It started with black market rations and ended with “the wedding of the century.”

The unlikely rise of the 1983 national croquet champions.

The joys—and absurdities—of finding oneself abandoned in a desolate landscape.

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

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For generations, plantation owners strove to keep black laborers on the farm and competing businesses out of town. Today, the towns faring best are the ones whose white residents stayed to reckon with their own history.

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

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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

How the People’s Temple tore one family apart, told in part via letters:

We have at long last opened our hearts to you, expressing the sorrow and agony which we have restrained over six long years. Any time you express the wish to resume normal relations and exchange with us, the past will be forgotten. For after all we do love you and the children more than any other persons. We shall continue to cherish you to our last day on earth. The peerless joy of raising you from childhood to youth is a unique life experience, indeed. Your father and mother

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.

A father’s attempt to combat the wage gap.

After two months in the hospital, a mother finally got to take her premature baby home. Then she spent five years trying to convince him to eat.

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.

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.

Barry Michels is Hollywood’s most successful therapist cum motivation coach with an approach that combines Jungian psychology, encouraging patients to embrace their dark side, and “three-by-five index cards inscribed with Delphic pronouncements like THE HIERARCHY WILL NEVER BE CLEAR.”

One expert warns that policies advanced by the think tank could lead to military conflict with China.

How a once-lauded psychiatrist became a prolific prescriber of painkillers in one of Virginia’s poorest and most isolated counties.

A profile of CeaseFire, a group of “violence interrupters” attempting to prevent street shootings by treating them like an infectious disease.