Was the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre actually a smokescreen to obscure an even more audacious art crime?

Daisy Coleman, new to town and a cheerleader, was 14. Matthew Barnett, a 17-year-old football player and the grandson of a longtime politician, was 17. The evidence pointed overwhelmingly toward rape. There was even a video. Yet the charges were dropped. Then the people of Maryville, Missouri, set about running the Colemans out of town.

This presentation was shown to potential recruits for the new Maven SI venture, and it details exactly how the people now in charge of Sports Illustrated plan on turning it into the sort of volume-driven content farm that ruled the web a dozen or so tweaks of the Google algorithm ago.

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”

The case of Gilberto Valle, “The Cannibal Cop,” and the line between criminal thoughts and action.

The story of the 1969 murder spree by Charles Manson and “Family” as told by those close to the case.

A profile of the eccentric Gene Weingarten, the only person to twice win the Pulitzer for feature writing.

The rise of the long-haul trucker/serial killer, as excerpted from Ginger Strand’s book Killer on the Road.

Testimonies about the Soviet war in Afghanistan, reported by the 2015 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The untold story of the world’s most infamous sex tape, and how the Internet spread it faster than anyone expected.

Inside the twisted, half-conscious world of Jure Robic, the Slovene soldier who might be the world’s best ultra-endurance athlete.

Inside the minds of two people, one with the world’s best memory and one with the world’s worst.

The shooting death of the last wild Passenger Pigeon, atomic energy, mastodon watering holes, and other footnotes in Ohio history.

The sordid, petty world of “gossip item” sources for the New York Post and The Daily News, and what happens when they go bad.

On the utter brutality of life in the tent cities, one year after the earthquake.

For three days, thousands of uninsured Americans converge on the Wise County Fairgrounds for the largest pop-up clinic in the country.

On the outsized pleasures of the very small.

At age 22, the author went undercover at his old high school. An excerpt of the book that became the film.

A speech on the value of being alone with your thoughts, delivered to the plebe class at West Point.

Ramsey Orta filmed the killing of Eric Garner—and the police punished him for it.

A profile of Sophia Amoruso, the 30-year-old CEO of Nasty Gal and author of #GIRLBOSS.

“What kind of a person looks upon the world’s largest land animal—a beast that mourns its dead and lives to retirement age and can distinguish the voice of its enemies—and instead of saying ‘Wow!’ says something like ‘Where’s my gun?’”

The investigation of 20-year-old Russian model’s fall from a Manhattan rooftop uncovers a string of mysteries and clues embedded within the insular world of international models and those who scout them.

In anonymous warehouses in Detroit, Goldman Sachs has hoarded a quarter of the world’s supply of aluminum, placing them firmly in control of trading on the London Metal Exchange.

A interview with David Mitchell, author of the recent The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and Cloud Atlas, on stretching a fictional universe across multiple novels and centuries of real history.