During his nearly six years in the Air Force, Airman First Class Brandon Bryant flew hundreds of missions and logged almost 6,000 hours of flight time. He killed or helped kill 1,626 people. And he never left Nevada.

Separating truth from lore in Haiti: “The dossier was, at bottom, a murder story, the judge said—but it was a murder story with the great oddity that the victim did not die.”

A profile Mark Pincus, the founder and C.E.O. of Zynga—the company that created FarmVille, CityVille, and Zynga Poker, the most popular online poker game in the world.

As China’s growing upper class has pushed the price of ivory above $700/pound, a look at both the supply and demand side of the global trade in (mostly) illicitly acquired elephant tusks.

A profile of the Hell’s Angels following “front-page reports of a heinous gang rape in the moonlit sand dunes near the town of Seaside on the Monterey Peninsula.”

In 1979, a group of Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy and held the entire American diplomatic mission hostage for fifteen months. Twenty-five years later, the students reflected on their actions, many with regret.

The CEO of the US’s biggest bank doesn’t have much charisma or a track record, but he’s “doing as well as any little Dutch boy can—sticking his fingers in the dike.”

One day Nejdra Nance realized the woman she had called Mom for 23 years may have been at the center of one of the most harrowing kidnappings in decades—hers.

A charismatic entrepreneur, an ex-con turned devout Christian, and the politicians who championed them.

The story of a $36 billion Ponzi scheme in Minnesota.

On a pair of Israeli psychologists who between 1971 and 1984 “published a series of quirky papers exploring the ways human judgment may be distorted when we are making decisions in conditions of uncertainty.”

How the contradiction-rich “country the size of Connecticut” that birthed Al-Jazeera has played an integral and surprising role in the revolutions of the Arab Spring.

Tim Masters becomes the main suspect in a gruesome Colorado murder; he’s eventually convicted thanks the work of a revered detective. Then the case unravels: DNA proves another man committed the crime.

In 1987, a terrible accident kills five Ole Miss sorority members. The author catches up with her Chi Omega sisters who survived.

In the late 90s, an American man adopted a 5-year-old from the Ukraine. A decade later, one of the two would be accused of molesting young boys. The other would be charged with murder.

Last summer, Gia Allemand took her own life in a New Orleans apartment complex. The first person on the scene was her boyfriend, NBA star Ryan Anderson. This is the story of how he survived.

As the most famous helicopter news pilot in American history, Bob Tur prided himself on being the ultimate alpha male. Except all along, he knew he wasn’t.

You can have a PhD from Yale. You can be a rising star in the State Department. And you can still find yourself being investigated by the FBI for espionage.

An art museum in Tasmania is saving the local economy. It also offers an “eternity membership” which, for $75,000, will see your ashes displayed there once you’ve gone.

An inside look at how an ad agency sells a car in 2015.

Jeff Mailhot, convicted serial killer, has joined several infamous criminals in a second career from behind bars: paid artist. His first piece? An outline of his left hand, available for $34.99.

Two Paths for the Future of Text: Steven Berlin Johnson’s lecture on “commonplace” books in which great 17th and 18th century thinkers compiled their browsing, and what it means for journalism today.

Kevin Fulton, a spy planted in the IRA, thought he was dead when he faced interrogation by a notorious IRA enforcer. But, it turned out, the enforcer was also an agent. How British intelligence undermined the IRA.

A utopian German settlement in Chile had already turned darkly cultish by the time it became a secret torture site for enemies of the Pinochet regime.

How the actor ended up with a house full of tourniquets and syringes, an unflinching belief in the restorative powers of “ozone,” and the brain scan of someone who has “experienced the equivalent of blunt trauma.”

It is agreed that the 1977 political murder of a couple in Johannesburg was a political killing that covered up mysterious Swiss Bank deposits. Various reports implicate Cuban Nationalists, Italian Fascists and the CIA.