Production was shut down three times, the stars often clashed, and studio executives were baffled. Here’s how a difficult shoot led to an Oscar-winning masterpiece.

Swept out to sea by a riptide, a father and his 12-year-old autistic son struggle to stay alive. As night falls, the dad comes to a devastating realization: If they remain together, they’ll drown together.

When a Qatari sheikh came to live in L.A., an entire economy sprouted to meet his wishes. “His highness doesn’t like to hear no,” one associate told a professor.

When a Black lineman from Colorado State went knocking on doors in a white neighborhood, he found himself at the dangerous intersection of a national racial reckoning and a world of internet-conspiracy fanaticism.

Some cops give their friends and family union-issued “courtesy cards” to help get them out of minor infractions. The cards embody everything wrong with modern policing.

A year ago, he was one of the Premier League’s highest-paid players. Now, after angering China and refusing a pay cut, he has simply vanished.

As one blockmate after another fell ill, we tried to stay safe and care for one another. It wasn’t always enough.

How did Beebo Russell—a goofy, God-fearing baggage handler—steal a passenger plane from the Seattle-Tacoma airport and end up alone in a cockpit, with no plan to come down?

Terrorists boarded two planes in Boston and flew them into the World Trade Center. Massachusetts zeroed in on its top airport official, who has never quite recovered.

Paul was in his 80s when someone called to say she was his daughter, conceived in a fertility clinic with his sperm. The only problem? He’d never donated any.

The school founded by evangelist Jerry Falwell ignored reports of rape and threatened to punish accusers for breaking its moral code, say former students. An official who says he was fired for raising concerns calls it a “conspiracy of silence.”

An intrepid expert with dozens of books to his name, Stéphane Bourgoin was a bestselling author, famous in France for having interviewed more than 70 notorious murderers. Then an anonymous collective began to investigate his past.

The failure of MTV’s Staten Island-based reality show and the fate of its cast members:

While Bridge & Tunnel hangs in programming purgatory, the DeBartolis are hamstrung by Draconian network contracts that reportedly don't allow them to have agents or managers or even talk about any of this publicly for five years. So while JWoww shills her own black bronzer line and Snooki slams into Italian police cars for $100,000 an episode, Gabriella and Brianna have been working respectively as a secretary and a pizza-order girl in Staten Island. The papers they signed as passports off Staten Island are effectively keeping them there.

I used to believe the art world was at war with itself, that money was fighting art and vice versa. But I’ve been living in my own ambivalence about things for a decade now, or more, and I’m starting to think it’s not a war but a new equilibrium state, defined by that ambivalence.

Stylistically speaking, in terms of clothing, they arrived in shirts and pants and shoes (there’s really no other way to say it). They had haircuts, but it didn’t really look it. While other bands were mumbling or over-enunciating their dreary positions or penny-candy philosophies, Pavement kind of screamed for a generation. But they did it in a way that was so deeply American that it was almost Scandinavian.

Playwright Will Eno profiles the band and their cult as they grow up and prepare for a reunion.

While on a string of tour dates opening for Radiohead, interaction between Mark Linkous’ antidepressants and the Rohypnol he took to sleep caused him to pass out. A hotel maid found him the next morning bent into a position where his legs had been cut off from circulation. When they untangled, built-up potassium shot from his lower body upward, triggering a harmful chain reaction that caused a heart attack and kidney failure.

“Now Pynchon hides in plain sight, on the Upper West Side, with a family and a history of contradictions: a child of the postwar Establishment determined to reject it; a postmodernist master who’s called himself a ‘classicist’; a workaholic stoner; a polymath who revels in dirty puns; a literary outsider who’s married to a literary agent; a scourge of capitalism who sent his son to private school and lives in a $1.7 million prewar classic six.”

Zukle: The old guy, Bob [Polizos]—I like him, he's a nice guy. When were first getting started, he said, "I like competition." And I said, "Good, because you're gonna get it!" People go over there for $5 steak bites, then they come here for a $500 lap dance.
Polizos: I don't want them here. We are a real restaurant. They're nothing but a whorehouse!

As someone who’s knocked on countless doors with nothing but a hunch and a prayer, I believe all doomed reporting missions should be seen through to their end. Besides, Zelonka’s pluck was entertaining, and I’d come all this way, so we went, two guys in masks, one zapped on Monster Energy and the other on Starbucks double espresso, roaming an empty office park in Rancho Cucamonga as the world was falling apart.

When jobs vanish, Southern men find new ways to contribute.