How a struggling comedian became a pimp who eventually started sending teenage hookers on bank robbery missions that earned them notoriety as the “Starlet Bandits.”

Dikembe Mutombo, humanitarian and former NBA center, and oil executive Kase Lawal arrange a ill-fated deal to buy $30 million in gold in Kenya.

Ted Nelson's Xanadu project began in 1960 and was supposed to be the universal, democratic hypertext library that would help human life evolve into an entirely new form. It didn't go that way.

Update: The software was finally, quietly released in April.

The material powers solar panels and microchips. In Alabama, two thieves cashed in.

Mark Karpelès ran the largest Bitcoin exchange in the world until a heist made it insolvent, ultimately landing him in solitary confinement in Japanese prison.

At age 17, Bonnie Richardson won the Texas state track team championship all by herself. Then she did it again.

The Permian Basin is booming with oil. But at what cost to West Texans? Though some will reap serious profits, the region’s dealing with skyrocketing rents, overcrowded schools, and potholes as big as VW Beetles.

On losing a mother and a marriage.

An encounter with Emerson’s essays.

Two women gave birth on the same day in a place called Come By Chance. They didn’t know each other, and never would. Half a century later, their children made a shocking discovery.

An internet huckster got rich selling a sex enhancement supplement named Stiff Nights. Then the FDA sampled his wares.

In addition to defending child molesters, illegal gun owners, and the occasional drunk who steals a dirt bike from the pit during a motorcross rally, Jay Leiderman is one of a handful of attorneys who represents hackers. His current clients include Matthew Keys, the former Reuters social media editor who faces 87 months in prison for hacking The Los Angeles Times.

The 50,000-word story of Microsoft’s antitrust case.

The story of Héctor Espino, the greatest hitter never to play in the majors.

The unmuzzling of Canadian journalism.

The toll of being a cop on the most successful force in the country.

On a decade-long war:

Hackers from many countries have been exfiltrating—that is, stealing—intellectual property from American corporations and the U.S. government on a massive scale, and Chinese hackers are among the main culprits.

Part two of the history of the Educational Testing Service.

The interior life of a sniper, the most misunderstood icon of the modern military.

According to a whistleblower, the SEC has been systematically destroying records of investigations for the last twenty years:

By whitewashing the files of some of the nation's worst financial criminals, the SEC has kept an entire generation of federal investigators in the dark about past inquiries into insider trading, fraud and market manipulation against companies like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and AIG. With a few strokes of the keyboard, the evidence gathered during thousands of investigations – "18,000 ... including Madoff," as one high-ranking SEC official put it during a panicked meeting about the destruction – has apparently disappeared forever into the wormhole of history.

On the emergence of morality and spirituality on the American left.