They travel America in vans and RVs stopping at Targets and Wal-Marts in search of rare soap and coveted toys to stock Amazon’s fulfillment warehouses.

When he was 2, Strider was severely beaten by his mother’s boyfriend. Today, at 6, Strider lives with his grandparents in rural Maine, in and out of poverty, trying to make it.

In 1865, a failed stockbroker tries to pull off one of the boldest financial schemes in American history: the original big short.

When a group of Black mothers in Ohio were told to wait for school integration, they started marching every day in protest. They kept going for nearly 18 months.

In just a few years, he’s become one of the most fearsome media figures in the country—mobilizing his vast Twitter following to promote his famous friends and punish foes. Can his own past survive similar scrutiny?

In 1936, Karp Lykov whisked his family into the Siberian wilderness to escape Bolshevik persecution. They remained there, alone, until discovered by a helicopter crew in 1978.

In the late 1960s, a German named Günther Hauck disappeared in Brazil. When he emerged, he was calling himself Tatunca Nara and claimed to be the chief of the Ugha Mongulala, an previously unknown Indian tribe. Since then he has lived in the Amazon, his legend growing. Jacques Cousteau hired him as a guide. An Indiana Jones movie was based on his stories. And three people who made pilgrimages to see him never came home.

A report from the KKK’s 2012 Faith and Freedom conference in Arkansas:

It's quite disconcerting in this modern age to be in a room full of white people who are all spouting the most vile racist slurs that one can imagine, openly, while everyone else laughs and applauds it. There is a Twilight Zone feeling to it, as if you'd stumbled into a secret clubhouse where white people can say those forbidden things—the Valhalla of dumb racist jokes.

Fourteen other tornadoes hit Georgia on April 27 and 28. This was not the record — that would be twenty, during Tropical Storm Alberto in 1994. But it was one of the worst twenty-four-hour periods in the history of the state. Tornadoes hit Trenton, Cherokee Valley, south of LaGrange, and Covington; killed seven people in a neighborhood in Catoosa County, swept through Ringgold, and killed two more — a disabled man and his caregiver — in a double-wide trailer on the far end of Spalding County. Those tornadoes got all the attention. The Vaughn tornado didn’t even warrant an article in a major newspaper. No one talked about Vaughn. The only way for a person to really find out about it was to drive past.

Cassie Chadwick pulled her first con in 1870, at the age of 13. Over the next 30 years, she would scam her way to $633,000, about $16.5 million in today’s dollars.

In 1984, Jacqui met Bob Lambert at an animal-rights protest. They fell in love, had a son. Then Bob disappeared. It would take 25 years for Jacqui to learn that he had been working undercover.

Javier Flores had hopes of a last-minute change in policy that would allow him to stay in Ohio with his wife and four kids, where he had a good job, a house, paid taxes. It didn’t come.

On Dec. 18, 2007, the school board in Pinellas Country, Florida, voted to abandon integration. They justified the decision with bold promises: Schools in poor, black neighborhoods would get more money, more staff, more resources. They delivered none of that. A 5-part investigation.

Memories of the author’s teenage years, when his father pulled up stakes on a comfortable life in Baltimore to reinvent himself as the head of a S&L bank in Los Angeles.

In June, 1942, a German submarine dropped four young Nazi agents off on a Florida beach. Their mission was to blow up bridges, factories, and Jewish-owned department stores. Among them was Herbert Haupt, the 22-year-old son of a German-American family in Chicago.

In 1963, William Zantzinger was convicted of manslaughter in the death of Hattie Carroll and then immortalized – and somewhat defamed – by Bob Dylan. What’s he been up to since then?

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.

A report from Nevada, where an economy in crisis and a Tea Party upstart are threatening to topple Harry Reid, the most nationally powerful politician in the state’s history.

Born into Sea Org; a diary of a misspent youth (and adulthood) in the service of Scientology. “One of the first things I learned in the Sea Org, because I was a receptionist, was how to handle process servers.” (25,000 words)

Federal agencies have long struggled to stop illegal fishing and drug smuggling in the Gulf of Mexico. In recent years, it’s only gotten worse.

“It’s striking that for all the talk about polarization in the US, the Tea Party Movement and Occupy Wall Street are entirely non-violent. Overseas, no one expected the Arab Spring protests to be as nonviolent as they were,” Pinker wrote in an email. The threat of overwhelming reprisal from authorities may have brought some peace to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, but Pinker also pointed to research that, today, “nonviolent protest movements achieve their aims far more often than violent ones.” Still, the story of violence’s decline contains much violence, and America is no exception.

Jane Jacobs has a somewhat ambiguous legacy—or at least one that's contested by different factions in the present-day debate over cities and urbanism—but to me her most important idea is encapsulated in the title and spirit of this piece. It's old and, I think, utterly prescient about what successive waves of planning fads miss. The purpose of urban space is for people to use it. A great place is a place where people want to be.

-M. Yglesias

“It was offensive to me on a certain level that when Saw and those other movies came out, people said, “Well, torture porn really started with Seven.” Fuck you. There’s enough pervy shit going on in Seven that I don’t have to get on my high horse to defend its artistic sensibilities.”

Cheryl Shuman has been a coupon queen, an optician to the stars and the plaintiff in a lawsuit against Steven Segal. Now she’s the face of the high-end weed market.