The author, on book tour when the pandemic set in, reflects on what could have been worse—and what could be better.

How a 16-year-old from suburban Connecticut became the most famous teen in America.

Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen grew up to make New York’s most desirable clothes. But can even perfection survive the pandemic?

Hundreds of workers at a Tampa lead smelter have been exposed to dangerous levels of the neurotoxin. The consequences have been profound.

Hundreds of workers at a Tampa lead smelter have been exposed to dangerous levels of the neurotoxin. The consequences have been profound.

As the pandemic rages across the country, one team of fact-checkers contends with a post-truth dystopia.

A Thanksgiving story about the limits of human empathy.

Rick Ross was born William Leonard Roberts II in 1976, and he borrowed his stage name (and the associated big-time cocaine-selling hustler persona) from the legendary L.A. drug lord Freeway Ricky Ross. But the website MediaTakeout uncovered a photograph of William Leonard Roberts II when he was a Florida corrections officer. Most people thought that'd be the end of his career. Freeway Ricky Ross then sued him for stealing his name. None of it mattered. Rick Ross the rapper just sold more records.

Finally, the crowd broke for lunch, with those who paid $1,000 availing themselves of private workouts. The highest tier lunched with Paltrow and select panelists. The proles were relegated to wandering around the warehouse and converted parking lot for two hours, getting solicited by dream interpreters or standing in endless lines for free blowouts or manicures — services promptly halted once the panels resumed, no matter that some had spent well over an hour in line.

From Southie to Santa Monica, a gangster romance on the run.

How a Mossad agent’s desperate bid to jumpstart his career led to the exposure of two top Hezbollah plants.

Will LaFever never felt right in the world. So he took to the Utah desert, barely making it out alive.

“Remember why we’re here: to empower the child. If you can’t handle it, keep your shades on.”

How the former CEO of McKinsey, who was indicted in the largest insider trading case in United States history, got played.

On the trail of Austin Tice and the late James Foley, freelance journalists who were kidnapped in Syria in 2012.

The railroad foreman’s brain was pierced by a tamping iron. He lived to tell the tale.

What the neighborhood of Higher Blackley in Manchester says about “one of the least understood and most discriminated-against groups in society.”

How modernity – and an eruption of violence – changed “the most remote inhabited island on the Atlantic seaboard.”

Each year, thousands of people pay to play eighteen holes of golf at Angola, “the largest maximum-security prison in the country.”

The rise of One Direction fanfiction that imagines the band members in relationships – with each other.

Behind the tabloid story of the “murder orphan” in Queens.

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

On the culture of misogyny and abuse at one of the nation’s largest megachurches.

We know the country music pioneer died New Year’s Eve, 1953. But how?