Just don’t call it Jurassic Park.

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

A trip to Enya’s castle in Ireland.

The Tunnel Creek avalanche, five years later.

A long-dormant police investigation gives the case new life.

After decades among the hidden homeless, Dominic Van Allen dug himself a bunker beneath a public park. But his life would get even more precarious.

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.

It’s been 14 years since Bryan Pata was shot to death just after football practice. He was months away from the NFL Draft. His killer is still free.

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?

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.

“Two weeks before Christmas, I was explaining to a friend in town that if I seemed more distressed than usual, it was just because I was trying to accustom myself to the fact that my cat didn’t want to be my cat anymore. ‘No way,’ she said. ‘Here’s what you do: You just call Dawn.’ And then she gave me the cat psychic’s phone number.”

“Brace Belden can’t remember exactly when he decided to give up his life as a punk-rocker turned florist turned boxing-gym manager in San Francisco, buy a plane ticket to Iraq, sneak across the border into Syria, and take up arms against the Islamic State. But as with many major life decisions, Belden, who is 27 — “a true idiot’s age,” in his estimation — says it happened gradually and then all at once.”

“My dad’s whole idea was to do an amusement park differently, not where you just got strapped in and twisted around, but one where you controlled what was going on. You can have an awesome time, but you can also hurt yourself if you don’t use good judgment.”

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

It was a 3-mile footrace. Thousands were in attendance. So how did Michael LeMaitre disappear?

Two decades later, unpacking a historic bust.

What seems like a slam-dunk case against a mass murderer exposes widespread prosecutorial misconduct in Orange County.

Investigating an astrophysicist’s sudden death at an isolated resesarch base in Antarctica.

Tracking down a Congolese war criminal.

How a mysterious twitching epidemic overtook one Western New York town.

Life inside a provincial Russian drug den. Originally appeared in Russky Reporter.