Indigenous water protectors face off with an oil company and police over a Minnesota pipeline.

A respected professor shot dead through the mansion window. A quaint New England town shaken to its core. One all-consuming obsession in Whip City.

The enforcer for Oregon’s grocery industry made enemies. One tried to kill him with thallium.

“You revise your reader up, in your imagination, with every pass. You keep saying to yourself: ‘No, she’s smarter than that. Don’t dishonour her with that lazy prose or that easy notion.’ And in revising your reader up, you revise yourself up too.”

Growing up in Toledo, Ohio, Gina Grimm always wondered who her biological parents were. “You know, you go to the supermarket and think, ‘That lady kinda has my nose.’ Or, you know, ‘That man kinda has a resemblance to my face.’”

Thomas Sweatt torched D.C. for decades and was finally jailed for killing one person. During a year-long correspondence from prison with a reporter, he confessed there were more.

"If I had been a straight-A student my whole life and had rapped about Jesus coming back to save us all, I wouldn’t get no media. The motherfuckers wouldn’t give a fuck about me. But since I’m telling the truth, and been through what I’m stressing and know what I’m talking about, I’m a threat."

Scott Catt was a single dad trying to make ends meet, so he started robbing banks. Then he needed accomplices, so he asked his kids.

GROSS: Let me stop there. You're talking about cutting yourself ... HAMMOND: Yeah. GROSS: ..with a razor. HAMMOND: Mm-hmm. GROSS: So I interrupted you. You're saying it does what? HAMMOND: Well, it creates a smaller, more manageable crisis than the one that has you gripping the carpet.

Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show’s thrilling, scary, inept performance on German television.

An investigation into the ill-fated text messaging platform ZunZuneo.

On the platonic but volatile relationship between fashion designer Alexander McQueen, who committed suicide in 2010 and professional muse Isabella Blow, who committed suicide in 2007.

On the highly enjoyable, nearly fatal first experiments with laughing gas in late 18th-century London.

On the seminal songwriter, who died four years ago today, in his final days before succumbing to dipsomania.

The Nigerian schoolgirls who escaped Boko Haram.

How a Rhode Island lawyer named Joseph Caramadre made millions by exploiting the life insurance industry’s fine print.

Revisiting a 30-year-old beating death in St. Louis.

A year and a half with Candace Desmond-Woods, whose husband, and Iraq war veteran, suffers from PTSD and alcoholism.

On the problems in “Dr. V’s Magical Putter.”

The roast where Chevy Chase learned that everyone hates him.

The former Perfect Strangers star cheerfully slags Tom Cruise, Eddie Murphy and Denzel Washington, among others.

Kylee Kimbrough lost her childhood, lost her sobriety, lost her living situation, and finally even lost her son. Then she found the drums.

360 degree deals and the music industry’s new hostages.

Before The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen was just another literary novelist with a new book coming out.