She was the daughter of movie mogul Harry Warner. He was 15 years younger and embezzled her money, landing himself in jail. In prison, he offered a young inmate named Richard Matt $100,000 to kill her.

“The case of Lisl Auman, who first wrote me from prison three years ago, is so rotten and wrong and shameful that I feel dirty just for knowing about it, and so should you.”

Bruce Cawsey Waite has no home, no office, and wears a dead man’s suit.

The bribery scandal, involving tests given for coveted government jobs and medical school admissions, began implicating high-ranking officials. Then people started turning up dead.

The life that he has created almost from scratch over the last two years has been defined at least as much by what Tyson wants to avoid — old haunts, old habits, old temptations and old hangers-on — as by what he wants to embrace.

Our debt, conscious or unconscious, to what has come before, and what it can tell us about copyright, the public domain, and the complicated relationship between creators and consumers.

“When a man steps onto the road, his journey begins. When a woman steps onto that same road, hers ends.”

The rise of the Night Wolves, a Kremlin-backed biker gang, and what it says about the Russian political condition.

The controversy surrounding the death of Uche Okafor.

Alfred Dellentash Jr. chartered the Rolling Stones in private jets while smuggling planeloads of Pablo Escobar’s drugs on the side.

Mementos left at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the man in charge of cataloging them.

The life and death of Marla Ruzicka, a 28-year-old aid worker in Baghdad.

A profile of the Mexican newsweekly, a “lone voice” in reporting on the narcos.

The elite Iraqi “Golden Division” was trained by the US to hunt terrorists. But now they’re locked in a brutal street battle for control of Mosul.

A theatre company has spent years bringing catharsis to the traumatized. In the coronavirus era, that’s all of us.

With flash, hip-hop echoes rock’s golden age.

When rock was at its peak in 1972, Americans earning the equivalent of $1m a year took just over 1 per cent of national income. In 2010, this group’s share of national income had grown to almost 10 per cent. At the same time, the average tax paid by these top earners almost halved. The rise of Jay-Z’s “new black elite” reflects the growth in numbers of the super-wealthy. But the opulence that he and West flaunt also reflects the growing estrangement of those at the top from the rest.

Billy Dillon was about to sign a contract with the Detroit Tigers. Instead he was convicted–wrongly–of first-degree murder and spent the next 27 years in prison.

Searching for a ghost of Meyer Lansky’s Cuba, a sex-show star who quietly disappeared from the island and was later immortalized in The Godfather Part II.

How the Bounty, a busted-up replica built in 1960 for the film Mutiny on the Bounty, ended up 100 miles out to sea during the height of Hurricane Sandy.

There were so many ways the two planes could have avoided the collision. The odds were so slim. But high above the Amazon in 2006, a combination of technology and human fallibility brought them together.

The founding fathers deserve at least some of the blame for the worst presidencies in American history—they created an office that’s vaguely defined and ripe for abuse. Plus: how to fix it.

On Marie-Madeline Marguerite, a 1600s French serial killer.

When your family is murdered, and the home you had made together is destroyed, and you yourself are beaten and left for dead — as happened to Bill Petit on the morning of July 23, 2007 — it may as well be the end of the world. It is hard to see how a man survives the end of the world. The basics of life — waking up, walking, talking — become alien tasks, and almost impossibly heavy, as you are more dead than alive. Just how does a man go about surviving such a thing? How does a man go on?

A profile of the world’s best League of Legends player, a 19-year-old Korean kid whose nickname is God.