On Leon Botstein and the future of Bard College, which he has run for four decades.

In 1935, a nine-year-old living in Switzerland became the King of Thailand. He would return to his homeland a decade later, and within six months he would be found shot to death in his bed. Though three servants were executed for the crime, a mystery endures.

Fred Steese served more than 20 years in prison for the murder of a Vegas circus performer even though evidence proved he didn’t do it. When the truth came to light, he was offered a confounding deal: he could go free, but only if he agreed to remain a convicted killer.

A look at Chicago’s DJ culture in the ’90s.

One day in 1997, Sneak promised his friend and fellow Chicago DJ Derrick Carter a new 12-inch for Carter's label Classic, then spent hours fruitlessly laboring over a basic, bustling four-four beat. Finally, Sneak gave in and smoked the J he'd had stashed for later in the day. When he came back inside, he carelessly dropped the needle onto a Teddy Pendergrass LP, heard the word "Well . . . ," and realized, "That's the sample, right there." He threaded Pendergrass's 20-year-old disco hit "You Can't Hide From Yourself" through a low-pass filter to give it the effect of going in and out of aural focus, creating one of the definitive Chicago house singles.

GQ moved up the release of this Charlie Sheen profile: ”The fucking AA shit. The sobriety shit. It was always for other people. I just wanted to get a job back and get enough money to tell everybody to go fuck themselves and then roll like Errol Flynn and Frank Sinatra—the good parts of those guys.”

An uncertain future for the retailer.

"Sears was so powerful and so successful at one time that they could build the tallest building in the world that they did not need," says James Schrager, a professor of entrepreneurship and strategy at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. "The Sears Tower stands as a monument to how quickly fortunes can change in retailing, and as a very graphic example of what can go wrong if you don't 'watch the store' every minute of every day."

On the mysterious relationship between a major New York State power broker and a Brooklyn family. “The Turanos are variously described by friends, neighbors and colleagues as the senator’s social acquaintances, lovers or surrogate relatives.”

Dreaming of the perfect apartment.

Should anyone ever choose to remake and bastardize Breakfast at Tiffany’s, I propose an opening sequence re-imagined to reflect more contemporary preoccupations. The revised opening scene should be filmed against the backdrop of an early evening in Brooklyn. The throngs of suits coming home from their nine to five grinds in Manhattan would be emerging from the subway stairwells like ants from an anthill, rushing off down various streets towards their various homes and families and dinners. All except for the would-be protagonist who, as the crowd rushes past her, makes her way to the closed-for-the-night real-estate storefront opposite the subway station. Somewhere, “Moon River” might still be playing, as if it had never stopped. Disheveled, lugging her purse and gym bag, she pauses for a number of minutes to read listings she has already read, and which she committed to memory weeks ago: a studio on Pineapple Street; a loft on Gold Street; a townhouse on Argyle Street; a two-bedroom coop on First Place; a one-bedroom condo on Carlton Avenue; a brownstone on Henry Street. It’s fall and the leaves blow in eddies on the sidewalk. She gets cold and turns away from the window to walk off down the street just as dusk begins to arrive in earnest. The occasional “For Sale” sign swings on its hinges, and the story of the day ends only to begin again in the morning.

Local communities are taking the world’s largest polluters to court. And they’re using the legal strategy that got tobacco companies to pay up.

The largest crowdfunding site in the world puts up a mirror to who we are and what matters most to us. Try not to look away.

Twenty-five years ago this month, “superpredator” was coined in The Weekly Standard. Media spread the term like wildfire, creating repercussions on policy and culture we are still reckoning with today.

He was a college freshman partying in Manhattan for the first. He ran into a woman he knew from college, got separated from his friends, and ended up at a house party full of strangers. By the next morning, his body would be dumped in a Brooklyn driveway. Fifteen years later, the “circumstances of his death remain muddled.”

In the first seven months of 2011, 94,000 people were sued for illegally downloading porn. Not one case has been decided by a jury. On the industry’s new strategy to make downloaders pay.

For days I've been slogging through a rain-soaked jungle in Indonesian New Guinea, on a quest to visit members of the Korowai tribe, among the last people on earth to practice cannibalism.

Kurdistan is the safest and most stable region in Iraq and at the center of its modern history is Amna Surak Prison, ground zero for both a genocide and an uprising.

A mysterious cache of documents could prove that a man serving a life sentence for homicide was framed by corrupt Alabama authorities—if the documents, and the man, can be believed.

After the success of her novel Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen spent years trying to prove a man’s innocence. Now she’s “absolutely broke” and “seriously ill,” and her next book is “years past deadline.”

The Watergate reporters look back.

In the course of his five-and-a-half-year presidency, beginning in 1969, Nixon launched and managed five successive and overlapping wars — against the anti-Vietnam War movement, the news media, the Democrats, the justice system and, finally, against history itself. All reflected a mind-set and a pattern of behavior that were uniquely and pervasively Nixon’s: a willingness to disregard the law for political advantage, and a quest for dirt and secrets about his opponents as an organizing principle of his presidency.

“In fact, in private conversations, Obama rarely mentions Trump at all. Those who’ve visited the office he’s leased from the World Wildlife Fund in Washington’s West End say he’s eager to talk for hours about the world’s ills. When informed about the latest presidential tweetstorms aimed at him, he chuckles and changes the subject. One friend of Obama’s recalled that after a 45-minute meeting that avoided the subject of Trump entirely, the pair ducked into an aide’s office and saw on television that the president was claiming to have been absolved in the Russia inquiry. Obama’s eyes flicked toward the chyron and his face took on a decidedly bemused aspect for a beat before he turned back to their conversation as if nothing had happened.”

Joshua Williams was 18 when he was arrested in 2014 for stealing a bag of chips and lighting a QuikTrip trash can on fire in the aftermath of a protest sparked by the death of Antonio Martin near Ferguson, MO. He is still in prison.

Mexico’s drug cartels are moving into the gasoline industry—infiltrating the national oil company, selling stolen fuel on the black market and engaging in open war with the military.