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.

A forgotten birthday cake sets off a chain of unexpected events.

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Before the guru, Prakashanand Saraswati, vanished in March—before a jury convicted him of sexual abuse; before he slipped across the border into Mexico overnight—he led the premier Hindu temple in Texas and, perhaps, the whole United States.

Was the biggest record sale in the history of Discogs actually someone selling the record to themself? Was a serial hoaxer who had posed as Jimi Hendrix’s son in blackface actually behind both the 1989 album and its 2017 sale?

She was the biggest tipper the waiters at some of the country’s most gourmet restaurants had ever seen. She treated casual acquaintances to elaborate vacations. Few saw the tiny bungalow where she lived amongst hundreds of boxes of unopened jewelry, and none knew the source of her wealth. When her multi-decade embezzlement scheme was revealed, the artisans and waitstaff whose lives had been changed by her generosity were left to sort out the pieces and consider their own relationship to her scam.

During New York’s ’80s and ’90s crack epedemic, a flashy detective who “imagined himself a crusader who created his own rules” and his star witness, a crack addicted prostitute who seemed to constantly be at the scene of homicides, sent dozens of men to prison for life. Now, they are under investigation.

“Let me say that again: Hedy Lamarr, arguably the most glamorous star of the pre-war period, also helped invent your cell phone and WiFi connection.”

When Isis rounded up Yazidi women and girls in Iraq to use as slaves, the captives drew on their collective memory of past oppressions – and a powerful will to survive.

The life and times of Myrtis Dightman, who broke the color barrier in professional rodeo and became one of the best bull riders who ever lived.

To some, Baltimore Jack’s choice to live off the grid was irresponsible. Others celebrated that he’d managed to break the shackles of convention. We look back on the life of an AT antihero.

When a ring of thieves steals a poet’s beloved dog, one of the world’s most famous women must break her long domestic oppression and discover herself in the process.

Just before his first NBA game, an 18-year-old LeBron James was asked about the pressure of controlling the combined fortunes of a city, major corporations, and the league. “I can handle it,” he said.

“But to grow up costs the earth, the earth. It means you take responsibility for the time you take up, for the space you occupy. It’s serious business. And you find out what it costs us to love and to lose, to dare and to fail. And maybe even more, to succeed. What it costs, in truth. Not superficial costs—anybody can have that—I mean in truth. That’s what I write. What it really is like. I’m just telling a very simple story.”

A year with a high school support group for boys who have lost a parent.

Two Dominican families, their lawyer, and a quest for ancestral riches that may not exist.

How cops are using nuisance abatement actions to put New Yorkers on the streets.

What happens when a great deal of cocaine suddenly washes up on the shores of a very small island.

The Ceasefire Babies was what they called us. Those too young to remember the worst of the terror because we were either in nappies or just out of them when the Provisional IRA ceasefire was called. I was four, Jonny was three. We were the Good Friday Agreement generation, destined to never witness the horrors of war but to reap the spoils of peace. The spoils just never seemed to reach us.

The story of a small town just outside Pittsburgh that has suffered through a half-century of economic decline, racial tension, and endless crime. Despite that trajectory, or perhaps because of it, Aliquippa has also produced an astounding number of NFL players.

The night America elected Donald J. Trump president, 38-year-old Richard B. Spencer, who fancies himself the “Karl Marx of the alt-right” and envisions a “white homeland,” crowed, “we’re the establishment now.” If so, then the architect of the new establishment is Spencer’s former mentor, Paul Gottfried, a retired Jewish academic...

A visit to the newly on-the-market Jamesburg Earth Station, a massive satellite receiver that played a key role in communications with space, and its neighbors in an adjacent trailer park.

“You know a storm is going to be bad, people in Oklahoma will tell you, when Gary England removes his jacket.” A profile of a meteorologist who has worked Tornado Alley for more than 40 years.

“What can I say about Jaco? When I first met him he was extremely present tense and, I would have to say for lack of a better term, extremely sage.”

Lee Holloway programmed internet security firm Cloudflare into being. But then he became apathetic, distant, and unpredictable—for a long time, no one could make sense of it.