What happened when one of San Francisco’s most notorious underworld bosses tried to go clean.

How one woman’s sexual assault by four University of Oregon football players in 1980 unwittingly led to the state’s expansive free speech protections.

Michael Phelps returns to his Olympic training after a 45-day stint at The Meadows.

How agents took down Mexico’s most vicious drug cartel and, in the process, gave El Chapo the opportunity to create an empire.

Why “the legal equivalent of outer space” continues to exist, fifteen years after 9/11.

Rabbi Barry Freundel said he would help dozens of women convert to Judaism. In the process, he secretly videotaped them naked.

How one man wants to transport the world’s heaviest cargo in airships that are lighter than air.

In his own final days, a Right to Die activist tells the story of his secret, illegal assisted-suicide service.

When massive ships sink, burn, fall apart or get stuck, their owners call Nick Sloane. His job: figure out how to save as much as he can.

How the author writes best-selling non-fiction books without the ability to leave her house.

Centralia, Pennsylvania, used to be a place with kids and schools and churches and houses. Then the ground caught on fire.

There are two roles to play in the new world of on-demand everything: royalty or servant.

Nowadays, the young and privileged view un- and under-paid assistantships as the road to a successful creative career. Are they deluding themselves?

From Stefani Joanne Germanotta to Lady Gaga: the self-invented, manufactured, accidental, totally on-purpose creation of the world’s biggest pop star.

The city of Boston, the Tea Party movement, and the rightful heir to the American Revolution.

Karaoke renditions of ‘My Way’ have led to murders in the Phillipines.

It took a desperate screenwriter to find Max Mermelstein, Miami’s former coke overlord, after twenty-five years in hiding.

A woman posing as a non-profit worker kidnaps a formerly homeless pregnant woman and tries to claim her baby. [PART 2]

Less than a week after Katrina, Michael Lewis goes home to New Orleans.

A mission in Baghdad to let a photojournalist get a shot of an insurgent corpse ends up getting a Marine killed.

If you walk into New York’s best restaurants without a reservation, what does it take to get a table?

A profile of Rahm Emanuel, written during his first congressional campaign in Illinois. Emanuel was running to fill the seat vacated by Rod Blagojevich.

A writer struggles to defend his arbor vitae trees from a pack of hungry deer—“an episode of great vexation and buffoonery.”

Taibbi on the Tea Party. “After lengthy study of the phenomenon, I’ve concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They’re full of shit.”

Four years after a disastrous MTV performance had led him to avoid the public, Rose was back on stage.