During WWII, a bomber crashes into the Pacific and the crewmen begin an epic battle against dehydration, exposure, and endless attacks by sharks. Adapted from Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken.

Guz Dominguez says he was trying to help baseball players from Cuba; the U.S. government says he was smuggling athletes. The truth is more complicated.

How Carl Foreman, while tangling with the House Un-American Activities Committee, turned a throwaway Western into an allegory for the Hollywood blacklist.

When Clark Rockefeller snatched his daughter during a custody dispute, what the D.A. called “the longest con I’ve seen in my professional career” came unraveled, and the trail led to bones buried in a California backyard.

Investors all over the world fell for the schemes of the man who called himself Khalid bin al-Saud. But the truth turned out to be more incredible than the lie.

They’re known as the Jills. They’re two of America’s top realtors, selling the glitziest mansions in Miami. Then a place went missing—and everyday greed blossomed into full-blown extortion.

Randy Quaid and his wife Evi have fled to Canada and are living in their car. They are seeking asylum from the menace of the “Hollywood Star Whackers.”

When a cheating scandal blew up the pastor’s life, some Hillsong congregants were left to question their relationship with a church that cultivated its own kind of fame—and the double standards that often came with it.

After Moneyball became a best-seller, Michael Lewis learned that many of the ideas it presented to the general public had actually been introduced decades earlier by a pair of Israeli psychologists.

Adapted from The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds.

The 79-year-old actor, too creaky to get off the couch, interviewed at his palatial Florida mansion about love, fame, and how he’s in okay financial shape despite the fact that a surveyor is taking measurements of his house as he speaks.

“For him, I was a blot on a spectacular ascent. For me, it was the opposite.”

Life as Steve Jobs's daughter when he denied being your dad.

At the end, Theranos was overrun by a dog defecating in the boardroom, nearly a dozen law firms on retainer, and a C.E.O. grinning through her teeth about an implausible turnaround.

From Vallejo to San Jose, a tour of local government despair:

The relationship between the people and their money in California is such that you can pluck almost any city at random and enter a crisis.

More Lewis: the complete financial disaster tourism series to date.

He was just another coked-up agent (repping the likes of Steven Soderbergh) when he disappeared into Iraq, shooting heaps of footage he would attempt to package into a pro-war documentary. And that was just the beginning.

“From the start, it was a bad case.

A battered 21-year-old woman with long blond curls was discovered facedown in the weeds, naked, at the western edge of Miami, where the neat grid of outer suburbia butts up against the high grass and black mud of the Everglades.”

A couple, well-known New York artists, decamp to L.A., where she intends to direct a movie about a rock star trying to leave a cult. Beck, a friend, signs on, then (possibly under pressure) drops out. Their behavior grows strange, and they rant of constant harassment by Scientologists. They return to New York—to die.

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.

A conversation with Monica Lewinsky about bullying, humiliation, and resurrection.

How a 29-year-old actress, reeling from the death of her first love and battling Dustin Hoffman off-screen, found herself on the set of Kramer vs. Kramer.

What led to the 1970 explosion of a Greenwich Village townhouse, in which three members of the Weather Underground were killed, and what happened to the group after.

Excerpted from Days of Rage.

Why little has changed in popular American style in the last 20 years.

Why is this happening? In some large measure, I think, it’s an unconscious collective reaction to all the profound nonstop newness we’re experiencing on the tech and geopolitical and economic fronts. People have a limited capacity to embrace flux and strangeness and dissatisfaction, and right now we’re maxed out.