On Easter Sunday, 2008, a boat called the Alaskan Ranger went down in the Bering Sea. Forty-seven people were left to fend for themselves in 32-degree water. Forty-two survived.

“I could give a flying crap about the political process,” Beck says. Making money, on the other hand, is to be taken very seriously. And he’s very good at it: Beck pulled in $32 million in the last year.

How to spend $1.2 million per month on your laundry in Kuwait; the system of kickbacks and non-competitive contracts that made Halliburton/KBR the near-exclusive contractor in the Iraq war zone.

Hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the U.S. may face violence and murder in their home countries. What happens when they are forced to return?

Othea Loggan came to Chicago and got a job bussing tables and washing dishes at Walker Bros. Original Pancake House in Wilmette in 1964. He still works there today.

In the mid-20th century, Great Britain maintained a network of 1,500 underground, volunteer-staffed bunkers in case of nuclear war. Now, one man is restoring two of these abandoned shelters to period-perfect condition.

Dumba has spent her life performing in circuses around Europe, but in recent years animal rights activists have been campaigning to rescue her. When it looked like they might succeed, Dumba and her owners disappeared.

Inside the five-year (so far) production of the Ilya Khrzhanovsky film Dau:

Khrzhanovsky came up with the idea of the Institute not long after preproduction on Dau began in 2006. He wanted a space where he could elicit the needed emotions from his cast in controlled conditions, twenty-four hours a day. The set would be a panopticon. Microphones would hide in lighting fixtures (as they would in many a lamp in Stalin's USSR), allowing Khrzhanovsky to shoot with multiple film cameras from practically anywhere — through windows, skylights, and two-way mirrors. The Institute's ostensible goal was to re-create '50s and '60s Moscow, home to Dau's subject, Lev Landau. A Nobel Prize–winning physicist, Landau significantly advanced quantum mechanics with his theories of diamagnetism, superfluidity, and superconductivity. He also tapped epic amounts of ass.

The underage prostitution study that was cited extensively in the congressional hearings that resulted in the removal of Craigslist’s Erotic Services turns out to be the work of a for-hire business consulting firm and, scientifically, completely bogus.

An American mystery writer and an Italian journalist join forces to identify a serial killer that targeted couples having sex in cars in the rolling hills above Florence.

"Here’s God’s truth about it: being a groupie wasn’t about sex, it was about access. I wanted to live in the stage life, dazzled by color and sound, constantly in motion, driven by excitement and power, loved by the stage lights, part of the story."

In Russia’s Far East, an orphaned female tiger is the test case in an experimental effort to save one of the most endangered animals on earth.

The second installment of the Gaile Owens story. A former churchgoing mother of two from suburban Memphis, Owens is the first woman to be given the death penalty in Tennessee in nearly 200 years.

How did a Kentucky entrepreneur, a Louisiana politician, and the vice president of Nigeria end up in one of the biggest scandals to hit America’s black elite in decades?

Memories of the expat revolutionary scene in 1980s Nicaragua. An excerpt from Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War.

Roy Petersen was blind in one eye, had two replaced hips, and was twice divorced. His job was to solve a gold mine robbery case in the Peruvian Andes. He would need some help.

In 1802, horse rustler George Washington Loomis rode into Oneida County and built a mansion adjacent to an impenetrable swamp perfect for storing thieved goods. It was the beginning of the saga of the largest organized crime family in 19th century America.

The chef, who died last year, was one of San Francisco’s culinary stars in the 1990s. She created a space for the city’s queer women to thrive in the kitchen.

Scientists are studying the extreme weather in northern Argentina to see how it works—and what it can tell us about the monster storms in our future.

Shut out of the employment market in their 20s, hikkomori shut-ins continue to search for direction in middle age.

When the business icon died in a fire last week, questions abounded. The answers seem rooted in a Covid-period spiral, where he turned to drugs and shunned old friends.

A drone sighting caused the airport to close for two days in 2018, but despite a lengthy police investigation, no culprit was ever found. So what exactly did people see in the sky?

The phrase “knew how to wear clothes” is a loaded one. To “know how to wear clothes” is another way of saying that Cary Grant embodied class, which is to say high class: Grant wore well-tailored clothes, and he knew how to hold himself in them. But he came from nothing, and the way he wore clothes was just as much of a performance as his refined trans-Atlantic accent, his acrobatic slapstick routines, and his masterful flirtation skills.

When Randy Lanier sped to Rookie of the Year honors at the 1986 Indianapolis 500, few knew his racing credentials, let alone his status as one of the nation’s most prolific drug runners, smuggling in tons of marijuana when he wasn’t on the track. Now, after 27 years in prison, Lanier is looking to the road ahead.

In Austin in 1973, politicos and hippies could get together and create violent, visionary horror films for $60,000. So they did. The story of how The Texas Chainsaw Massacre got made.