Sada Abe, a former geisha, became a sensation in 1930s Japan after erotically asphyxiating her married lover, cutting off his penis and testicles and carrying them in her kimono for days.

In 2008, a federally owned power plant spewed coal sludge over 300 acres in Tennessee. Now, 40 people who helped clean up the mess are dead and 300 ill.

The Estonia was carrying 989 passengers when it sank in 30-foot seas on its way across the Baltic in September 1994. More than 850 lost their lives. The ones who survived acted quickly and remained calm.

In 1978, an eighth grader killed his teacher. After 20 months in a psychiatric facility, he was freed. His classmates still wonder: What really happened?

In the fall of 1966, billionaire Doris Duke killed a close confidant in Newport, Rhode Island. Local police ruled the incident “an unfortunate accident.” Half a century later, evidence suggests she got away with murder.

In the ’90s, a frustrated artist in Berlin went on a crime spree—building bombs, extorting high-end stores, and styling his persona after Scrooge McDuck. He soon became a German folk hero.

In Taipei, young people like Nancy Tao Chen Ying watched as the Hong Kong protests were brutally extinguished. Now they wonder what’s in their future.

As surely as 2008 was made possible by black people’s long fight to be publicly American, it was also made possible by those same Americans’ long fight to be publicly black. That latter fight belongs especially to one man, as does the sight of a first family bearing an African name. Barack Obama is the president. But it’s Malcolm X’s America.

A youth set to the shifting sounds of CCM, Christian Contemporary Music:

This, by the way, is considered the ultimate sign of quality CCM, even amongst Christians: the ability to pass as secular. Every band’s goal was to have teenagers stop their grooving mid-song and exclaim, like a soda commercial actress who’s just realized she’s been drinking Diet, “Wait, this is Christian?”

“As we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money?”

In the days following Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, more than 100 cities experienced significant civil disturbance. In New York, everyone expected riots. What happened next.

A rape case in which most of the evidence lies in the archives of Twitter and Instagram divides a football-crazed town of 18,400.

A former Saint and Super Bowl champion, Will Smith, was shot and killed by another player named Cardell Hayes. Their fatal collision highlights the fine line between triumph and tragedy in football and life in New Orleans.

In 1939, acting on a tip and clues from The Iliad, archaeologists unearthed King Nestor’s palace on Pylos. Recently, another discovery in Pylos, the grave of an even earlier soldier, could change our entire understanding of how western civilization developed.

“If I were a bitch, I’d be in love with Biff Truesdale. Biff is perfect. He’s friendly, good-looking, rich, famous, and in excellent physical condition. He almost never drools.”

In January 2009, a U.S. platoon came under rocket attack in Iraq. Two years later, how the event changed the soldiers’ lives.

No one knew how Suzanne Jovin ended up in a wealthy neighborhood away from Yale’s campus in New Haven, or why she was brutally stabbed on the sidewalk, apparently by someone she knew. The only suspect that police named was her thesis advisor.

On William H. McMasters, who ten days after being hired as Charles Ponzi’s publicist wrote a scathing exposé in The Boston Post that revealed the biggest fraud, at the time, in American history.

Shakiya Robertson thought she had found a way get her family a home. She moved in, fixed the place up, made all the payments. Then she, like thousands of others in Detroit, was told that the house she thought she had purchased wasn’t actually hers.

In 1948, a man was found on a beach in South Australia. The circumstances of his death and his identity were rich with mystery. When an amateur sleuth became obsessed, he could not imagine where the clues would lead him.

How Yvette Vickers, a B-movie starlet who had appeared in Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman, ended up mummified in her Los Angeles home last year.

The latest frontier of statistical research in baseball—and the newest front in the Yanks/Red Sox arms race—is defense. And it’s yielding some surprising insights about who is actually worth his salary.

Scott Storch, a producer who earned six figures for beats he made in less than an hour, was worth an estimated $70 million. Then he blew it all in a bizarre cocaine binge.

In need of a new lead singer, Journey settled on an unknown 40-year-old from the Philippines whose clips they found online. Arnel Pineda was perfect: just a small-town boy, living in a lonely world.

A conversation with NYU Law Professor Philip Alston on the legality of ‘targeted killings’ by drones, which have made headlines in Pakistan, but also have been deployed by the C.I.A. in countries like Yemen.