Thirty years ago, the biggest celebrities on earth opened a chain restaurant. For a few years, it was the hottest ticket in town. Then it went bankrupt. Twice.

Archaeological discoveries are shattering scholars’ long-held beliefs about how the earliest humans organized their societies—and hint at possibilities for our own,

“As the world’s best-known oceanographer—Sylvia is to our era what Jacques Cousteau was to an earlier one—she feels a heavy responsibility. In her lifetime, she has seen the ocean damaged in ways humans never thought it could be. The ongoing disaster leaves her mournful, desolate, and sometimes scary to talk to. Since her first dive, in a sponge-diver’s helmet in a Florida river when she was 16, she has spent 7,000 hours, or the better part of a year, underwater.”

Groupon disasters, the behaviors of the consumer swarm, and how the “1% and the 90% [are] collaborating to prey on the 9% in the middle.”

A medical device company experiments on humans.

On Johnny Carson, a cold man in a hot seat.

How two love-struck, type A high schoolers almost got away with murder.

An anatomy of a failure.

How a rugby legend came out.

A profile of a suburban New Jersey fifth-grader named Colin Duffy.

The U.S. had been his home since he was 6 months old. When he was deported 
to Mexico 26 years later, it was more than he could bear.

A wedding photographer catches up with his past clients.

Inside an IRL cult built on Facebook memes and semen-drinking.

For the purposes of this essay, I’ll call it ‘ambient privacy’—the understanding that there is value in having our everyday interactions with one another remain outside the reach of monitoring, and that the small details of our daily lives should pass by unremembered. What we do at home, work, church, school, or in our leisure time does not belong in a permanent record. Not every conversation needs to be a deposition.

Hitman-for-hire darknet sites are all scams. But some people turn up dead nonetheless.

The number one place Tampa Bay cops visit: Walmart. And it’s not even close — they average two trips an hour.

He was white nationalism’s heir apparent. Then he went to college.

He helped build an artists’ utopia. Now he faces trial for 36 deaths there.

Central Park wasn’t always so bucolic.

Gangs of toughs—teenagers and the macho middle-aged, usually drunk, occasionally including a couple of off-duty cops—roam the Ramble at night, engaging in an old American pastime: fag bashing. You don't have to be gay. You don't have to be exposing yourself. You don't have to be doing anything except walking through the tangled darkness to be abused, shoved, threatened at knifepoint, kicked, and beaten.

“I decided that if he would not tell us his story, then I would.”