A former journalist, equipped with an algorithm and the largest collection of murder records in the country, finds patterns in crime.

Inside the trailer park known as Little Mexico in Norwalk, Ohio in the wake of an ICE raid that separated children from their parents.

In the wake of a vicious murder, the state of Oregon wrestles with what went wrong in its mental health system.

Black people formed one of the largest militias in the U.S. Now its leader is in prosecutors’ crosshairs.

“Successful brand identities in the House and on talk radio have never before relied on such similar skill sets — there has never been so much politics in media, and media in politics.”

In 1980, Richard Pryor doused himself in rum, lit himself, and streaked though the streets or Northridge in a ball of flames. He would go on to live another 25 years.

The bodies in the chalet were found in a secret chamber, arranged radiating out from a point like spokes in a wheel. Some had suffocated, some had been shot. They all were followers of a mysterious prophet, Luc Jouret.

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.

In anonymous warehouses in Detroit, Goldman Sachs has hoarded a quarter of the world’s supply of aluminum, placing them firmly in control of trading on the London Metal Exchange.

Gaile Owens was a churchgoing mother of two boys in suburban Memphis. Now she’s the first woman sentenced to die in Tennessee in nearly 200 years. The jury never heard her whole story; this is it.

In the midst of a tribal burial, Jim Thorpe’s third wife burst in to remove his body, setting in motion a decades-long battle over the Native American athlete’s final resting place.

In the 1980s, Billy Ray Bates, once dubbed “the Legend,” drank himself out of the NBA and ended up playing in the Philippines. For a few wild years, his legend grew—both on the court and in the bars.

Working from a tiny shop in Chinatown, Sister Ping brought in thousands of Chinese immigrants by boat, bringing in over $40 million. Then one of her ships ran aground.

A profile of Little Richard in the last years of his life, confined to a wheelchair and living in the penthouse suite at the Hilton in downtown Nashville.

In the 1980s some of the world’s most powerful institutions were taken in by stories, begun in Victoria B.C., of a global Satanic underground abducting and abusing thousands of children.

In 2003, the destruction of one particular statue in Baghdad made worldwide headlines and came to be a symbol of western victory in Iraq. But there was so much more to it—or rather, so much less.

“Like they said in Step Brothers: Never lose your dinosaur. This is the ultimate example of a person never losing his dinosaur. Meaning that even as I grew in cultural awareness and respect and was put higher in the class system in some way for being this musician, I never lost my dinosaur.”

“Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.”

Encountering a pack of wild dogs in Manhattan.

On working in an artists’ colony.

A sport in flux.

In the slums adjacent to Mumbai’s airport.

The author on her childhood in Wingham, Ontario.

What caused the worst shipping disaster in maritime history?

A Q&A:

My mother was called to school frequently because I was yelling out things in class, quips in class, and because I would hand in compositions that they thought were in poor taste, or too sexual. Many, many times she was called to school.