In 1992, a Chinese freighter tipped violently in a storm dumping a load of plastic floatee toys—7,200 red beavers, 7,200 green frogs, 7,200 blue turtles, and 7,200 yellow ducks—to the open sea. This is their story.

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.

A profile of Rick Santorum published early in his final campaign for the U.S. Senate, a race widely considered a stepping stone to the White House before he lost.

By day, Dan Brown runs the seafood counter at SuperFresh. By night, he does his life work: clearing, dressing, and sharing road-killed deer.

Two pairs of identical twins mismatched in a hospital happen upon each other in their twenties.

She told the family of a severely disabled man that she could help him to communicate with the outside world. Then she said they were in love.

They were the New York crew that once pulled off the Lufthansa heist, one of the biggest thefts in American history and the basis for Goodfellas. Nearly 40 years later, most are dead. The survivors are old, broke, and snitching.

Suzan Russaw is 70 years old. She lived in affordable Palo Alto housing for decades. Then, in 2013, she was forced to move into her car. On the new homeless of Silicon Valley.

Last February, John Jonchuck Jr. dropped his 5-year-old daughter off a bridge to her death. This is the story of what happened, and what didn’t, in the years before the murder made headlines.

“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.

How David Milch, the creator of NYPD Blue and Deadwood, blew his $100 million fortune at the track.

On systemic corrpution in the upper house of British Parliament, where lawmakers have the freedom to work for any business—banks, oil companies, Facebook—willing to pay for their “expertise.”

Gerald Blanchard, the world’s most ingenious thief, made his first swipe at age six. And he didn’t stop, robbing banks and stealing jewels around the world until a pair of obsessed Winnipeg cops took his case.

Admiring evangelicals are helping David Berkowitz, the imprisoned serial killer who murdered six people in NYC during the summer of 1977, with an unusual image makeover.

“There is perhaps no other political-military elite in the world whose aspirations for great-power regional status, whose desire to overextend and outmatch itself with meager resources, so outstrips reality as that of Pakistan.”

In Torreón, north of Mexico City, cartel gunmen are freed from a prison, commit a massacre at a wedding that includes the band, and then return to custody.

Or, the perils of promoting a middle schooler’s basketball skills. An excerpt from Play Their Hearts Out.

How a Nigerian-American conned upwards of $40 million from banks during the housing boom using publicly available information from the internet, persuasive storytelling, and prepaid cellphones, and then ditched his FBI tail in a casino.

On the dilemmas facing a (very famous) working mother in New York City. “It is less dangerous to draw a cartoon of Allah French-kissing Uncle Sam—which, let me make it very clear, I have not done—than it is to speak honestly about this topic.”

“There are some things nobody needs in this world, and a bright-red, hunch-back, warp-speed 900cc cafe racer is one of them—but I want one anyway, and on some days I actually believe I need one. That is why they are dangerous.”

The last vestiges of a sporting powerhouse.

A Czech Libertarian planted a flag on an unclaimed island in the Danube and gave it a name. Now, the Liberland government is struggling to build its a country without taxes, political correctness, or much in the way of women.

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?

In Sweden, hundreds of refugee children have fallen unconscious after being informed that their families will be expelled from the country. The patients, doctors say, seem to have lost the will to live.

A profile of the grieving musician, who lost his teenage son 18 months ago.