A two-part write-around of the world’s only billionaire.

Dreaming of the perfect apartment.

Should anyone ever choose to remake and bastardize Breakfast at Tiffany’s, I propose an opening sequence re-imagined to reflect more contemporary preoccupations. The revised opening scene should be filmed against the backdrop of an early evening in Brooklyn. The throngs of suits coming home from their nine to five grinds in Manhattan would be emerging from the subway stairwells like ants from an anthill, rushing off down various streets towards their various homes and families and dinners. All except for the would-be protagonist who, as the crowd rushes past her, makes her way to the closed-for-the-night real-estate storefront opposite the subway station. Somewhere, “Moon River” might still be playing, as if it had never stopped. Disheveled, lugging her purse and gym bag, she pauses for a number of minutes to read listings she has already read, and which she committed to memory weeks ago: a studio on Pineapple Street; a loft on Gold Street; a townhouse on Argyle Street; a two-bedroom coop on First Place; a one-bedroom condo on Carlton Avenue; a brownstone on Henry Street. It’s fall and the leaves blow in eddies on the sidewalk. She gets cold and turns away from the window to walk off down the street just as dusk begins to arrive in earnest. The occasional “For Sale” sign swings on its hinges, and the story of the day ends only to begin again in the morning.

An account of the night last September when 15 Taliban, dressed as American soldiers, snuck onto one of the largest air bases in Afghanistan.

On lucha libre’s exóticos, “wrestlers who dress in drag and kiss their rivals, never quite revealing whether the joke is on their opponents, themselves or conservative Mexican society at large.”

How the author, following up on a rumor, helped reignite the dormant investigation into the murder of Martha Moxley, a teenager who had been murdered nearly 25 years before in Greenwich, Connecticut.

How a self-taught doctor from Delhi cornered the black market in kidneys, building one of the world’s most lucrative organ-trading rings, until it all came crashing down.

Despite its association with piracy, BitTorrent is a company in its own right, and one desperate to hit upon a way to monetize its revolutionary file transfer technology.

Your local police department probably has a $400,00 device that listens in on cellphones. Soon your neighbor will be able to buy the same thing for $1,500.

Fifty years ago, Geraldo Foos bought the Manor House Motel. While his customers had sex, he watched from above and took scrupulous notes. Only three people in the world knew what he was doing: Foos, his wife, and the author.

The activists fighting for police reform in the wake of a video that showed a black teenager shot 16 times by a white cop.

Four men stood on the edge of the Shenzhen Health and Family Planning Commission, threatening to jump in protest. They referred to themselves as “China’s 21st century eunuchs,” damaged by medically-dubious surgeries.

50onRed is a fixture in Philly’s startup world. But there’s something the leadership didn’t talk about, even with some of its own staff. They make malware.

In the city of Rosario, some fans have evolved into a mafia with an illicit cash flow and a stable of hit men. A look inside their homicidal turf war.

For decades, the lead actor at an acclaimed storefront Chicago theater beat, groped, and choked his female co-stars in front of audiences, while manipulating them into coercive relationships offstage.

“Rio is about far more than Phelps adding to his legacy. It’s the next step toward achieving the same peace and balance on land as he’s had in the water.”

“There was no they.' There was not even a 'he,' no armed person turning on a crowd. But what happened at JFK last night was, in every respect but the violence, a mass shooting.”

The fire department working a desolate New Mexico mesa is made up of 15 anarchists and recluses and led by a friendly giant whose job is to be an administrator in a place that defies administration.

When the prosecutor in a 1924 trial focused on the murder of a priest backed the suspect–and everything that followed.

They are the most celebrated in the U.S. military. But hidden behind the heroic narratives is a darker, more troubling story of “revenge ops,” unjustified killings, mutilations, and other atrocities.

Abdullahi Yusuf was 18 and ready to dedicate his life to ISIS when federal agents pulled him aside in the Minneapolis airport. He will never see the inside of a jail cell.

Why the future feels frozen in time, as framed by Marshall McLuhan (“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”) and William Gibson (“The future is already here; it is just unevenly distributed.”)

Life at Marvel Comics in the mid-1960s.

An excerpt from Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.

Grammy-winning liner notes describing the rise, fall, and rebirth of Roky Erickson, who founded the psychedelic rock pioneers The Thirteenth Floor Elevators before a charge stemming from a single marijuana joint landed him in a Texas mental hospital.