On video game collectors’ “holy grail” – a Nintendo World Championships cartridge:

Wired.com tracked down some of the Nintendo World Championships participants and serious videogame collectors whose lives have touched by these coveted artifacts of a bygone 8-bit era. Here are their stories.

Houston detectives investigate a series of brutal assaults on prostitutes in the Acres Homes section of the city. They thought they were after one man; it turns out they were wrong.

Having fallen on hard times, a former football star and the pride of his small town decides to rob the local bank. His weapons of choice: Craigslist, bear mace, and an inner tube.

A profile of the climber and thief Vjeran Tomic, dubbed Spider-Man by the French press, who describes robbery as an act of imagination.

When deep sea diver Dave Shaw reached the bottom of Bushman’s Hole, he discovered the body of Deon Dreyer. Though Dreyer had been gone for 10 years, Shaw was determined to bring him back.

Dozens of military contractors, most of them Black, have been jailed in the emirate — some on trumped-up drug charges. Why has the American government failed to help them?

We stopped at a service station where there were old truck drivers, their vehicles festooned with red banners: “All-out war against the virus, weather hard times together.” The drivers wore their masks down around their chins as they smoked. I asked for water at the only open shop, and the assistant pulled his jacket up to cover his mouth before saying “over there.”

Before I learned about beauty, I delighted in my body. I sensed a deep well at my center, a kind of umbilical cord that linked me to a roiling infinity of knowledge and pathos that underlay the trivia of our daily lives.

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.

When Larycia Hawkins, the first black woman to receive tenure at Wheaton College, made a symbolic gesture of support for Muslims, the evangelical college became divided over what intellectual freedom on its campus really meant.

Franklin Leonard’s anonymous survey has launched careers, recognized four of the past eight Best Picture winners, and pushed movie studios to think beyond sequels and action flicks.

After watching his father Sandy abuse his paralyzed former-jockey mother for years, Mat Crichton committed murder. Nearly the entire local farming community rallied in support of him.

In the not-so-distant future, all of our objects will talk to each other. They’ll make our coffee, find our keys, save our lives. The roadmap to a fully networked existence.

An interview with Barry Diller about Aereo and the past, present and future of TV.

Previously: Vanessa Grigoriadis on the Longform Podcast.

How divisions between Nigeria’s Muslim North and Christian South resulted in the birth of terror’s most ruthless movement.

A tenth of Kannapolis, North Carolina, residents were laid off after the local textile mill closed. A billionaire bought the mill and turned it into a mecca for biotechnology and life sciences research. Now many residents are human research subjects.

Jamie Smith said he was a co-founder of Blackwater and a former CIA officer. He appeared on cable news as a counterterrorism expert and he received millions in goverment contracts to train personnel. The money was real. The resume wasn’t.

On Forever 21 and the rise of “fast fashion”:

They have changed fashion from a garment making to an information business, optimizing their supply chains to implement design tweaks on the fly.

A West Hollywood aesthetician made headlines after allegedly trying to have a business rival killed. But the real story, involving ongoing harassment and a member of the so-called Bling Ring, may be more complicated.

When 25-year-old Valentine Strasser seized power in Sierra Leone in 1992, he became the world’s youngest head of state. Today he lives with his mother and spends his days drinking gin by the roadside.

David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, has written a new Obama biography expected to be a best-seller. His frugal streak has kept his staff intact. And yet, after a dozen years, he’s still the new guy at Condé Nast.

After one of the most decisive wins in Kentucky Derby history, Barbaro broke his leg at the Preakness, ending a promising career and beginning a herculean effort to save his life.

It all started with an unclaimed lottery ticket worth millions, soon revealing a string of unlikely winners that pointed to an inside job. But who had rigged the lottery? And how?