Steven Seagal spent a few years in Japan and  returned to open a dojo in L.A.. Jules Nasso was the wiseguy producer behind all of Seagal’s hits. When it all fell apart, Seagal reputedly offered money for a contract killing, and Nasso may have been caught on tape arranging to extort Seagal through the Gambino Family.

He sawed out the bottom. Nailed the crate to the telephone pole out in front of the house. New hoop. ... I’d be out there shooting until 10 at night. That’s when I started getting really good. The pole was round so you couldn’t bank the ball in. And you weren’t getting a friendly bounce on a square rim. You had to hit it dead-on, wet.

“His seeming ease belies the anxiety and emotion that advisers say he brings to his historic position: pride in what he has accomplished, determination to acquit himself well and intense frustration.”

Microprocessors cost billions to develop. They take three times longer to build than an airplane, in an environment 1,000 times more sterile than a hospital. Throughout the entire process, nobody ever touches them.

In the late ’80s, Lewis went to Japan to research a hypothetical: what would the economic fallout be if a major quake hit?

A profile of twenty-seven-year-old James O’Keefe, who came to national attention during the last election after his prank videos stung ACORN and Planned Parenthood. A subsequent attempt to bug Senator Mary Landrieu’s phones resulted in jail time for O’Keefe.

Thirty-three years ago, a Chicago man was sentenced to death for murder. In 1999, another man confessed to the crime. Today, they are both free.

It takes a gallon of water to grow a single almond. Yet in drought-ravaged California, hedge funds are racing to plant as many new trees as they can.

The U.S. is one of only two countries that don’t guarantee paid maternity leave. As a result, women across the country are rushing back to work after C-sections and losing their positions in order to take care of newborns.

The lavish display and heavy drinking concealed the deadly serious North Caucasus politics of land, ethnicity, clan, and alliance.

In a cable brought to light by Wikileaks, the Ambassador to Russia describes a raucous three-day Dagestani wedding attended by Chechnya’s president Ramzan Kadyrov.

There was torture, starvation, betrayals and executions, but to Shin In Geun, Camp 14—a prison for the political enemies of North Korea—was home. Then one day came the chance to flee.

The improbable and true story of how Al Sharpton, Cornel West, Marion Barry’s wife, and Tucker Carlson (yes, that Tucker Carlson) flew to Liberia to negotiate a ceasefire in the midst of a civil war.

An acquaintance dies in Iraq and a writer investigates. “How did Michael come to inspire such loyalty? And how did he come to die on the floodplain of the Euphrates? I looked closer and saw they were the same.”

Night raids by the “Hash Monster” and other perils facing American soldiers at a remote base in the wilderness of the Paktya Province as they attempt to turn over power to the Afghan Army.

A just-barred Pakistani-American attorney attempts to save a young family’s home from foreclosure and glimpses the contradiction-rich bureaucracy that has emerged in response to the housing crisis.

When Isis rounded up Yazidi women and girls in Iraq to use as slaves, the captives drew on their collective memory of past oppressions – and a powerful will to survive.

When she died in 1952, author Margaret Wise Brown left the rights to Goodnight Moon to a nine-year-old neighbor named Albert Clarke. The book became a classic. Clarke, living entirely off the royalties, became a deadbeat.

Houston was plagued by a series of brutal armored car robberies that bewildered FBI agents for nearly two years. To finally bring down the unassuming mastermind behind it all, the agents had to stage an elaborate trap—and catch him in the act.

In his old life, Matthew Cox told stories to scam his way into millions of dollars. Now he’s trying to make it by selling tales that are true.

It was once a widely accepted way of explaining why some children struggled to read and write. But in recent years, some experts have begun to question the existence of dyslexia itself.

A Manson-contemporary cult group rises out of a jug band, builds a fortress in the Boston ghetto, bullies control of a community newspaper, swallows a successful actor, fractures, splits for California, and attempts to describe to the reporter the enigma that is Mel Lyman.

In my naive denial, I had wanted to see him as a hapless ne’er-do-well, a nonconformist with a streak of dishonesty. I liked to think of him as a latter-day Robin Hood. Now I knew that wasn’t true.

Will LaFever never felt right in the world. So he took to the Utah desert, barely making it out alive.

A profile of Kehinde Wiley, a painter who inserts the “brown faces” that have historically been relegated to the background in Western art.