For nearly 200 years, San Francisco has been the last stop of petty thieves, con artists and killers. Iva Kroeger was all three.

Inside the shadowy meetings between Chicago’s violent gang members and its elected officials.

On the complete corruption of Paul Bergin, a federal attorney turned high-priced defense lawyer now awaiting trial on a host of charges.

If Paul is guilty of half the things they say, he’d be the craziest, most evil lawyer in the history of the State of New Jersey. That is saying something.

There’s a tale about a boy in Waycross. Near a canal, he struck a match, lit a piece of newspaper, and tossed it into the water. But when the burning paper touched the surface, it didn’t go out. The water burst into flames.

A jailhouse interview with Vladimir Putin’s rival at the very end of his decade behind bars.

How Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction, all nine-sixteenths of a second of it, changed TV, the internet, and American culture.

An annual re-enactment drags America’s history of racist violence into the light.

An attempt at writing about the football coach.

Browsing the stacks with The Washington Post’s Michael Dirda.

How an obscure Australian judge and a hard-charging lawyer put the S&P on trial for the global financial collapse.

One year before his death, Mickey Mantle describes a life of drinking.

Inmates work for hours each day and yet have no labor rights.

“You probably don’t believe me, but I didn’t kill Harry.”

For a time, NGOs thought they’d eradicated the disease. But now it’s back.

“The whole thing has a sort of Taylor Swift-meets-jihad feel.”

An oral history of The Right Stuff.

Meet a man who could be called the “Hillaryland Whisperer.”

A cop kills a fellow officer during a drug bust and claims it was an accident. Others suspect that it wasn’t.

The answer may lie with the country’s powerful security agencies.

On the art of the takedown.

How a ferry disaster exposed the corruption devastating Iraq.