He was a Harvard Law professor who taught a class on judgment, which made him an unlikely target for an elaborate paternity scheme that nearly cost him his house and family.

Border Patrol agent Matthew Bowen had been investigated for years before he used his 4,000-pound truck to assault a fleeing migrant.

Carrying babies for foreign couples was once touted as a win-win for everyone involved. Indian women, however, were often left with little to show for their efforts.

My dad was a riddle to me, even more so after he disappeared. For a long time, who he was—and by extension who I was—seemed to be a puzzle I would never solve.

Shirley Jackson wrote 17 books while raising four children — and she couldn’t have had a successful career without them.

In 1984, Jacqui met Bob Lambert at an animal-rights protest. They fell in love, had a son. Then Bob disappeared. It would take 25 years for Jacqui to learn that he had been working undercover.

When computer science legend Jim Gray disappeared, his friends and colleagues – including Bill Gates and Larry Ellison – used every technological tool at their disposal to try to find him.

Decades ago, a marketing stunt promised Philippine soda drinkers a chance at a million pesos. But an error at a bottling plant led to 600,000 winners—and to lawsuits, rioting, and even deaths.

“‘If there’s anything I can do to make your trip more enjoyable, let me know.” He walked away, then he strode back to Cree 15 seconds later and whispered, making eye contact, “Anything.’”

“Southwark’s petty thugs must have thought all their birthdays had come at once: a well-dressed toff stumbling round their borough in no state to defend himself, and with an alcoholic street whore as his only companion.”

Reconstructing a mysterious 1892 London murder.

A post-mortem.

President Lincoln worked very hard all his life. After he died, his corpse kept a gruelling travel schedule, too.

“As a middle-aged queer, I could not break cover. And, as a middle-aged black man, I was embarrassed that these white boys from this melodrama mattered to me anyway.”

An oral history with former employees Sasha Frere-Jones, Alysia Abbott, Piotr Orlov, and Chris Wilcha.

Cancer surgery for $700, a heart bypass for $2,000. Pretty good, but under India’s new health-care system, it’s not good enough.

Last year an antique Depression-era neon sign was excavated in Pasadena—but it dug up a troubling story along with it. On Nat King Cole, hot chicken, and Malibu’s racist past.

When word spreads about a 17-year-old in rural Tuscany reputed to have clairvoyant powers, she must withstand followers seeking her wisdom and officials hellbent on tearing her down.

How Viennese psychologist Ernest Dichter transformed advertising:

What makes soap interesting? Why choose one brand over another? Dichter’s first contract was with the Compton Advertising Agency, to help them sell Ivory soap. Market research typically involved asking shoppers questions like “Why do you use this brand of soap?” Or, more provocatively, “Why don’t you use this brand of soap?” Regarding such lines of inquiry as useless, Dichter instead conducted a hundred so-called “depth interviews”, or open-ended conversations, about his subjects’ most recent scrubbing experiences. The approach was not unlike therapy, with Dichter mining the responses for encoded, unconscious motives and desires. In the case of soap, he found that bathing was a ritual that afforded rare moments of personal indulgence, particularly before a romantic date (“You never can tell,” explained one woman). He discerned an erotic element to bathing, observing that “one of the few occasions when the puritanical American [is] allowed to caress himself or herself [is] while applying soap.” As for why customers picked a particular brand, Dichter concluded that it wasn’t exactly the smell or price or look or feel of the soap, but all that and something else besides—that is, the gestalt or “personality” of the soap.

To support their families back home, women from the Philippines have found work and a new way of life in Israel. But at what price?

Activities include: getting his own stem cells injected into his body every six months, taking 100 supplements a day, following a strict diet, bathing in infrared light, hanging out in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, and wearing yellow-lensed glasses every time he gets on an airplane.