From a Tokyo smash-and-grab to driving a car through the window of a Dubai jewelry shop, how a ragtag band of Balkan thieves set a new bar for audacious heists.

A member of the Pink Panthers, Milan Poparic, escaped from prison yesterday.

George Trow’s Within the Context of No Context was a brilliant, scary vision of a cultural end-time. Then, having described it, he lived it, spiraling into madness.

With “The Apprentice,” the TV producer mythologized Trump—then a floundering D-lister—as the ultimate titan, paving his way to the Presidency.

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

A profile of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, prime minister of Turkey.

A profile of then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.

Rolf Kaestel stole $264 in 1981. He’s still in jail.

“Over the past century, coaches have used intuition and discipline to vastly improve athletic performance. Now scientists are taking the last step, helping athletes approach perfection.”

The multiple stories behind an iconic college football photo.

The Booker Prize-winning novelist on fantasy, reality, and a religious crisis that has never ended.

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

Life inside Long Island’s largest cluster of sex offenders.

An oral history of Siskel and Ebert.

A profile of Rupert Murdoch, written before his empire began to crumble.

Adapted from a new biography of Jane Fonda.

A profile of Elizabeth Warren.

A profile of Taylor Wilson, who achieved nuclear fusion at age 14.

Are video games capable of emotion?

A globe-trotting, pre-CCTV profile of architect Rem Koolhaas.

How Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian government has woven soccer into its grisly campaign of oppression.

How a perfect vision of mother hood hurts moms.

A secret hope of mine, which I now find hilarious: I imagined that once I had a child, I would become a faster writer. Faster, and also better. It’s hard for me to reconstruct the optimistic logic that led me to this hypothesis. I think I honestly believed that if I did not have the option to write badly, I would simply evolve, like that Lamarckian giraffe, into a more efficient creature.

The Libyan Investment Authority was brand new, staffed by people who barely understood finance and had billions to invest. Goldman Sachs saw a whale. Now the Libyans want their money back.