The birthing of a conspiracy theory that the record holder for oldest person, Jeanne Calment, was actually her daughter Yvonne, who had “stolen her deceased mother’s identity to avoid paying inheritance taxes,”

An oil tanker was ordered to save more than 100 migrants floating in the middle of the Mediterranean. Europe didn’t want them. They couldn’t go back to Libya. How would they survive?

Maria Ressa, editor of a popular news site in the Philippines, has incurred President Duterte and his supporters’ wrath by investigating his extrajudicial killing campaign.

Brenda thought she and Ricky would be together forever, until he left her. Kendra thought she and Ricky would be together forever. Then Brenda took matters into her own hands. Inside the case of jealousy, spying, and murder that shook Uptown Dallas.

The famous subreddit started as a forum for one man to ask about his workplace behavior. Seven years later, it’s become a platform where millions of people discuss good, bad, and everything in between.

An important house in Florida history is for sale, its future uncertain. Some want the historic house preserved, while the racism that fueled the Rosewood riots remains.

An essay on working at Sotheby’s.

Art pricing is not absolute magic; there are certain rules, which to an outsider can sound parodic. Paintings with red in them usually sell for more than paintings without red in them. Warhol’s women are worth more, on average, than Warhol’s men. The reason for this is a rhetorical question, asked in a smooth continental accent: “Who would want the face of some man on their wall?”

A hundred and fifty years ago, slightly more, a strange notion: the dead could be counted. In the Civil War, in the lush fields of the South, Americans first, as a culture, began to imagine death in numbers. Rosters of soldiers, as well as lists of war casualties, were not common practice in the mid-nineteenth century. Many officials feared responsibility for the dead by numbering or naming them, and military leaders felt an accurate count might embolden their enemies.

In northern Nigeria, radical Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram is facing a vigilante backlash from armed teenagers with nothing to lose.

Kobe Bryant knows who he is, and he’s happy to tell you all about it.

All you need is a blueprint, a polymer, a printer, and a knowledge of government regulations.

Where does Strawberry-Kiwi Snapple come from? Givaudan is part of a tiny, secretive industry that produces new flavors.

For years, a mysterious figure has been stealing books before their release. Is it espionage? Revenge? Or a complete waste of time?

Federal agencies have hired contractors with no experience to find respirators and masks, fueling a black market filled with price gouging and multiple layers of profiteering brokers. One contractor called them “buccaneers and pirates.”

“I mean, writers are horribly envious and so nobody likes stars, we always feel like it’s a zero-sum game and whatever stardom somebody else has is being taken directly from us, so we hate the stars. But we also need them. Because the possibility of some level of stardom is what will continue to attract new writers to the game. If you’re a linguistically talented 22-year-old, there’s a list of things you can be: you can work in Hollywood, you can be a blogger, etc. And if being a novelist equates to some quaint thing like being a Morris dancer, who’s going to choose this?”

On the theft of 6 million pounds of maple syrup from Canada’s strategic reserve and the group of free market renegades who are fighting “The Maple Wars.”

Eagleman, a neuroscientist, describes how groundbreaking advances in the science of brain have changed our understanding of volition in criminal acts, and may erode the underpinnings of our justice system.

The story of the most popular music video of all time, including memories of a then-25-year-old Michael Jackson on and off the set. Director John Landis: “I dealt with Michael as I would have a really gifted child.”

Mykal Riley’s last-second three-pointer kept thousands of fans out of the path of a tornado. Just as remarkable? That Riley was there to take the shot in the first place.

A profile of Francis Collins, a fervent Christian, former head of the Human Genome Project and Obama’s appointee to head N.I.H., now at the center of the stem cell research debate.

In 1993 a black teenager in London was randomly stabbed to death by a gang of white youths. Twenty years later, they would be at the center of the trial of the decade.

John Ackerman has spent millions procuring a majority of the known caves in Minnesota, which add up to dozens of miles of underground passageways and likely make him the largest cave owner in the U.S. He collects and charts them in the name of preservation, but his controversial methods have created many opponents.