In my naive denial, I had wanted to see him as a hapless ne’er-do-well, a nonconformist with a streak of dishonesty. I liked to think of him as a latter-day Robin Hood. Now I knew that wasn’t true.

He brought Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Cabbage Patch Kids to our living rooms. He made and lost fortunes. Can Al Kahn stay in the game?

In “the trial of the century,” a Houston socialite was accused of plotting her husband’s murder—and of having an affair with her nephew. But Candace Mossler was only getting started.

Inside Harun Yahya, which promotes a “sexed-up Disney version of Islam,” publishes a 800-page creationist atlas, runs a surreal TV station, and has films it members in orgies that often include high-ranking politicians.

Jai Alai once packed Florida’s frontons with gamblers and glamor. Today, America is down to a single top-level pro who plays under the name Tevin in honor of Tevin Campbell.

Shai Agassi had nearly $1 billion in funding and a dream to replace gas guzzlers with electric cars. All he was missing was a plan.

Three years after profiling him, the author checks in with the Bieber experiment.

Tom Monaghan started Domino’s. Mike Ilitch started Little Caesers. Both became billionaires, both live in Detroit, both are now over 75. They’ve made very different decisions about how to spend their fortunes.

In exchange for his surrender, the top Colombian drug lord was allowed to build his own jail, complete with a disco, jacuzzi, and waterfall. Now 23 years later, it’s a home for the elderly.

“Kelsey’s gender identity is ‘non-binary.’ Or, ‘agender.’ It’s what Kelsey feels comfortable with, even though the world keeps insisting, in a million little ways, that Kelsey has to choose.”

Nearly 70 years after Bugsy Siegel’s unsolved murder in Beverly Hills, a family finally comes forward: they know who did it.

As a young community organizer in Chicago, Barack Obama concluded that to make a real difference, he needed to gain power. A look at how that plan has worked thus far.

“It was creepy to wake up violently in the middle of the night. It was creepier when no one could tell me why it was happening.”

A profile of Bidzina Ivanishvili.

Published originally in GQ Russia.

On the experimental favela police force UPP (aka “The Big Skull”) and their efforts to clean Rio’s largest slum in advance of the World Cup and Olympics.

Afghanistan’s Kyrgyz nomads survive in one of Earth’s most remote places, a pocket of land 14,000 feet high where the currency is sheep, the dream is a road, and many will go an entire lifetime without ever seeing a tree.

On Luddites, “bands of men, organized, masked, anonymous, whose object was to destroy machinery used mostly in the textile industry,” and their literary spawn.

How a longtime gambling addict and a small band of his cronies manipulated both the game and betting exchanges from a tiny Berlin cafe, going as far as buying ownerships of teams in order to insure their failure.

“The mythical image of Malick that has been built up over the last 30-odd years is, in essence, a creation of the same media corps with whom the filmmaker himself has continually chosen not to engage.”

Al Seckel held legendary parties in the 1980s and 90s, with attendees ranging from Slash to Francis Crick. He later became a collector of optical illusions and gave a TED talk on the topic. He may have also misled and defrauded many of the people he came into contact with.

The men and the women of the transactional-love economy. “A thing you should know is that there are very few people to root for in this story.”

A profile of Judy Clarke, who takes on the most heinous, notorious defendants in America, trying to save them from the death penalty. Until Dzokhar Tsarnaev, she usually succeeded.

A talk on personal data and the people who collect it:

"Let me ask a trick question. What was the most damaging data breach in the last 12 months? The trick answer is: it's likely something we don't even know about."