When its informant’s cover was blown, German intelligence destroyed his files. Did his handlers fail to pick up a violent cell that would eventually murder nine immigrants and a cop in order to preserve their asset?

A behind-the-scenes look at a U.S. attack against civilians near Khod: “the high-tech wizardry would fail in its most elemental purpose: to tell the difference between friend and foe.”

A profile Mark Pincus, the founder and C.E.O. of Zynga—the company that created FarmVille, CityVille, and Zynga Poker, the most popular online poker game in the world.

An annotated transcript:

MR. SEALE: [The marshals are carrying him through the door to the lockup.] I still want an immediate trial. You can’t call it a mistrial. I’m put in jail for four years for nothing? I want my coat.

“It is a story that seems almost impossible to believe: a group of female convicts, few of whom had ever played a musical instrument or taken voice lessons, forming a country and western band and becoming, at least in Texas, the Dixie Chicks of their day.”

As China’s growing upper class has pushed the price of ivory above $700/pound, a look at both the supply and demand side of the global trade in (mostly) illicitly acquired elephant tusks.

What happened to Wesley Autrey after he jumped in front of a New York City subway train to save a man’s life.

A profile of the Hell’s Angels following “front-page reports of a heinous gang rape in the moonlit sand dunes near the town of Seaside on the Monterey Peninsula.”

In 1979, a group of Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy and held the entire American diplomatic mission hostage for fifteen months. Twenty-five years later, the students reflected on their actions, many with regret.

The CEO of the US’s biggest bank doesn’t have much charisma or a track record, but he’s “doing as well as any little Dutch boy can—sticking his fingers in the dike.”

One day Nejdra Nance realized the woman she had called Mom for 23 years may have been at the center of one of the most harrowing kidnappings in decades—hers.

A charismatic entrepreneur, an ex-con turned devout Christian, and the politicians who championed them.

The story of a $36 billion Ponzi scheme in Minnesota.

On a pair of Israeli psychologists who between 1971 and 1984 “published a series of quirky papers exploring the ways human judgment may be distorted when we are making decisions in conditions of uncertainty.”

How the contradiction-rich “country the size of Connecticut” that birthed Al-Jazeera has played an integral and surprising role in the revolutions of the Arab Spring.

On the strengths and limitations of the Republican frontrunner:

“The Mormon’s never going to win the who-do-you-want-to-have-a-beer-with contest,” concedes one adviser, while another acknowledges, “He’s never had the experience of sitting in a bar, and like, talking.”

On the American Legislative Exchange Council, a D.C. nonprofit with a library of more than 800 pieces of fill-in-the-blank legislation ready for state legislatures across the country.

Tim Masters becomes the main suspect in a gruesome Colorado murder; he’s eventually convicted thanks the work of a revered detective. Then the case unravels: DNA proves another man committed the crime.

“That learning to cook could lead an American woman to success of any kind would have seemed utterly implausible in 1949; that it is so thoroughly plausible 60 years later owes everything to Julia Child’s legacy.”

In 1987, a terrible accident kills five Ole Miss sorority members. The author catches up with her Chi Omega sisters who survived.

On the last weekend of April 2011, two things happened in Washington D.C.: the annual White House Correspondents Dinner and the decision to raid Osama bin Laden’s compound. This is the story of how both transpired.

A history of the divide between computing and language, and why we “define and regiment our lives, including our social lives and our perceptions of our selves, in ways that are conducive to what a computer can ‘understand.’”

Bill Ferguson does not believe his son, Ryan, killed a popular newspaper editor. To prove it, he’s drained his savings, performed public re-enactments of the crime, and alienated almost everyone in his Missouri city.

Darren Lumar lived in mansions he didn’t own, ran companies that didn’t make a dime, went to colleges that didn’t exist and slept with “any number of women” despite being married to James Brown’s daughter. When he was murdered, the cops had a problem: too many possible suspects.

In the late 90s, an American man adopted a 5-year-old from the Ukraine. A decade later, one of the two would be accused of molesting young boys. The other would be charged with murder.