A profile of Shigeru Miyamoto, the man who invented Donkey Kong, Mario, and the Wii.

How a group of roommates in Minneapolis created the most enduring educational game ever.

Chronicling the viral spread of the early video game Spacewar through computer science departments around the country, with students hacking in their own variations on the game and passing it on, until it eventually arrived in coffee shops at 25 cents per play.

Duke Nukem 3D made its creators filthy rich. Trying to complete its sequel nearly destroyed them.

A profile of Dave Jones, the designer of Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto.

A “crude table-tennis arcade game” called Pong and the birth of the video game industry.

The motley gang of L.A. teens that cat-burgled celebrities, sometimes repeatedly, in search of designer clothes, jewelry, and something to do.

Film: The Bling Ring

An orchid-enthusiast goes to battle in Florida.

Film: Adaptation

Nearly 20 years after its publication, the author revealed that this story, on the disco scene in Brooklyn, was a fake.

Film: Saturday Night Fever

The man who blew the whistle on big tobacco.

Film: The Insider

Adventures in bartending.

Film: Coyote Ugly

Six young men, a boat, and the worst gale in a century.

At age 22, the author went undercover at his old high school. Here’s what he found.

A young Brooklyn man attempts a bank robbery to finance his lover’s sex change surgery.

Film: Dog Day Afternoon

Hanging with surfer girls in Maui.

Film: Blue Crush

Drag racing in New York.

Film: The Fast and the Furious

At 25, Stephen Glass was a reporter wunderkind, regularly filing incredible pieces for the largest magazines. When suspicion fell on his sources, things started to really get strange. It wasn’t just sources and organizations he was inventing, but whole stories.

How the CIA used a fake science fiction film to sneak six Americans out of revolutionary Iran.

Film: Argo

Way before Ray Kurzweil, Keynes showed us what happens as exponential growth accumulates over time. His projections about how big the economy would become after decades of compounded growth sounded like lunacy to readers during the Great Depression but were amazingly accurate, as was his prediction that humanity would move past its “struggle for subsistence” within a century. At the same time, he overestimated how quickly the work week would get shorter – most of us are working a lot more hours than he envisioned.

This description of what Usenet is and how it works, written shortly before the Web exploded into the mainstream, got important things right: the net’s great variety and utility, its unruliness, and the overall spirit of helpfulness and sharing that persists more than two decades later.

Economist Julian Simon is an intellectual hero of ours. Throughout his underappreciated career he made the case that things were getting better instead of worse, backed up his arguments with masses of data, and won wagers against prominent Malthusians. This piece is a great introduction to his thinking, and gives him some of the recognition he’s due.

Before the Watson supercomputer trounced the two best human Jeopardy! players early in 2011, this article revealed its uncanny ability to mine vast amounts of text in search of answers to tough questions, and to navigate the punning and other wordplay that the quiz show throws at its contestants. This is one of the articles that made us say to each other “Something’s different now…”

Kasparov, a powerful writer, explains how computers came to dominate humans at chess and why this is not cause for alarm that they’ll soon be able to do everything better than we do. Chess has long been an exemplar of human intelligence, and increasingly a metaphor for how humans and machines may co-exist.

The digital economy is not just different, too often it’s invisible. Brian Arthur brings it to life with a description of all the ways it increasingly surrounds us. As “software eats the world”, to use Marc Andreessen’s evocative phrase, we’ll all need to get more and more familiar with this other economy.

Captures the palpable energy coming from San Francisco’s young technology entrepreneurs, who by perceiving no barriers are knocking a lot of them down. We share Heller’s sense that things are happening more quickly there than just about anyplace else.

For the data lovers among us, here’s a slew of encouraging trends from falling poverty and crime, to rising life expectancy, literacy and computer power. There’s still a lot of work to be done, but the positive numbers feed our optimism.

On Timothy Treadwell, later immortalized in Grizzly Man, who lived and died by the bears of Alaska.

The life story of Travis the chimp and the family of tow truck operators who raised him like a human child before it all ended in tragedy.

The life story of Tilikum, a killer whale who dragged his SeaWorld trainer into the pool and drowned her in 2010. It was the third time the orca had been involved in a death during his 27 years in captivity.

Encountering a pack of wild dogs in Manhattan.

“Joe’s hand began to tingle, and he called the group together. The toxins would leave his system in 48 hours, he said. He’d be conscious the whole time.”

After two people are found dead in Yellowstone National Park, a team of investigators tracks down the unlikely culprit: a grizzly bear.

How smallpox went from eradicated disease to the ideal weapon of bioterrorists.

The author of The Hot Zone on how geneticists can help contain the current outbreak.

The story of H1N1 and John Behnken, whose life it claimed.

New York during the early days of the AIDS epidemic.

Living on borrowed time, with liver cancer.

Exploring the riddle of Morgellons disease: sufferers feel things crawling under their skin and hardly anyone believes them.

He was an 18 year old Marine bound for Iraq. She was a high school senior in West Virginia. They grew intimate over IM. His dad also started contacting her. No one was who they claimed to be and it led to a murder.

John Dirr’s son Eli didn’t really have cancer. In fact, neither Eli nor John Dirr ever existed. The story of a decade-long hoax.

On an affliction for the digital age, “Munchausen by internet.”

How a 19-year-old actress and a few struggling Web filmmakers created a star.

How a Massachusetts psychotherapist fell for a Nigerian e-mail scam.

The story was told by Sports Illustrated, CBS News, and countless others: linbeacker Manti Te’o, Heisman trophy candidate and the face of Notre Dame football, was playing brilliantly despite the tragic loss of his girfriend to leukemia early in the season. The reporters missed one key element of Te’o’s story, however: the girl hadn’t died. She couldn’t have. She didn’t exist.

An obsessive marine biologist gambles his savings, family, and sanity on a quest to be the first to capture a live giant squid.

On the grief that comes with losing livestock.

A profile of a 25-year-old Spanish sensation.

The inevitably tragic story of Travis the chimp and the family of tow-truck operators who raised him like a human child.

A trip to a lobster festival in Maine leads to an examination of the culinary and ethical dimensions of cooking a live, possibly sentient, creature.