He was a convicted felon who found a niche in Seattle’s construction boom. As the region’s fortunes rose and fell—and rose again—so did his. Then a fatal boating accident came for Michael Powers’s fairy-tale ending.

He brought Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Cabbage Patch Kids to our living rooms. He made and lost fortunes. Can Al Kahn stay in the game?

In bleak farmlands of East Anglia, the first wave of Eastern European migrants learned exploitation and extortion from their own experiences with day labor. Then they began to prey on fellow immigrants, luring in them into debt and then forcing them to commit crimes to pay it off.

Gus Weiss, a shrewd intelligence insider, pulled off an audacious tech hack against the Soviets in the last century. Or did he?

The story of Asa Earl Carter, aka Forrest Carter, the best-selling author of The Education of Little Tree, an autobiographical novel about “communion with nature and love of one’s fellow man.” He was also a Klansman, penning the famous George Wallace line, “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!”

Thomas Quick confessed to more than 30 murders. But the man also known as Sture Bergwall may not have committed any of them.

Video-game designer Zoë Quinn in the aftermath of Gamergate, an act of web harassment with world-altering implications.

How mitigation specialists are changing the application of the death penalty:

In Texas, the most prominent mitigation strategist is a lawyer named Danalynn Recer, the executive director of the Gulf Region Advocacy Center. Based in Houston, GRACE has represented defendants in death-penalty cases since 2002. “The idea was to improve the way capital trials were done in Texas, to start an office that would bring the best practices from other places and put them to work here,” Recer said recently. “This is not some unknowable thing. This is not curing cancer. We know how to do this. It is possible to persuade a jury to value someone’s life.”

The absurd scale of McDonald’s’ economics suggests a company more like a commodity trader than a chain of restaurants.

At this volume, and with the impermanence of the sandwich, it only makes sense for McDonald’s to treat the sandwich as a sort of arbitrage strategy: at both ends of the product pipeline, you have a good being traded at such large volume that we might as well forget that one end of the pipeline is hogs and corn and the other end is a sandwich. McDonald’s likely doesn’t think in these terms, and neither should you.

Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. If the Japanese have conquered south Asia, then they will keep south Asia for ever, if the Germans have captured Tobruk, they will infallibly capture Cairo; if the Russians are in Berlin, it will not be long before they are in London: and so on. This habit of mind leads also to the belief that things will happen more quickly, completely, and catastrophically than they ever do in practice. The rise and fall of empires, the disappearance of cultures and religions, are expected to happen with earthquake suddenness, and processes which have barely started are talked about as though they were already at an end.

Tom Catena is the only surgeon for thousands of square miles in Southern Sudan. His hospital, and his life, are constantly under threat. There is no end to the carnage he must treat. He refuses to leave.

A political history of Britain.

In rural North Dakota, a small county and an insular religious sect are caught in a stand-off over a decaying piece of America’s atomic history.

In Colorado and beyond, a negotiated surrender in the war on drugs.

A tony bedroom community in Los Angeles, a kidnapping gone horribly wrong, and the birth of a teenage fugitive.

Is a serial killer on the loose in Wellfleet? An investigation.

The story of how Washington blew its best shot to do something on climate change.

Leïla Slimani’s best-seller explores the dark relationship of a mother and her babysitter.

Malfunctions caused two deadly crashes. But an industry that puts unprepared pilots in the cockpit is just as guilty.

A journey through a quixotic New Hampshire town teeming with libertarians, fake news, guns, and—possibly—furry invaders.

What if people don’t just invent medical symptoms to get attention—what if they feign oppression, too?

“Radically brilliant. Absurdly ahead of its time. Ridiculously poorly planned.” An oral history of the National Sports Daily.

On H.H. Holmes “an old hand at corpse manipulation and insurance fraud,” who built a house of death in 1890s Chicago.

Lessons learned about Washington from investigating how the “grand bargain” fell apart.