A French soccer star’s rise and fall from sports to cons to the Nazi Party.

“I am having a moment, but I only want more. I need more. I cannot merely be good enough because I am chased by the pernicious whispers that I might only be ‘good enough for a black woman.’”

“For people who pay close attention to the state of American fiction, he has become a kind of superhero.”

On Pham Xuan An, Time’s Saigon correspondent during the Vietnam War, who led a double life as an intelligence agent for Ho Chi Minh.

For decades, dozens of men with intellectual disabilities lived in an old schoolhouse and did gruesome work in a turkey plant for subminimum wage. No one noticed.

A mother defends her family lineage against disruption from envious cousins.

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In Harpersville, Alabama, a traffic violation can lead to months in jail and a never-ending stint in a work-release program – what some refer to as a modern-day debtors’ prison.

Over the past 33 years, Dick Hoyt has pushed, pulled and carried his disabled son, Rick, through more than 1,000 road races and triathlons, including 28 Boston Marathons. But as time bears down on them, how much longer can they keep it up?

What overcrowded and swelling Bangladesh can tell us about how the planet’s population, more than 1/3 of which live within 62 miles of a shoreline, will react to rising sea levels.

She surveyed her former possessions, the stuff of a world now lost. "I'd be happy with just walking away from all of this," she concluded. "Dump it all and just start over. Happy birthday — I'm alive."

Christopher Clayton Hutton hatched a plan to deliver Monopoly boards to British prisoners of war. The games were advertised as a diversion, but really they offered a way out.

Al Sharpton wanted to be a civil rights leader in the mold of Martin Luther King, Jr. It hasn’t quite worked out that way.

I’ve read stories from people who say they always knew they were attracted to the same sex, or that they figured it out at a young age. I’m not one of them.

Jimmy Lai, a Hong Kong tabloid tycoon, thinks he’s found the future of journalism: an animation assembly line that can crank out clips recreating–or anticipating, or imagining–breaking news.

A famed attorney begins a transformation away from being a man; and dies after a companion shoves her under an oncoming train.

On the young and ascendant Frank Sinatra, “who ruled crowds by seductive magnetism and surrounded himself with courtiers, but had once been an adolescent alone in his room listening to Bing Crosby on his Atwater-Kent.”

A newly minted, 34-year-old White House budget director gets a little too candid with a reporter profiling him during Ronald Reagan’s first year in office. Among Stockman’s many admissions: “None of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers.”

A plague leads sea stars to tear off their own arms.

He made billions. He lost billions. He was fired as CEO of the company he created. And on March 2, just hours after he was accused of rigging oil deals, he died in a one-car crash.

On NFL siblings Michael and Martellus Bennett, who “tend to perplex people.”

Just don’t call it Jurassic Park.

On astrophysicist Sara Seager and her obsession with discovering distant worlds.