How the “genial Bavarian” version of Adolf Hitler became a global media celebrity, “a plain-living gentleman with a soft spot for dogs and children.”

Kidnapped by rebels when he was 9, Dominic Ongwen grew up to command fighters who slaughtered, raped, and pillaged. Is he guilty of heinous crimes or was he a hostage the whole time?

A profile of Paul Reubens and his subversive alter ego.

Lily gets ready for her first date.

Between 1937 and 1973, Earl Johnson served out the sentences on nine felonies, worked for Charlie “Cherry Nose” Gio, became friends with a Soviet spy, and tried to kill “Joe Cargo” Valachi of the Cosa Nostra with a poison dart.

When juveniles are found guilty of sexual misconduct, the sex-offender registry can be a life sentence.

On the border of Utah and Arizona, Mormon fundamentalists have long lived according to their own rules. When a former sect member and his family moved to the town where he’d grown up, they expected a homecoming. What they got was a war.

Ozel Clifford Brazil was a respected clergyman who helped thousands of African-American teens go to college. He broke the law to do it.

The promises and pitfalls of self-tracking devices and apps.

Founded in 1974, the Raëlian Movement teaches that life on Earth was scientifically created by a species of extraterrestrials. Raëlians claim to have cloned the first human being and extol sensuality and pleasure as a path to peace.

"When I was younger, someone took a knife to my clitoris and cut out a small but significant part of me. I blamed my mother. I despised her. I loved her."

An American writer living in Japan, unread and underpublished, sends an email to a group of writers he doesn’t know informing them that he is committing suicide.

They were an ordinary pair of small-time criminals in the UK. Then they figured out how to blow up an ATM.

Walter Pitts, who helped develop the “first mechanistic theory of the mind,” was so brilliant he was once been invited to study with Bertrand Russell. He was also homeless.

The story of The Anarchist Cookbook and why its creator, William Powell, regrets writing the book.

A man in Puerto Rico stumbles on a brick of cocaine, and rather than sell it he decides to bury it. Others, hearing his story, cook up a plan to retrieve it.

On Brent White, the joke whisperer who edits the largely improvisational comedies of Paul Feig, Judd Apatow and Adam McKay.

In 1965, Wheat was sentenced to death for armed robbery and murder. When his sentence was commuted, he decided to devote the rest of his life to helping people.

In nine hours, Guinea-Bissau’s President and military leader were assassinated in separate incidents. Their dealings had turned the country into the runway of choice for drug smugglers and Hezbollah.

An excerpt from Night of the Gun, the memoir by New York Times media critic David Carr about his years as a junkie in late-‘80s Minneapolis.

In the bayou south of New Orleans, a program called the Nurse-Family Partnership tries to reverse the life chances for babies born into extreme poverty. Sometimes, it actually succeeds.

A reporter heads to Nauru, a tiny island nation in the Pacific, to track down the hub of a worldwide money-laundering operation—a shack filled with computers, air-conditioners, and little else.

A Pynchon conference in Lublin, Poland may say more about the men (yes, only men) who attend Thomas Pynchon conferences than the works of the reclusive author.

A Barclays analyst leaves for a routine laser treatment and is never heard from again. Ten months later, authorities find her body under a concrete slab at the house of her doctor, who was in fact not a doctor at all.

Some call them “flying lawnmowers.” The entire fleet is decades old. The Pentagon almost junked them in 2008. And yet the tiny Kiowa helicopter has become America’s air weapon of choice in Afghanistan.