She fabricated harrowing personal backstories, peddled gross caricatures, and spoke from perspectives she had no right to claim. And nobody stopped her.

The legacy of Benihana.

While on a string of tour dates opening for Radiohead, interaction between Mark Linkous’ antidepressants and the Rohypnol he took to sleep caused him to pass out. A hotel maid found him the next morning bent into a position where his legs had been cut off from circulation. When they untangled, built-up potassium shot from his lower body upward, triggering a harmful chain reaction that caused a heart attack and kidney failure.

Mary Bacon took a bullet while pilfering fruit as a child. Mary Bacon dropped out of school in the sixth grade and was pregnant by age 16. Mary Bacon had a romantic relationship with Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke. Mary Bacon was kidnapped by a stalker. That same stalker later tried to shoot her with a gun. Not all of those sentences are complete horseshit.

Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. If the Japanese have conquered south Asia, then they will keep south Asia for ever, if the Germans have captured Tobruk, they will infallibly capture Cairo; if the Russians are in Berlin, it will not be long before they are in London: and so on. This habit of mind leads also to the belief that things will happen more quickly, completely, and catastrophically than they ever do in practice. The rise and fall of empires, the disappearance of cultures and religions, are expected to happen with earthquake suddenness, and processes which have barely started are talked about as though they were already at an end.

A group of scientists started tracking thousands of British children born during one cold March week in 1946. Those children are now 65 and the data generated through careful tracking of their life history has become extremely valuable.

On the legendary journalist and the book he never finished.

Spun-off from Time Warner and saddled with $1.3 billion in debt as a parting gift, the once-mighty Time Inc needs to reinvent itself. Fast.

A woman travels with a band on the way to their next show.

On the writers, poets and beats in a reclusive California town, where residents repeatedly tear down highway signs indicating its location.

On Dylan Yount, a man who jumped from a San Francisco building, and the people who watched, recorded and, in some cases, encouraged his suicide.

Two years ago, the fitness guru abruptly disappeared from public life. His friends worry that he’s being held against his will inside his Hollywood Hills mansion, or something even worse.

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.

The author on how he was conned by Christian Gerhartsreiter, aka "Clark Rockefeller."

Excerpted from Blood Will Out.

The author attends a Tolstoy conference as a grad student. She wears flip-flops, sweatpants and a flannel shirt, and tries to determine if Tolstoy was murdered.

How crooked officials pulled off a massive scam, spent millions on Dubai real estate, and killed the author’s law partner when he tried to expose them.

As an “angry young man,” Ghost World author Daniel Clowes insulted Stan Lee and Art Spiegelman in a graphic novel’s satirical alternate reality. It was born from a nagging self-doubt that, despite the cartoonist’s current recognition and status, lingers.

When he disappeared four years ago on Turkey’s tallest mountain, Donald Mackenzie wasn’t trying to reach the summit. A true believer, Mackenzie was looking for Noah’s Ark.

A 15-year-old dies shortly after collapsing from heatstroke during a high school football practice. Was it has coach’s fault? The state thought so, and put him on trial.

Caleb Cain was a college dropout looking for direction. He turned to YouTube, where he was pulled into a world filled with conspiracy theories, misogyny and racism.

The Salesforce founder has donated a fortune to right capitalism’s wrongs, and he thinks his fellow billionaires should too. Why can’t we just be grateful?

Roger Stone, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Ben Shapiro—they’ve all made their way to the Sunshine State, fueling and profiting from a tabloid culture that turns politics into spectacle, arguably Florida’s greatest export.

In late 2018, Pittsburgh’s Jewish community was mourning the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history. Then a stranger and his family landed in their midst.

In the basement of the White House, in an office with no windows, an MFA grad named Ben Rhodes is telling the story of America’s foreign policy.