“It is not so difficult to get Paul McCartney to talk about the past, and this can be a problem. Anyone who has read more than a few interviews with him knows that he has a series of anecdotes, mostly Beatles-related, primed and ready to roll out in situations like these. Pretty good stories, some of them, too. But my goal is to guide McCartney to some less manicured memories—in part because I hope they'll be fascinating in themselves, but also because I hope that if I can lure him off the most well-beaten tracks, that might prod him to genuinely think about, and reflect upon, his life.

And so that is how—and why—we spend most of the next hour talking about killing frogs, taking acid, and the pros and cons of drilling holes in one's skull.”

The story of a rivalry gone awry.

It’s not just the virus that stands in the way, it’s bureaucratic logistics, and the frightening look of those hazmat suits.

The backstory on Julian Assange’s relationship with the Guardian and the New York Times.

Inside the ongoing argument over whether Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the blockchain are transforming the world.

After the massive success of SimCity, the company behind the game began building private simulations for corporations.

The mob that rampaged the halls of Congress included infamous white supremacists and conspiracy theorists.

How the Brazilian butt lift, one of the world’s most dangerous plastic surgery procedures, went mainstream.

Is it homage? An art project? Whatever it is, it is very Brooklyn 2015.

If you were a U.S. prison warden trying to figure out how to kill people with an electric chair in the ‘80s, there was basically one guy to call. His name was Fred A. Leuchter Jr. He ran a business out of his house in the Boston suburbs, providing consulting or execution equipment to at least 27 states between 1979 and 1990. Some of Fred Leuchter’s equipment is still in use today, which is why I wanted to talk to him.

“The government calls it “Operation Open Market,” a four-year investigation resulting, so far, in four federal grand jury indictments against 55 defendants in 10 countries, facing a cumulative millennium of prison time. What many of those alleged scammers, carders, thieves, and racketeers have in common is one simple mistake: They bought their high-quality fake IDs from a sophisticated driver’s license counterfeiting factory secretly established, owned, and operated by the United States Secret Service.”

“Two weeks before Christmas, I was explaining to a friend in town that if I seemed more distressed than usual, it was just because I was trying to accustom myself to the fact that my cat didn’t want to be my cat anymore. ‘No way,’ she said. ‘Here’s what you do: You just call Dawn.’ And then she gave me the cat psychic’s phone number.”

“Brace Belden can’t remember exactly when he decided to give up his life as a punk-rocker turned florist turned boxing-gym manager in San Francisco, buy a plane ticket to Iraq, sneak across the border into Syria, and take up arms against the Islamic State. But as with many major life decisions, Belden, who is 27 — “a true idiot’s age,” in his estimation — says it happened gradually and then all at once.”

After all these years, it’s still there, in the back of her mind, lurking. No matter how good things are going, it never quite goes away, this feeling that she should have died that day. And her brush with death is the first thing that strangers tend to notice about her, like a limp or a disfigurement. Once they find out where she went to high school, that’s all they want to talk about.

The Constitution and its worshippers.

On Princess Diana of Wales.

A profile of the postwar Bronx Bombers.

A history of scandal and civil war within the first family of the Unification Church.

On the rise of Indian Posse, the largest of Canada’s native gangs, and the fall of its leader.

Over the past five years, the Syrian government has killed almost 700 medical personnel. Inside the race to spread medical knowledge as the Assad regime erases it.

The rise and fall of Mickey the Pope, the founder of a New York City marijuana delivery business.

How an obscure Australian judge and a hard-charging lawyer put the S&P on trial for the global financial collapse.

The search for the missing Holocaust hero began in 1945. The unending quest tore his family apart.