He was an 18 year old Marine bound for Iraq. She was a high school senior in West Virginia. They grew intimate over IM. His dad also started contacting her. No one was who they claimed to be and it led to a murder.

John Dirr’s son Eli didn’t really have cancer. In fact, neither Eli nor John Dirr ever existed. The story of a decade-long hoax.

On an affliction for the digital age, “Munchausen by internet.”

How a 19-year-old actress and a few struggling Web filmmakers created a star.

How a Massachusetts psychotherapist fell for a Nigerian e-mail scam.

The story was told by Sports Illustrated, CBS News, and countless others: linbeacker Manti Te’o, Heisman trophy candidate and the face of Notre Dame football, was playing brilliantly despite the tragic loss of his girfriend to leukemia early in the season. The reporters missed one key element of Te’o’s story, however: the girl hadn’t died. She couldn’t have. She didn’t exist.

An obsessive marine biologist gambles his savings, family, and sanity on a quest to be the first to capture a live giant squid.

On the grief that comes with losing livestock.

A profile of a 25-year-old Spanish sensation.

The inevitably tragic story of Travis the chimp and the family of tow-truck operators who raised him like a human child.

A trip to a lobster festival in Maine leads to an examination of the culinary and ethical dimensions of cooking a live, possibly sentient, creature.

A profile of the late actor-turned NRA president.

Adapting from his book of the same name, Chivers traces how the design and proliferation of small arms, originating from the Pentagon and the Russian army, rerouted the 20th century.

Most military experts agree that robots, not people, will inevitably do the fighting in ground wars. In Tennessee, a high-end gunsmith is already there. The story of Jerry Baber and his robot army.

How two twentysomethings, equipped with the Internet and weed, ruled the lucrative world of weapons trading … for a while.

On America’s relationship with the right to bear arms, from the founding fathers to the Black Panthers and the Ku Klux Klan.

The author sits down with notorious (and recently convicted) arms dealer Viktor Bout, Bout’s brother, and a close friend.

In the days after 9/11, Mark Stroman went on a revenge killing spree in Texas. Rais Bhuiyan survived and, a decade later, tried to stop Stroman’s execution.