“‘It’s like a novel,’ a newspaper editor once told me, shaking his head. When I recently asked Ruggeri, the chief investigator, to sum up the case, she stared at her desk and just said ‘incredible’ four times.”

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s friends didn’t realize what he’d done until they saw his image on television.

“Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.”

The region’s hyper-local response has lessons for us as we confront the winter wave and begin to distribute vaccines.

The agency, seeking information on an animal rights group, attempted to recruit a former truck driver as an informant, the truck driver says.

Notes on humiliation.

Can suicide be predicted?

Ray Bowman and Billy Kirkpatrick, who began boosting together as teenagers, were arrested only twice during their prolific partnership. The first time was for stealing 38 records from a K-Mart in 1974. The second arrest came in 1997. In between, Bowman and Kirkpatrick robbed 27 banks, including the single biggest haul in United States history: $4,461,681 from the Seafirst Bank in suburban Tacoma.

On a recent lawsuit over Stairway to Heaven and Led Zeppelin’s deep catalog of songs that were revealed to have been written by others.

At one time, a whole generation of New York Times reporters wished they could write like McCandlish Phillips. Then he left them all for God.

A profile of Vogue Creative Director André Leon Talley.

From our guide to haute couture genius at Slate.

Five years ago, Mel Gibson was one of Hollywood’s few genuine family-men and a leading box office attraction; inside his wild descent from star to pariah.

You learn to believe in your child’s existence. What happens when she’s killed by a piece of your daily environment?

How a distillery worker in Kentucky stole hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of bourbon, one barrel at a time.

A pair of undercover journalists, a boatload of refugees, 200 miles of ocean and a journey that has claimed more than a thousand lives.

Georgia and Patterson Inman, 15-year-old twins, are the only living heirs to the $1 billion Duke tobacco fortune. They are also emotional wrecks, tortured by a hellacious childhood in which they were raised by drug addicts and left to fend for themselves in mansions across the country.

To understand Cam Newton, you need to go to a small church 45 minutes outside of Atlanta called Holy Zion Center of Deliverance and hear his dad preach.

An inmate’s protest.

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.

The last thing child-welfare supervisor Chereece Bell wanted to see was what happened to 4-year-old Marchella Pierce. The last thing she expected was to go to jail for it.

Life as Beck.

A suitcase was smuggled from Spain to Mexico during the Spanish Civil War containing negatives from three photographers would later become legends and all die in war zones. The suitcase disappeared.

Saudi Arabia thought a bombing campaign would quickly crush its enemies in Yemen. But three years later, the Houthis refuse to give up, even as 14 million people face starvation.

The former first lady’s new memoir recounts her family’s trajectory from the Jim Crow South to Chicago’s South Side and her own improbable journey from there to the White House.

An African-American-owned restaurant began making the spicy dish eighty years ago. Now it’s a viral sensation. Who’s getting the big money?