On Witanhurst, the dilapidated London mansion whose ownership is cloaked in mystery.

Explaining the explainer.

Two days after the Japanese tsunami, after the waves had left their destruction, as rescue workers searched the ruins, news came of an almost surreal survival: Miles out at sea, a man was found, alone, riding on nothing but the roof of his house.

From the 1940s through the early 70s, incoming freshman at Harvard, Yale, Vassar, Wellesley, and several other top schools were photographed nude in the name of science–bogus science, as it turned out. Most of the photos were destroyed, but not all.

A week before 9/11, a five-day standoff at a 34-acre campground in rural Michigan that been the site of marijuana festivals ended with the killing of the couple that owned it, Tom Crosslin, 46, and Rolland “Rollie” Rohm, 28.

After the election of Narendra Modi in 2014, Muslim journalists covering Hindu extremism noticed a change. The masks came off; the facade of courtesy, once flimsy, crumbled altogether.

Why can’t the military fix its violence against women problem? Congress is on the precipice of ushering in the biggest shift in military policy since the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. But would it have saved 21-year-old airman Natasha Aposhian?

How the administration’s loyalists are quietly reshaping American governance, one civil servant at a time.

After oil was discovered on their Oklahoma reservation, the Osage Nation became the richest people per capita in the world. Then they began to be murdered off mysteriously. In 1924 the nascent FBI sent a team of undercover agents, including a Native American, to the Osage reservation.

Since 2007, when they first heard that “the Florida of Russia” was being awarded the Winter Olympics, two Dutch journalists have been documenting everyday life in Sochi and how it has changed in the run-up to the Games.

Kate del Castillo, the actress who brought Sean Penn to Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, tells her side of the story.

The annual tradition in the grape-growing country of South Africa’s Western Cape was that locals could gather fruit before it rotted on the vine. But this season produced a body amongst the rows.

“The tragedy of digital media isn’t that it’s run by ruthless, profiteering guys in ill-fitting suits; it’s that the people posing as the experts know less about how to make money than their employees, to whom they won’t listen.”

Four American rock climbers are kidnapped by guerillas in Kyrgyzstan.

How can you know if you’re about to get replaced by an invading algorithm or an augmented immigrant? “If your job can be easily explained, it can be automated,” Anders Sandberg, of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, tells Oppenheimer. “If it can’t, it won’t.” (Rotten luck for people whose job description is “Predict the future.”)

Is it time to end the mourning period for old media?

When a group of Black mothers in Ohio were told to wait for school integration, they started marching every day in protest. They kept going for nearly 18 months.

When she was a 15-year-old runaway, the writer was nearly killed by a truck driver. Twenty-seven years later, she investigates whether her attacker was truck stop serial killer Robert Ben Rhoades, who often kept his victims chained in the back of his truck for weeks before killing and dumping them.

The developer responsible for the tallest residential building in New York—the penthouse just sold for $90 million—lives in a two-story house in Queens.

When the most famous amnesiac in history died, the battle for custody of his brain began.

On an Indonesian town that serves both as stopping point for those seeking to reach Australia by boat and a hotspot for short term ‘contract marriage,’ which allows Saudi tourists a loophole to engage in Islamic-sanctioned prostitution.

“Professional boxing is the only major American sport whose primary, and often murderous, energies are not coyly deflected by such artifacts as balls and pucks.”

In his old life, Matthew Cox told stories to scam his way into millions of dollars. Now he’s trying to make it by selling tales that are true.

Bill Benter did the impossible: He wrote an algorithm that couldn’t lose at the track. Close to a billion dollars later, he tells his story for the first time.