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.

For almost 20 years, Greg Torti has lived the life of a convicted sex offender—carrying a blue ID card with him at all times, avoiding schools and parks, living on the outskirts of town. It’s a just punishment for the crime, he says. It’s just that he didn’t commit it.

On the mid-sixties birth of America’s underground newspaper movement and the rise of The Realist, East Village Other, Berkeley Barb, and more.

A review of Treme, the new HBO show about post-Katrina New Orleans from David Simon, creator of The Wire. “The series virtually prohibits you from loving it,” Franklin writes, “while asking you to value it.”

How did a Kentucky entrepreneur, a Louisiana politician, and the vice president of Nigeria end up in one of the biggest scandals to hit America’s black elite in decades?

An interview with rapper Drakeo the Ruler after he was released from prison, having previously faced the possibility of 25 to life despite being previously acquitted of murder charges related to a 2016 killing.

Buyers from all over America—some of whom had never heard of the Illinois town—came searching for wealth amid the Rust Belt ruins.

In early 2012, the bones of a woman and young boy were found near the Arizona-Mexico border. The author investigates who they were and how they died.

How Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder, with a little help from the Bush Administration, got 140 trees chopped down in a national park to improve his view and ruined the life of a park ranger in the process.

Walter Pitts, who helped develop the “first mechanistic theory of the mind,” was so brilliant he was once been invited to study with Bertrand Russell. He was also homeless.

On Brent White, the joke whisperer who edits the largely improvisational comedies of Paul Feig, Judd Apatow and Adam McKay.

In nine hours, Guinea-Bissau’s President and military leader were assassinated in separate incidents. Their dealings had turned the country into the runway of choice for drug smugglers and Hezbollah.

The holdings of the Seattle Art Museum are historically male-dominated. When Matthew Offenbacher won a prize for his own art, he decided to use it to beef up their queer and female holdings.

The writer returns to his remote North Dakota hometown’s high school, then isolated with a graduating class of only 28, now even smaller but connected by the internet.

Thinking about the right thing to do, now and in the imaginable future.

A U.S. Marine’s journey from the Afghan war to an Illinois prison.

By choice, for less than $2 an hour, the female inmate firefighters of California work their bodies to the breaking point. Sometimes they even risk their lives.

In 1865, a failed stockbroker tries to pull off one of the boldest financial schemes in American history: the original big short.

Perpetual outsiders, Mormons spent 200 years assimilating to a certain national ideal—only to find their country in an identity crisis. What will the third century of the faith look like?

Companies are figuring out how to balance what appears to be a lasting shift toward remote work with the value of the physical workplace.

It started with a candle in an abandoned warehouse. It ended with temperatures above 3,000 degrees and the men of the Worcester Fire Department in a fight for their lives.

The preacher ran a prostitution ring out of his halfway house. The teenager posed as his nephew and later claimed he feared for his own life. Only one man they drove into the woods would survive.

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.

In trailers just minutes from the Vegas Strip, Air Force pilots control predators over Iraq and Afghanistan. A case study in the marvels—and limits—of modern military technology.

A utopian German settlement in Chile had already turned darkly cultish by the time it became a secret torture site for enemies of the Pinochet regime.