“Before he earned a spot as a soloist with the Houston Ballet, and before he became a social-media phenom with nearly 250,000 Instagram followers and another 470,000 devotees on TikTok, Harper Watters was an eight-year-old boy with a broken nose.”

On the evening of November 7th 1974, the 7th Earl of Lucan, an inveterate gambler and Backgammon champion with a taste for power boats, snuck into his estranged wife’s basement. He then bludgeoned their nanny with a lead pipe and placed her in a canvas sack, before attempting to murder his wife. Recognizing his voice, she convinced him that she could him escape, then slipped out a bathroom window. Lord Lucan was never seen again.

A profile of Uruguay President José Mujica, a former revolutionary who’s been shot six times, was imprisoned for 14 years and, since taking office, has shunned the presidential mansion in favor of a small farm while legalizing gay marriage, abortion and marijuana.

“If you have read 6,000 books in your lifetime, or even 600, it’s probably because at some level you find “reality” a bit of a disappointment.”

Why people stampede, and what can be done to prevent “crowd disasters.”

Two American backpackers, two Indonesian villagers, one small boat, 15 slices of bread, a dozen hard-boiled eggs, ten oranges, five apples, two pineapples, two bags of cookies, two packages of peanuts, eight liters of water, one machete and three weeks adrift at sea.

Welcome to World of Wonder, the Hollywood production company that celebrates “outsiders, 16th-minute celebrities, conspiracy theorists, penis puppeteers, dictators, street hustlers, porn stars, hackers, homicidal club kids, gender deviants, furries, plushies, and Tori Spelling.”

The rise and fall of Synanon, an addiction-recovery cult in California, and its charismatic leader, a one-time homeless wino named Chuck Dederich who taught his followers to berate each other for therapy.

Tyson on his childhood in Brooklyn and the man who changed his life. An excerpt from his upcoming memoir, Undisputed Truth.

Each soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan generated around 10 pounds of garbage per day. Most of that trash—along with used equipment and medical supplies and other wastes of war—was burned in open-air pits, emitting a toxic smoke that many soliders blame for their poor health today.

Bibek Dhong traveled from Nepal to Malaysia to test cameras for the new iPhone 5. When production ended abruptly, he and his coworkers found themselves stranded for two months without money, food or passports.

A technical, thrilling account of how Pinboard, a tiny bookmarking service, dealt with the fire hose of new users after news leaked that Yahoo would discontinue Pinboard’s massive rival, Delicious.

In 1967, Stanley Ann Dunham took her 6-year-old son, Barry, on an adventure to Indonesia. An excerpt from A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother.

On the Brooklyn nature walk built alongside a sewage treatment plant.

A group of misfit boys from the fringes of Las Vegas form a clique. Then, with murky motives, they decide to murder one of their own and bury him in a desert pit.

An essay on craft, excerpted from Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities.

The story of one man’s descent into lies and illegal activity – and why it could so easily happen to any of us.

“There was no Delta blues before there were cheap, readily available steel-string guitars. And those guitars, which transformed American culture, were brought to the boondocks by Sears, Roebuck & Co.”

For 12 days she was tortured and raped by a former neighbor, who strung her up on a deer-skinning device. On the fourth day, she forgave him.

On Jack Idema, a con-man who once ran a pet hotel before reinventing himself as a black-ops secret agent in Afghanistan, and the history of counterinsurgency theory.

A business opportunity stemming from “a moment in time when the debate over how colleges should address sexual assault has reached a fever pitch.”