In Austin in 1973, politicos and hippies could get together and create violent, visionary horror films for $60,000. So they did. The story of how The Texas Chainsaw Massacre got made.

Steven Seagal spent a few years in Japan and  returned to open a dojo in L.A.. Jules Nasso was the wiseguy producer behind all of Seagal’s hits. When it all fell apart, Seagal reputedly offered money for a contract killing, and Nasso may have been caught on tape arranging to extort Seagal through the Gambino Family.

In October, Iraqi forces set out to retake Mosul, one of Iraq’s largest cities and ISIS’s biggest stronghold in the country. It would take them nine months and cost thousands of lives.

There the man in the shorts—later identified as a Russian agent using the alias Richard Murphy of New Jersey—handed Michael Zottoli from Seattle two items: a flash memory card and a bag that held $150,000 in cash.

Within nine months they’d both be behind bars.

In 2016, a West Virginia police officer came upon a young man in distress who asked the officer to shoot him. The officer didn’t. A few minutes, another officer did. Only one of them lost their job.

He sawed out the bottom. Nailed the crate to the telephone pole out in front of the house. New hoop. ... I’d be out there shooting until 10 at night. That’s when I started getting really good. The pole was round so you couldn’t bank the ball in. And you weren’t getting a friendly bounce on a square rim. You had to hit it dead-on, wet.

“A legend is growing in Nepal, where people say a meditating boy hasn’t eaten or drunk in seven months. He barely moves, just sits under a tree, still as a stone. It’s impossible, some say. Is it a miracle? A hoax? Let’s find out.”

The Western student of international politics knows to nod approvingly when Lee’s name is mentioned. Frustrated by the sludge of partisan politics in his own country, he sees in Lee’s legacy a kind of exotic escape. If asked, he remarks sagely: Singapore is proof of what enlightened authoritarianism can achieve.

A dispatch from Vermont, which is in the midst of what the governor calls a “full-blown heroin crisis.”

Two men, separated by more than 150 years, discover the folly of attempting Western-style capitalism in Micronesia.

In northern Nigeria, radical Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram is facing a vigilante backlash from armed teenagers with nothing to lose.

A Little League season in Camden, New Jersey, where the murder rate is 17 times the national average.

Tom Cruise did not, in fact, jump up and down on Oprah’s couch.

The gangs of Brooklyn’s Brownsville, an area with the higest concentration of public housing in America.

A profile of anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who has spent her career uncovering a hidden global market in human flesh.

A 21-year-old UCLA math major leaves his $9,000-a-month internship to fight with the rebels in Libya.

In the Swiss town of Meiringen, where an obsessed group of ‘pilgrims’ painstakingly recreate the death of Sherlock Holmes.

A week in the author’s life when it became impossible to control the course of events.

In 1968, the author revisits remote British Columbia, which he traveled two years earlier.

Is Bryan Saunders a drug-inspired outsider genius, or just in need of intervention?

A visit to the hotel North Korea starved to build, still unfinished after breaking ground in 1987.

On the actors who unwittingly starred in The Innocence of Muslims.

An internet pioneer loses hope in the promise of web culture.

How governments and private companies have engaged in digital arms trading by building a global black market for ‘zero day’ hacks.