Was the biggest record sale in the history of Discogs actually someone selling the record to themself? Was a serial hoaxer who had posed as Jimi Hendrix’s son in blackface actually behind both the 1989 album and its 2017 sale?

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.

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.

In the past the only people who wrote autobiographies or memoirs were very important, those who had a crucial role in the history of their own country—Napoleon, Goethe—or were witness to major events or people who had singular, adventurous lives. Otherwise, it is ridiculous to write your autobiography.

Henry Heimlich saved untold choking victimes when he invented his maneuver in 1974. Since then, he’s searched in vain for another miracle treatment—pushing ethical boundaries along the way. Now at the end of his career, Heimlich has hired an investigator to find an anonymous critic working full-time to destroy his legacy.

On the nature of violence.

When my brother was twelve, I found six mice nailed to the wall of the abandoned tree house in the woods near our apartment. He spent a lot of time there. It seemed to me the little mouse faces were frozen in agony. As though they’d been alive when he’d hammered the nails through them.

Oskar Groening, an SS officer whose duties included counting confiscated money, describes his time posted to Auschwitz.

Before the market crashed and home prices tumbled, before federal investigators showed up and hauled away the community records, before her property managers pled guilty for conspiring to rig neighborhood elections, and before her real estate lawyer allegedly tried to commit suicide by overdosing on drugs and setting fire to her home, Wanda Murray thought that buying a condominium in Las Vegas was a pretty good idea.

Twelve years ago, a Saudi Arabian man, whom federal authorities had long suspected of having ties to terrorism, was sentenced to life in prison on multiple counts of unlawful sexual contact. To this day, al-Turki has maintained that he’s innocent and was instead the target of post-9/11 anti-Muslim sentiment.

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.