The Columbia shuttle was to be a revolution for NASA. But a year before its first launch, the shuttle was several years behind schedule, had cost $1 billion, and wasn’t guaranteed to ever get off the ground.

Sex in space.

A profile of celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

The inside story of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and subsequent investigation.

An interview with Ralph Lapp, a member of the Apollo Project.

Elon Musk's dreams of colonizing Mars.

David Letterman weathers a sex and extortion scandal.

Johnny Carson, profiled at the top of his game.

An out-of-character conversation.

A profile of Kimmel published just after he got the late-night job.

A writer for Conan O’Brien on how The Tonight Show really ended and on how his boss got screwed

Steve Allen, the original host of The Tonight Show, in his cranky, later years.

The Spanish police believed he was a missing American teen. So, seemingly, did the Texas family who had lost him three years prior. Who they had actually found was Frédéric Bourdin, was a 23-year-old Frenchman on the run.

He was an 18-year-old Marine bound for Iraq. She was a high school senior in West Virginia. They grew intimate over IM. His dad started contacting her. No one was who they claimed to be.

For nearly a decade, Laura Albert lived a double life as troubled teen turned cult writer JT LeRoy, writing books, chatting constantly with celebrities, and convincing another woman to appear as JT LeRoy in public.

Jerry Joseph showed up in a small Texas town seemingly out of nowhere, produced a birth certificate that said he was of age, and quickly became a star for the local high-school basketball team. It was a role he’d played before.

The story of Alan Young, a career con whose go-to move was to pose as a member of the Temptations and smooth-talk his way into luxury hotel rooms and limo rides.

When a man named Clark Rockefeller snatched his daughter during a custody dispute, what the D.A. called “the longest con I’ve seen in my professional career” unraveled.

Excerpts from Live From New York, an oral history of SNL.

SNL in its grim 20th season through the lens of first-year (and only-year) cast member Janeane Garofalo.

A pre-30 Rock profile of Tina Fey.

Eight years removed from the show, Murray was at the peak of his box office power and living in a secluded farmhouse in the Hudson River Valley.

How one of the most maligned cast members in SNL history ended up a talking head on Fox News.

A sweeping, honest interview published just before Murphy announced he wouldn’t host the Oscars included his first public comments on SNL in years.

Dispatches revealing the March 1968 murder of 109 Vietnamese civilians during a search-and-destroy mission on a rumored Viet Gong stronghold, often referred to in military circles as Pinkville, actually the village of My Lai.

How the racism of white players and coaches ruined the NFL’s St. Louis Cardinals.

An eyewitness account of Robert Kennedy’s assassination.

On Van Morrison’s grounbreaking album, which was released in November 1968.

From the Apollo 8 flight journal.

The speech Martin Luther King, Jr delivered the day before he died.

A young couple’s story.

On a child diagnosed with autism.

The long, happy, surprising life of 77-year-old Donald Gary Triplett, the first person ever diagnosed with autism.

Should autism be celebrated? A look at the neurodiversity movement.

Autistic individuals have great difficulty breaking into many professions. One exception may be computer programming, where the difficulty of forming emotional attachments and communicating is not necessarily a problem.

As part of his obsessive search for evidence of UFOs, Gary McKinnon worked his way into thousands of government computers. The U.S. charged him with terrorism. Doctors diagnosed him with Asperger’s.