Creators, gatekeepers, and the future of the comedy business.

A transcript of Oswalt’s keynote at last week’s Just For Laughs conference.

How two brothers, born of the same mother but adopted by different families, reunited and used a stolen $50k to fund a ride that started in New Jersey and ended with bullet-ridden cabins in the wilds of Alaska.

The Conficker ‘worm’ has replicated itself across tens of millions of computers. Only a few hundred people have the knowledge to recreate how, and no one (except its anonymous maker) fully understands why.

The urban legend about the guy who hooked a rocket up to the back of his car and drove/flew it into a mountain? The anonymous author claims the story is about him and some of his small town high school buddies.

Clay Shirky, writing in 1999 on the Web eclipsing TV’s reach: “We will always have massive media, but the days of mass media are over, killed by the explosion of possibility and torn into a thousand niches.”

Saad Mohseni, Afghanistan’s first media mogul and a business partner of Rupert Murdoch, produces everything from nightly news broadcasts to the controversial Afghan version of American Idol.

A DHL tycoon’s small plane disappeared near the Phillipines amidst rumors of children fathered with teenage Asian villagers. Every scrap of his DNA went missing, but that didn’t stop a forensic mathematician.

A 2009 profile of the guy behind 4chan, Christoper “moot” Poole, his anonymous army of millions, and how it’s all losing him money.

When ‘Ceca’, the Madonna of the Balkans, met Arkan, bank robber turned paramilitary leader and war criminal, and how it all came to a tragic end in the lobby of the Belgrade Intercontinental.

The prosecutor in the case of hacker turned F.B.I. informant (but still hacker) Albert Gonzales and his organization Shadowcrew : “The sheer extent of the human victimization caused by Gonzalez and his organization is unparalleled.”

A profile of Larry David, with a focus on his years as a struggling stand-up. “I was hoping that somehow I could get some kind of cult following and get by with that.”

Fourteen people connected to resistance of Vladimir Putin have died on British soil. Every case has been closed, the deaths deemed of natural causes. American intelligence believes they were all assassinated by the Kremlin.

A reporter on her way out of India probes a case of a woman beaten to death by her husband in public.

It turns out “Madame Giselle” wasn’t any of these things, couldn’t make her Chevy Chase, Maryland, neighbors rich, and may have been at the center of a massive scandal in Colombia.

In the wake of a brazen but mysterious Philadelphia gunfight, Marvin Harrison, the man who holds the NFL record for receptions in a season, may find himself with a permanent record of a different sort.

Hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the U.S. may face violence and murder in their home countries. What happens when they are forced to return?

How the President’s son-in-law, despite his inexperience in diplomacy and his lack of security clearance, became Beijing’s primary point of interest.

A profile of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who “may be the only reliable voice of caution left in an administration inching closer to the brink.”

The untold story of how Lisa Howard’s intimate diplomacy with Cuba’s revolutionary leader changed the course of the Cold War.

Joe Howlett gave his life to save an animal that may already be past the point of no return. After ten centuries of annihilation, is there any way to undo the damage done?

In September 2017, a police officer shot and killed a queer college student in Atlanta. By the end of the year, several of the student’s friends had been arrested, and two were dead. What happened at Georgia Tech?

“This is the story of the past three years of my life. It’s romance in a way, but it’s also a breakup story.”

On the grueling nature of Chinese restaurant work and the hopes and dreams of the cooks and delivery men who have migrated to the U.S.

For decades, one company has ruled the world of tampons. But a new wave of brands has emerged, selling themselves as more ethical, more feminist and more ecological.

We aspire to a life without discomfort, without unpleasantness. But what kind of life would that be? It is as hard to imagine a world without pain as a person without sadness: a whole dimension of existence would be missing.