He was a Baptist who became a Muslim, a Marine who became a bank robber, a criminal who became an informant, and a student who became an imam. But was Marcus Robertson connected to the deadliest mass shooting in American history?

When his parents marriage imploded, the author’s mother said his father was worthless, a con man. A bad investment in their lives. But years later, a mysterious book about Wall Street showed up—a gift from his father—that began to change the story.

“When a man steps onto the road, his journey begins. When a woman steps onto that same road, hers ends.”

In the ’90s, a frustrated artist in Berlin went on a crime spree—building bombs, extorting high-end stores, and styling his persona after Scrooge McDuck. He soon became a German folk hero.

Tracking down 40-odd members of the British band.

It's a Tuesday morning in December, and I'm ringing people called Brown in Rotherham. "Hello," I begin again. "I'm trying to trace Jonnie Brown who used to play in the Fall. He came from Rotherham and I wondered if you might be a relative." "The Who?" asks the latest Mr Brown. "No. The Fall - the band from Salford. He played bass for three weeks in 1978." "Is this some kind of joke?"

A search for the “armpit of America” ends in Battle Mountain, Nevada.

“What I do is not magical realism. I do realistic magic. Look, whenever someone does something new, people have to compare it with things they already know. So even if you innovate, you end up being connected to the past. When I began making movies people linked me to Fellini or Buñuel. Now new filmmakers are called ‘jodorowskian.’”

How to get Americans to “pay $45 to $75 to run for their lives from 1,500-pound, bad-tempered beasts.”

“The ‘hard’–science fiction writers dismiss everything except, well, physics, astronomy, and maybe chemistry. Biology, sociology, anthropology—that’s not science to them, that’s soft stuff. They’re not that interested in what human beings do, really. But I am. I draw on the social sciences a great deal. I get a lot of ideas from them, particularly from anthropology. When I create another planet, another world, with a society on it, I try to hint at the complexity of the society I’m creating, instead of just referring to an empire or something like that.”

The postscript to a miracle.

When American and Iraqi soldiers were exposed to leftover chemical munitions from Saddam Hussein’s war against Iran, the Pentagon kept silent.

Remembering the indie rock club that The New York Times once said was “so New York that it’s in New Jersey.”

“I tell them it’s like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

Guz Dominguez says he was trying to help baseball players from Cuba; the U.S. government says he was smuggling athletes. The truth is more complicated.

First they found his server, then they found his name. But if they couldn’t catch him with his laptop open, the whole thing would fall apart.

What’s wrong with some forgery, fraud, and crystal meth if you’ll soon be gone? A better question: What the hell happens if you survive?

Sexual harassment. Hate speech. Employee walkouts. The Silicon Valley giant is trapped in a war against itself. And there’s no end in sight.

Gus Weiss, a shrewd intelligence insider, pulled off an audacious tech hack against the Soviets in the last century. Or did he?

The challenges facing the historians of the internet.

In 2004, Cameron Todd Willingham was executed for starting a fire that killed his three daughters. The case hinged on the testimony of a jailhouse informant named Johnny E. Webb. Today, Webb says he lied.

An investigation into the mass graves in Texas that contain the remains of migrants.

On Graham Greene, the master of “ethical ambivalence.”

Who was Ashraf Marwan working for when he fell to his death from the balcony of a London flat?