Production was shut down three times, the stars often clashed, and studio executives were baffled. Here’s how a difficult shoot led to an Oscar-winning masterpiece.

“Peril is generational for black people in America—and incarceration is our current mechanism for ensuring that the peril continues.”

How do you write about Hollywood’s most self-referential screenwriter at a destabilizing moment in history? It takes more than one draft.

The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League did everything it could to keep lesbians off the diamond. Seventy-five years later, its gay stars are finally opening up.

In a district where parents are epidemiologists and health policy experts, the meltdown happened one Zoom meeting at a time

The psychologist taught us that what we remember is not fixed, but her work testifying for defendants like Harvey Weinstein collides with our traumatized moment.

Should humans try harder to protect even wild creatures from predators and disease? Should we care whether they live good lives? Some philosophers and scientists have an unorthodox answer.

Rédoine Faïd loved the movies, and his greatest crimes were laced with tributes: to Point Break, Heat, and Reservoir Dogs. When he landed in a maximum-security prison, cinema provided inspiration once again.

For centuries, dowsers have claimed the ability to find groundwater, precious metals, and other quarry using divining rods and an uncanny intuition. Is it the real deal or woo-woo?

When a gossip rag went after the CEO, he retaliated with the brutal, brilliant efficiency he used to build his business empire.

Thirty years ago, the biggest celebrities on earth opened a chain restaurant. For a few years, it was the hottest ticket in town. Then it went bankrupt. Twice.

It seemed like an easy crime to stop: protected Indonesian rainforest, cut for coffee farms. But a globalized economy can undermine even the best-laid plans.

Fifty years ago, The Last Picture Show changed the way the world saw small-town Texas and, in turn, the way the small town saw itself

In 16 months, he has broken into more than a thousand homes up and down the San Fernando Valley. According to the police, his haul is worth anywhere from $16 million to $40 million. And yet because he has cultivated so many aliases, law-enforcement officials have been hard-pressed to learn his real name—Ignacio Peña Del Río—much less comprehend his unlikely background.

“Jon Corzine had never had anything to do with the futures business, had never run a public company, and hadn’t worked on Wall Street for a decade. His time there had ended badly. But by any reasonable standard, the former Goldman chief seemed almost embarrassingly overqualified. Says Flowers: ‘It seemed like we had more CEO than company.’”

Sarma Melngailis owned a booming vegan restaurant beloved by celebrities. But after systematically draining the company bank account, she and her husband skipped town. Last week, after nearly a year on the lam, they were arrested in a Fairfield Inn & Suites in Tennessee. The cops found them after they ordered Domino’s.

At 9:14pm on November 22, 1987, sportscaster Dan Roan was doing the Bears highlights on Chicago’s WGN-TV when the station’s signal was hijacked. Someone wearning a rubber Max Headroom mask appeared, silently, on TV screens around the city. A few hours later, Headroom popped up again on another channel, this time for longer and with audio. Despite FBI and FCC investigations, the case remains unsolved.

An actor, fresh from prison, attempts to reconnect with his son in 1950s California.

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"His friends remembered when Richard became famous. It was the year the hippies came to San Francisco. Richard had published one novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur, but it had sold miserably 743 copies and his publisher, Grove Press, had dropped its option on Trout Fishing in America."

A Q&A:

My mother was called to school frequently because I was yelling out things in class, quips in class, and because I would hand in compositions that they thought were in poor taste, or too sexual. Many, many times she was called to school.

Before the market crashed and home prices tumbled, before federal investigators showed up and hauled away the community records, before her property managers pled guilty for conspiring to rig neighborhood elections, and before her real estate lawyer allegedly tried to commit suicide by overdosing on drugs and setting fire to her home, Wanda Murray thought that buying a condominium in Las Vegas was a pretty good idea.

In the years before World War II, Zacharewicz shined at Cannes and was wooed by Samuel Goldwyn but when the Nazis occupied Poland, he was sent to Auschwitz for defending his Jewish countrymen: “For him, the choice was easy.”