For 40 years, journalists chronicled the eccentric royal family of Oudh, deposed aristocrats who lived in a ruined palace in the Indian capital. It was a tragic, astonishing story. But was it true?

Vera Pratt moved to the island at age 70 hoping to find many years of happiness. Then she met “Psychic Angela” and her future got a whole lot more complicated.

In 16 months, he has broken into more than a thousand homes up and down the San Fernando Valley. According to the police, his haul is worth anywhere from $16 million to $40 million. And yet because he has cultivated so many aliases, law-enforcement officials have been hard-pressed to learn his real name—Ignacio Peña Del Río—much less comprehend his unlikely background.

“The squirrels may take my tomatoes and spit them back, but they would not go unanswered. The time had come to close the circle of life.”

She lives in a world called Calalini with an invisible companion named 400-the-Cat; inside the life of a six-year-old with schizophrenia.

The 20 soldiers in Second Platoon try in vain to hold down a strategic outpost in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, “among the deadliest pieces of terrain in the world for U.S. forces.”

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.

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

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.

Anthony Minghella’s 1999 film adaptation, starring Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and the coast of Italy, has become a cult classic (and a warning).

For more than 50 years, world governments have trusted a single Swiss code-making machine company to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers, and diplomats secret. It turns out that company was run by the CIA.

Jurors from the Emmett Till trial revisit the case 50 years later.

On the stories we tell ourselves about happiness and the indecent questions we ask women who decided not to become moms.

A legend hangs on.

A private investigator asks a magazine to write a puff piece on his business. The journalist finds a real story.

When the greatest players in the world go head-to-head, things can get downright angsty.

Two Houston performance artists faux-marry an oak. Controversy ensues about the live installation’s relationship to the gay marriage debate.

What the heck happened?

Instead, they got scorched.

How two Jewish American political consultants helped create the world’s largest anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

A Texas con artist made millions promising prisoners’ families the thing they wanted most: to bring their children home.

How killing by remote control has changed the way we fight.

Before The Jerky Boys and Longmont Potion Castle there was Mal Sharpe.

Cesar Sayoc turned his loyalty toward Donald Trump into a literal assault on the President’s Democratic enemies in 2018.