When U.S. customs law met abstract art in the form of a bird, “shimmering and soaring toward the ceiling while the lawyers debated whether it was an ‘original sculpture’ or a metal ‘article or ware not specially provided for’ under the 1922 Tariff Act.”

The few who got to view Jerry Lewis’s notorious The Day the Clown the Cried, set at Auschwitz, piece together memories of their surreal personal screenings.

In an elaborate FBI sting to expose corruption, four agents pose as futures traders in Chicago. The plan works–if you don’t count the hundreds of thousands in taxpayer dollars the agents lost in the process.

The writer and his girlfriend move to the Dominican Republic, joining the rapidly expanding community of expats who claim to have found paradise. They promptly get robbed at gunpoint. To cope, he investigates the country.

Barry Jones has spent the last 22 years on death row for the murder of a 4-year-old girl. Prosecutors have fought against reopening his case even as the basis for his conviction has fallen apart.

When she died in 1952, author Margaret Wise Brown left the rights to Goodnight Moon to a nine-year-old neighbor named Albert Clarke. The book became a classic. Clarke, living entirely off the royalties, became a deadbeat.

In February 1637, the Dutch tulip market had grown to the point that a single bulb sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsworker. Then, almost overnight, the market crashed completely.

How a group of hippie surfers and a former Spanish teacher built the largest weed-smuggling empire on the West Coast.

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.

A profile.

An interview with Allee Willis, the late songwriter behind Earth Wind & Fire’s “September” and the Friends theme song, on creating the world you want to live and work in and throwing virtual parties.

Covid-19 has cemented the e-commerce giant’s hold on the economy — but it has also spurred employees all around the country to organize.

How did the most wanted man in America, the serial bomber behind the Atlanta Olympics explosion, survive for five years in the North Carolina woods? And was he helped?

Selling the story of disinformation.

“Think about that: Kim has so thoroughly monetized the very act of living that the money she earns from being filmed going about her life constitutes a relatively small sum compared with the one she generates from allowing people to see pictures and cartoon drawings of the life she has already filmed. She has figured out how to spin the mundanity of being herself—something billions of people do every day for free—into a more lucrative business than being the most famous rapper in the world.”

“It’s Tuesday, it’s February, it’s my first day back at work after a week on vacation. I notice the candle in the foyer just as the whoosh of the door blows it out. They never did that for my birthday, I think as I walk past reception.”

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.

Like hundreds of other local slaves — [they] had been pressed into service by the Confederates, compelled to build an artillery emplacement amid the dunes across the harbor. They labored beneath the banner of the 115th Virginia Militia, a blue flag bearing a motto in golden letters: “Give me liberty or give me death.”

The origin story of the C.I.A.’s covert drone war, which began with the 2004 killing of a Pashtun militant, the result of a secret deal for access to Pakistani airspace.

Untouched by Western journalists except in the presence of American troops, Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley was once the most violent part of the Afghan War.

A profile of Afghanistan’s outgoing president.

Rebellious teens on the Sunset Strip.

The volcanic ash cloud from Eyjafjallajokull has caused travel chaos and misery. But we were lucky. An eruption in the future could wipe out the human race.

Lance Stephenson, the latest in a long line of Coney Island basketball prodigies, carries a burden none of his predecessors did: restoring New York City’s reputation as the hoops capital of the world.

The lonesome death of Arnold Rothstein, notorious gambler, inspiration for the character Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby, alleged fixer of the 1910 World Series, opiate importation pioneer, mobster.