The government says Matt DeHart is an online child predator. DeHart—and his parents—say he’s being framed over his knowledge of CIA secrets.

A teenage Florida hacker crew, millions of credit cards numbers stolen by driving by big box stores and entering their networks, $1.1 million in cash buried in a backyard, an FBI snitch,  and how it all fell apart.

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.”

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.

Help came right away. And then it stopped.

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

Only 16 counties regularly impose death sentences, and they have three things in common: overaggressive prosecutors, defense lawyers who aren’t up to the task and cultural legacies of racial bias. Florida’s Fourth Judicial Circuit is among them.

Just don’t call it Jurassic Park.

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

Music writer Mark Fisher (who died this week) on the decline of Michael Jackson.

Mark Hogancamp nearly died after being jumped by five men in 2000. After waking from a coma with no memories, he developed an extraordinary coping device: he built a miniature town in his garden where he gets his revenge.

Bomb makers—including ISIS—have been on a quest to obtain red mercury, a weapon reputed to be powerful enough to “create the city-flattening blast of a nuclear bomb.” They haven’t found it yet. That might be because it doesn’t exist.

A trip to Enya’s castle in Ireland.

According to the trades and his pitch to investors, Ryan Kavanaugh had found film business formula that couldn’t lose. It could. Unraveling a Tinseltown Ponzi scheme.

The Tunnel Creek avalanche, five years later.

From “Idiocracy” to “Silicon Valley,” the writer and director has established himself as America’s foremost chronicler of its own self-destructive tendencies.

Undercover in an industrial slaughterhouse.

Previously: Conover discusses this story on the Longform Podcast.

A profile of Chencho Dorji, Bhutan’s first psychiatrist, who has treated “more than 5,300 depressed, anxious, psychotic and drug-addled” people since 1999.

Kids have taken a technology that was supposed to help grownups stop smoking and invented a new kind of bad habit, molded in their own image.

At 90 years old, Lawrence Hill’s mother was ready to end it all on her own terms, but Canada’s assisted-dying law was too strict to allow that.