Who really built the first electric rock ‘n’ roll guitar?

What’s actually happening at the box office.

Public-health officials are confronting dangerous ideas as much as a deadly disease.

American conspiracy theories are entering a dangerous new phase.

Welcome to Toke-la-homa.

On trying, and failing, to qualify for the USA Olympic Marathon Trials.

“They have effectively claimed the progressive causes of the left – from gay rights to women’s equality and protecting Jews from antisemitism – as their own, by depicting Muslim immigrants as the primary threat to all three groups. As fear of Islam has spread, with their encouragement, they have presented themselves as the only true defenders of western identity and western liberties – the last bulwark protecting a besieged Judeo-Christian civilisation from the barbarians at the gates.”

A species of jellyfish that can transform itself back to a polyp at any time appears to debunk the most fundamental law of the natural world — you are born, and then you die.

In 1939, acting on a tip and clues from The Iliad, archaeologists unearthed King Nestor’s palace on Pylos. Recently, another discovery in Pylos, the grave of an even earlier soldier, could change our entire understanding of how western civilization developed.

On the many lives and careers of Owsley Stanley (1935-2011), chemist, sound design innovator, and outback jeweler, whose name appears in the OED as a synonym for “a particularly pure form of LSD.”

The improbable and true story of how Al Sharpton, Cornel West, Marion Barry’s wife, and Tucker Carlson (yes, that Tucker Carlson) flew to Liberia to negotiate a ceasefire in the midst of a civil war.

A 1988 profile of Bill Murray, then at the peak of his box office power and living in a secluded farmhouse in the Hudson River Valley.

A profile of the Los Angeles Clippers owner, an oft-sued real estate baron with a documented racist streak and a penchant for heckling his own players, on the occasion of him winning an NAACP lifetime achievement award.

As medical researchers scramble to find the source of a fatal lung disease and officials seek to ban the sale of vape pens, our correspondent set out to separate reality from hysteria.

Authorities say Ramon Abbas, aka Hushpuppi, perfected a simple internet scam and laundered millions of dollars. His past says a lot about digital swagger, and the kinds of stories that get told online.

The life and times of James McClintock, the man behind the famed H.L. Hunley who also may or may not have faked his own death.

On the holy city of Canudos, and other attempts at better living “by the dispossessed and marginalized the world over.”

Last summer, when she thought nobody was looking, Mary Bale put a cat in the trash. The act was caught on video, and Bale was quickly tried and convicted online. The aftermath of a viral crime.

“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”

Six months after the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, a member of the Presidential commission that investigated the crash presents his personal findings.

The Mennonite women of the Manitoba Colony would awake with blood and semen stains, dried grass in their hair, and tiny bits of rope on their wrists and ankles. Their rapists, armed with a veterinary tranquilizer converted to spray form, were eight young men from their own community.

Justin Vivian Bond found downtown fame as Kiki DuRane, decrepit drag chanteuse and comedic prophet of gay rage born out of the AIDS era. Then he killed Kiki to try to become the woman (and man) he always wanted to be.

Chris Earnshaw began taking photographs of Washington, D.C. more than 40 years ago. By the time he paid a visit to a museum to tout his work, he had in his possession—in plastic bags and filing drawers—3,000 Polaroids of a city long gone.

The British artist, a contemporary of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, has been called “the most unabashedly all-balls-out, rock ‘n’ roll” of her generation.

Her disclosure of classified documents in 2010 ushered in the age of leaks. Now, freed from prison, she talks about why she did it—and the isolation that followed.

An in-depth history of the most important pop innovation of the last 20 years, from Cher’s “Believe” to Kanye West to Migos.