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.

“The final evaluation of a play has nothing to do with immediate audience or critical response. The playwright, along with any writer, composer, painter in this society, has got to have a terribly private view of his own value, of his own work. He's got to listen to his own voice primarily. He's got to watch out for fads, for what might be called the critical aesthetics.”

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.

As a young community organizer in Chicago, Barack Obama concluded that to make a real difference, he needed to gain power. A look at how that plan has worked thus far.

With up to four million World War II soldiers considered missing in action on the Eastern front, a group of Russian volunteers vows to unearth, identify and properly bury their remains.

When its informant’s cover was blown, German intelligence destroyed his files. Did his handlers fail to pick up a violent cell that would eventually murder nine immigrants and a cop in order to preserve their asset?

What happened to Wesley Autrey after he jumped in front of a New York City subway train to save a man’s life.

On the strengths and limitations of the Republican frontrunner:

“The Mormon’s never going to win the who-do-you-want-to-have-a-beer-with contest,” concedes one adviser, while another acknowledges, “He’s never had the experience of sitting in a bar, and like, talking.”

Darren Lumar lived in mansions he didn’t own, ran companies that didn’t make a dime, went to colleges that didn’t exist and slept with “any number of women” despite being married to James Brown’s daughter. When he was murdered, the cops had a problem: too many possible suspects.

On Enrique of Malacca, “the closest thing there is to a hero in the story of Ferdinand Magellan’s horribly botched attempt to circumnavigate the world.”

After robbing two video stores with a friend, Rene Lima-Marin was sentenced to almost 100 years in prison. Then, due to a clerical error, he was released 88 years too early.

He went from a viral pop hit to an arrest for conspiracy to murder charges in just under six months. Was Bobby Shmurda “too real” for his label?

Bill Conradt, a well-known prosecutor, never arrived at the house in Murphy, Texas, where police and a crew from NBC’s To Catch a Predator were waiting. So the crew, along with a SWAT team, went to Conradt.

The champ is now a vegan, claims to be broke, and says he feels freer than ever before. “I have this uncanny ability to look at myself in the mirror and say, ‘This is a pig. You are a fucking piece of shit.’”

The number one item confiscated by U.S. customs for four years in a row: fake shoes. As brands continue to crack down, counterfeiters continue to up their game.

In 1977, Johanna van Haarlem finally tracked down the son, Erwin, she had abandoned as a baby 33 years earlier. She immediately travelled to London to meet him. It was the perfect cover.

A rash of building fires in San Francisco has many speculating that the fault lies with landlords hoping to oust their poor tenants. One anonymous landlord describes his failed plan to do exactly that.

She keeps watch over one of the largest databases of missing persons in the country. For Meaghan Good, the disappeared are still out here, you just have to know where to look.

Pinned down in deep snow and running out of food, veteran thru-hiker Stephen “Otter” Olshansky scraped his way to a campground latrine, holed up inside, and prayed for help to arrive.

In 1971, an unlikely activist sued to overturn Iowa’s ban on married women and mothers playing school sports. She just wanted to play.

When her former student was found wandering the streets a decade after she’d last seen him, Michelle Girard immediately agreed to take him in. Then she decided to do far more, including give him the Christmas he’d never had.

The Air Force, beholden to corporate forces, is trapped in a contract with Northrop Grumman to rebuild the nuke program.

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.

A trip to a pepper-eating contest in remote India.