“After college, as my friends left Michigan for better opportunities, I was determined to help fix this broken, chaotic city by building my own home in the middle of it. I was 23 years old.”

Why it took more than a decade for the posthumous pardon of Tim Cole, even after another inmate confessed to the brutal crime that put Cole away.

A CIA veteran remembers his Soviet nemesis, Leonid Vladimirovich Shebarshin, who was the chairman of the KGB for a single day during the 1991 coup against Gorbachev, and committed suicide in Moscow in March.

“Ligurta Station, Arizona. The hottest town in America. It’s 120 in the shade. Can you dig it? Ron can. He’s been out here for the past five years, carving out his own little slice of heaven.”

At Nancy Reagan’s memorial, Hillary Clinton praised her fellow former first lady for “starting a national conversation” about AIDS. That is not how everyone remembers it.

The battle for the old man with “snots running down his nose / Greasy fingers smearing shabby clothes.”

When IP mapping goes awry dozens of strangers show up to the same home again and again looking for their stolen gear.

An examination of Brazil’s immense tannery industry shows how hides from illegally deforested ranches can easily reach the global marketplace. In the United States, much of the demand for Brazilian leather comes from automakers.

How to get Americans to “pay $45 to $75 to run for their lives from 1,500-pound, bad-tempered beasts.”

How divisions between Nigeria’s Muslim North and Christian South resulted in the birth of terror’s most ruthless movement.

The aging action star’s second wind abroad: political maneuvering, many guns and, most importantly, a market for his B movies.

“The idea for Handybook occurred to me when I was studying at Harvard. It was so hard to find a reliable cleaning service to tidy my apartment! You know?”

On September 11, 2001, three out of every four people who worked for Howard Lutnick died. The story of a recovery.

Gerry Pickens took a paycut to join the police department in tiny, overwhelmingly white Orting, Washington. Fired less than a year later, he’s now suing the town for enough to break it.

When the Feds sought the death penalty for four African-American drug dealers in Baltimore, the accused found a defense in the unlikeliest of places: the legal theories of white supremacists.

The birthing of a conspiracy theory that the record holder for oldest person, Jeanne Calment, was actually her daughter Yvonne, who had “stolen her deceased mother’s identity to avoid paying inheritance taxes,”

“The key differentiator of Super-Aggregators is that they have three-sided markets: users, content providers (which may include users!), and advertisers. Both content providers and advertisers want the user’s attention, and the latter are willing to pay for it.”

After sitting alone in a forest and not moving for 24 hours, the author reflects on time, mortality, and turning 40.

The grocer started communicating with Chinese counterparts in January and was running tabletop simulations a few weeks later. (But nothing prepared it for the rush on toilet paper.)

The phrase ‘adult beginner’ can sound patronising. It implies you are learning something you should have mastered as a child. But learning is not just for the young.

For years, Hou was the only woman who stood a chance against the very best. But she had her own ambitions.

A study in building spaceships.

A woman reels in the wake of her mother’s absence.

In 1965, Wheat was sentenced to death for armed robbery and murder. When his sentence was commuted, he decided to devote the rest of his life to helping people.

I played a father for a 12-year-old with a single mother. The girl was bullied because she didn’t have a dad, so the mother rented me. I’ve acted as the girl’s father ever since. I am the only real father that she knows.