“Fast food and hedge funds. That’s where we’re going.”

The story of the Refugee Olympic team.

On Edward Tufte, the  great data visualization (read: charts and graphs) theorist and author of 1983’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, one of the most successful self-published books ever produced.

Three interviews with John Gardner, author of Grendel and The Art of Fiction, conducted over the last decade of his life.

The last thing child-welfare supervisor Chereece Bell wanted to see was what happened to 4-year-old Marchella Pierce. The last thing she expected was to go to jail for it.

The belief that hidden memories can be “recovered” in therapy has been discredited, but the mental health establishment does not always learn from its mistakes—and families are still paying the price.

Michael Brown beat the odds by graduating from high school before his death—odds that remain stacked against black students in St. Louis and the rest of the country.

Life as Beck.

How a 24-year-old nurse discovered Vegas, high-stakes gambling, and serial bank robbery.

A profile of Rebekah Brooks, who started as a secretary at News of the World and became CEO of News International by 41, developing an incredibly close relationship with Rupert Murdoch along the way.

On the mysterious disappearance of a beloved coding legend (and his code) with stops along the way for a short history of programming languages, an ethnography of code-based communities, and an inquiry into what it means to “die young without artifact.”

How a lonely, self-taught hacker found his way into the private emails of movie stars – and into the underworld of the celebrity-skin business.

An acquaintance dies in Iraq and a writer investigates. “How did Michael come to inspire such loyalty? And how did he come to die on the floodplain of the Euphrates? I looked closer and saw they were the same.”

The Conficker ‘worm’ has replicated itself across tens of millions of computers. Only a few hundred people have the knowledge to recreate how, and no one (except its anonymous maker) fully understands why.

Clay Shirky, writing in 1999 on the Web eclipsing TV’s reach: “We will always have massive media, but the days of mass media are over, killed by the explosion of possibility and torn into a thousand niches.”

After two New Jersey homes were robbed of their silver—only their silver—in the same night, the local police got a call from a detective in Greenwich, Connecticut. “I know the guy who’s doing your burglaries.”

A profile of Viktor Bout, believed to be the largest arms trafficker in the world. A Russian who bought his first cargo planes at age 25, Bout has been in the news recently after being arrested in Thailand.

A suitcase was smuggled from Spain to Mexico during the Spanish Civil War containing negatives from three photographers would later become legends and all die in war zones. The suitcase disappeared.

He was the most powerful fish broker in New Bedford, America’s most valuable seafood port. The Russians who arrived looking to buy his operation were undercover agents and he told them everything.

“Rosemary was wide awake the whole time. The doctors had her recite poems as they cut—when she was silent, they knew the procedure was complete.”

When Isis rounded up Yazidi women and girls in Iraq to use as slaves, the captives drew on their collective memory of past oppressions – and a powerful will to survive.

In the wake of a brazen but mysterious Philadelphia gunfight, Marvin Harrison, the man who holds the NFL record for receptions in a season, may find himself with a permanent record of a different sort.

On January 13th, 2018, the residents of Hawaii picked up their phones to find a warning: a missile would be hitting the islands imminently. Here’s what people do when they think they only have 38 minutes left to live.

Houston was plagued by a series of brutal armored car robberies that bewildered FBI agents for nearly two years. To finally bring down the unassuming mastermind behind it all, the agents had to stage an elaborate trap—and catch him in the act.

The life and times of Myrtis Dightman, who broke the color barrier in professional rodeo and became one of the best bull riders who ever lived.