Odessa High School students know her as “Betty,” a ghost that haunts the auditorium at night.  But few know much about the real Betty, whose 1961 murder was “the most sensational crime in West Texas in its day.”

When a CIA operation in Pakistan went bad, leaving three men dead, the episode offered a rare glimpse inside a shadowy world of espionage. It also jeopardized America’s most critical outpost in the war against terrorism.

The stories of two dozen strangers who survived the Joplin, Mo., tornado by hiding in a walk-in beer cooler.

From his arrival in New York as a penniless 22-year-old Dutch stowaway through years of obscurity until emerging as a major artist in his 50s.

Why had the U.S. once again targeted Gaddafi? Of all the evils and perils in the world, there is none that galls Reagan more than terrorism. Of all the anti-American thugs who hang out in the back alleys of the Third World, there is none Reagan despises more than Gaddafi.

Walter Isaacson’s book is long, dull, often flat-footed, and humorless. It hammers on one nail, incessantly: that Steve Jobs was an awful man, but awful in the service of products people really liked (and eventually bought lots of) and so in the end his awfulness was probably OK.

An American mystery writer and an Italian journalist join forces to identify a serial killer that targeted couples having sex in cars in the rolling hills above Florence.

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.

"Here’s God’s truth about it: being a groupie wasn’t about sex, it was about access. I wanted to live in the stage life, dazzled by color and sound, constantly in motion, driven by excitement and power, loved by the stage lights, part of the story."

In Russia’s Far East, an orphaned female tiger is the test case in an experimental effort to save one of the most endangered animals on earth.

“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.”

The second installment of the Gaile Owens story. A former churchgoing mother of two from suburban Memphis, Owens is the first woman to be given the death penalty in Tennessee in nearly 200 years.

The author wanted to give up her day job but keep her lifestyle. So she turned to Seeking Arrangement, a site that pairs rich, older men interested in “companionship” with 20-somethings interested in “gifts.”

How did a Kentucky entrepreneur, a Louisiana politician, and the vice president of Nigeria end up in one of the biggest scandals to hit America’s black elite in decades?

Memories of the expat revolutionary scene in 1980s Nicaragua. An excerpt from Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War.

Roy Petersen was blind in one eye, had two replaced hips, and was twice divorced. His job was to solve a gold mine robbery case in the Peruvian Andes. He would need some help.

For decades, the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca has quietly hid money in offshore accounts for the world’s wealthiest people. Following the largest document leak in history, the Panama Papers, the firm’s secrets are now public.

In 2001, Maksym Igor Popov defected to work as an informant in the U.S. But a decade later, he was back to scamming the FBI.

In 1990, Judith Butler published a groundbreaking book on queer theory. Today, “in a broad-stroke, vastly simplified version, the understanding of gender that Gender Trouble suggests is not only recognizable; it is pop.”

In rural North Dakota, a small county and an insular religious sect are caught in a stand-off over a decaying piece of America’s atomic history.

Stephen Miller, the 31-year-old White House advisor, became steeped in white nationalism in the unlikeliest of places: a Santa Monica high school and Duke University.

A Ugandan bill that would threaten homosexuals with imprisonment, or in some cases death, has its roots in the shadowy American evangelical group known as The Family.

In more than a decade of arguing cases in court, I’ve witnessed the stubborn cultural biases female attorneys must navigate to simply do their jobs.

Sada Abe, a former geisha, became a sensation in 1930s Japan after erotically asphyxiating her married lover, cutting off his penis and testicles and carrying them in her kimono for days.

In 1802, horse rustler George Washington Loomis rode into Oneida County and built a mansion adjacent to an impenetrable swamp perfect for storing thieved goods. It was the beginning of the saga of the largest organized crime family in 19th century America.