Thomas Sweatt torched D.C. for decades and was finally jailed for killing one person. During a year-long correspondence from prison with a reporter, he confessed there were more.

Peggy Jo Tallas spent most of her adult life doing two things: taking care of her ailing mother and robbing bank after bank dressed as a pudgy, bearded cowboy.

According to the movie version, they died side by side, guns blazing, in the crosshairs of half a Bolivian regiment. It’s a great Hollywood ending that happens to be true, mostly: they left America… then died in Bolivia. What Hollywood didn’t know is that Butch and Sundance escaped.

In November 1985, a woman who appeared to be a homeless drifter staked out the offices of 80-year-old banker Nicholas Deak, waited until he returned from lunch, then executed Deak and his secretary. As police wrestled her to the floor, she said “Don’t hurt me. He told me I could carry the gun.”

Twenty years ago, ‘Grand Theft Auto III’ set a new standard for open-world video games. The titles it inspired have grown bigger and busier, but it takes more than massive maps to give gamers the freedom they felt on their first trip to 3-D Liberty City.

How a small group of gamers has been able to “set the terms of debate in a $100 billion industry, even as they send women like Brianna Wu into hiding and show every sign that they intend to keep doing so until all their demands are met.”

“There are people who are wired to be skeptics and there are people who are wired to be optimists. And I can tell you, at least from the last 20 years, if you bet on the side of the optimists, generally you’re right.’

Georgia and Patterson Inman, 15-year-old twins, are the only living heirs to the $1 billion Duke tobacco fortune. They are also emotional wrecks, tortured by a hellacious childhood in which they were raised by drug addicts and left to fend for themselves in mansions across the country.

She was mocked for her clothes and for her hair. Tabloids published nude photos of her and covered her custody fight. The defense called her hysterical. The judge condescended to her. She lost. And then she became a punchline. Twenty years later, thanks in part to The People v. O.J. Simpson, Marcia Clark is finally being seen in full.

The son of a Red Sox legend, his trail of violent attacks runs back to his teen years. So does the line of judges who somehow saw fit, time and again, to give him one more chance. Now he’s on trial for murder.

The making of a lost generation:

According to the Unicef report, which measured 40 indicators of quality of life – including the strength of relationships with friends and family, educational achievements and personal aspirations, and exposure to drinking, drug taking and other risky behavior – British children have the most miserable upbringing in the developed world. American children come next, second from the bottom.

Using his good looks and charm to lure over young women into his VW, Bundy terrorized the Pacific Northwest and then Utah, leaving over 30 corpses in desolate forest gravesite clusters. After being caught in Colorado, he escaped twice, the second time fleeing to Florida by train and going on a murderous rampage.

Neither Jon nor Ian is legally married to Jaiya. Both are allowed to see other women. But the three of them live a lifestyle that—much of the time—isn't that different from a conventional marriage.

On the rise of polyandry, in which one woman settles down with two or more men.

Inside the relationship between the U.S. and Pakistan:

The U.S. government has lied to itself, and to its citizens, about the nature and actions of successive Pakistani governments. Pakistani behavior over the past 20 years has rendered the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism effectively meaningless.

When Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison were roommates.

He and I had our differences. I am not inclined to be sentimental about those Arcadian or Utopian days. He didn't approve of my way of running the place. I had complained also that his dog relieved himself in my herb garden. I asked, "Can't you arrange to have him do his shitting elsewhere?"

A biography of Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studios.

“The regular average layman couldn’t see what I see. And the way they’re painting the trainer is all wrong. Look at him there, screaming, Do this! and Do that! I never had anyone telling me what to do. I did it. Shouting at the fighter like that makes him look like an animal, like a horse to be trained.”

The bizarre tale of how the hiring of a reality TV contestant to greet high-end customers led to the firing of a successful CEO. Plus: a follow-up article.

On writing what you loathe. Leslie McFarlane, ghostwriter of the early Hardy Boys novels, was so ashamed of the work he couldn’t even bring himself to name the books in his diary. “June 9, 1933: Tried to get at the juvenile again today but the ghastly job appalls me.”

On September 20, 1973, 50 million Americans watched Bobby Riggs lose to Billie Jean King in a tennis match dubbed “The Battle of the Sexes.” This spring, a man named Hal Shaw came forward with a secret he’d held for 40 years: Riggs, in debt to the mafia, had lost on purpose.

Fidel Castro, the fiery apostle of revolution who brought the Cold War to the Western Hemisphere in 1959 and then defied the United States for nearly half a century as Cuba’s maximum leader, bedeviling 11 American presidents and briefly pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war, died on Friday. He was 90.

The president of the Philippines’ kill list is reputed to have over million names of supposed drug pushers and addicts, including many mayors and politicians. There is no reliable way to get off the list other than dying in a hail of bullets from assassins on motorbikes.

The name Shecky can vacillate from noun to verb to adjective. The opinion of every comedian during that gilded age of show business, whether they were Republican Bob Hope or hipster Lenny Bruce, is that Shecky Greene was the wildest of them all. The craziest of them all. Most importantly - the funniest of them all.