In Austin in 1973, politicos and hippies could get together and create violent, visionary horror films for $60,000. So they did. The story of how The Texas Chainsaw Massacre got made.

Gang-bang buffet tables, deeply earnest 'Letters to the Editor,' ghost-writing Kierkegaard references into model bios in Barely Legal, and how a half-decade of reviewing porn eroded the thin line between the author's alter egos and self.

The story of Jim Olson and his Tumor Paint dream.

Three years after profiling him, the author checks in with the Bieber experiment.

On Leon Botstein and the future of Bard College, which he has run for four decades.

“It was creepy to wake up violently in the middle of the night. It was creepier when no one could tell me why it was happening.”

The diarist and photographer Peter Beard, known both for his series documenting a mass elephant starvation and for discovering the supermodel Iman on a Nairobi street, reflects on his life of “drugs, debt, and beautiful women” while recovering from being trampled by an elephant.

Former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling needed funding for his ambitious video-game startup. Rhode Island politicians needed jobs and a vision for how to transform the state’s beleaguered economy. The story of a $75 million bet gone bust.

One Marine battalion has had four members kill themselves in just the last year. The soldiers have jury-rigged a system of Facebook notifications and Google spreadsheets to try to stop it.

Traveling with a sex tourist to the Uzbek city of Tashkent. Excerpted from the forthcoming book If It’s Monday It Must Be Madurai.

The perilous routes through which information—video footage, secret documents, radio broadcasts—flow in and out of North Korea through its porous borders with China.

In 1935, a nine-year-old living in Switzerland became the King of Thailand. He would return to his homeland a decade later, and within six months he would be found shot to death in his bed. Though three servants were executed for the crime, a mystery endures.

When a CIA operation in Pakistan went bad, leaving three men dead, the episode offered a rare glimpse inside a shadowy world of espionage. It also jeopardized America’s most critical outpost in the war against terrorism.

Boris Yeltsin’s right-hand man tells the inside story of the 1991 coup that killed glasnost:

"That scum!" Boris Yeltsin fumed. "It's a coup. We can't let them get away with it."

Why it took more than a decade for the posthumous pardon of Tim Cole, even after another inmate confessed to the brutal crime that put Cole away.

Bill Ferguson does not believe his son, Ryan, killed a popular newspaper editor. To prove it, he’s drained his savings, performed public re-enactments of the crime, and alienated almost everyone in his Missouri city.

Tabloid newspapers were caught hacking into the voicemails of Prince William and Prince Harry. One reporter was arrested - but an investigation shows the eavesdropping was far more elaborate and widespread.

As one of the Angola 3, he was in isolation longer than any other American. Then he came home to face his future.

Fred Steese served more than 20 years in prison for the murder of a Vegas circus performer even though evidence proved he didn’t do it. When the truth came to light, he was offered a confounding deal: he could go free, but only if he agreed to remain a convicted killer.

Stephen Miller, the 31-year-old White House advisor, became steeped in white nationalism in the unlikeliest of places: a Santa Monica high school and Duke University.

On the relative plausibility of impossible beings.

Jimmy Smith-Kramer, a basketball legend on the Quinault Nation reservation, was 20 when he was mowed down by a white man in a pickup truck. The decision not to charge a hate crime, and recent talk of a plea deal, has re-opened ancient wounds.

In America’s deadliest big city, the task of announcing each new murder falls to police spokesman T. J. Smith. One year ago, he confronted a killing like no other.

In more than a decade of arguing cases in court, I’ve witnessed the stubborn cultural biases female attorneys must navigate to simply do their jobs.

He was 8 years old, and the signs of abuse were obvious. Yet time and again, caseworkers from child-protective services failed to help him.