What links an eccentric Oxford classics don, billionaire US evangelicals, and a tiny, missing fragment of an ancient manuscript?

Dutch astronomer, mathematician, and inventor Christiaan Huygens’ early work on probability paved the way for his very modern evaluation of what alien life might look like.

Last year, three cryptocurrency enthusiasts bought a cruise ship. They named it the Satoshi, and dreamed of starting a floating libertarian utopia. It didn’t work out

The CNN anchor may not be the clueless bumbler the internet believes him to be.

The father: an Oscar-winning songwriter. The son, a college dropout and partier around downtown New York. Their alleged crimes; serial casting-couch rape (the senior) and a drowning murder in a Soho House bathtub (the junior).

An attempt to sort out whether Vick is truly a changed man or simply a very gifted football player who was bound to be forgiven.

Jeff Walton is a 69-year-old plumber with a wife and 35-year-old son. It turns out he’s also Ronald Stan, a Canadian man who faked his own death in 1977.

The BBL is the fastest growing cosmetic surgery in the world, despite the mounting number of deaths resulting from the procedure. What is driving its astonishing rise?

To speak of the human as such, as the modernists did, is like taking a piece of the wild, putting it into a petri dish, adding bleach and antibiotics until more than half of what’s in there is dead and then celebrating the barely-living remains as “the human.” Provocatively put, the human is a sterile abstraction, a harmony of illusions.

Despite its association with piracy, BitTorrent is a company in its own right, and one desperate to hit upon a way to monetize its revolutionary file transfer technology.

Did A.Q. Khan sell nuclear secrets on the black market? The fame had unbalanced him. He was subjected to a degree of public acclaim rarely seen in the West—an extreme close to idol worship, which made him hungry for more. Money seems never to have been his obsession, but it did play a role.

On frozen dumplings, industrial freezers, and what the future could hold after China’s burgeoning refrigeration boom.

How Human Potential Movement workshops permeated our lives and our businesses.

“He was, it must be said, a pig. And my heart grew fonder.”

A 12-hour interview on career and craft.

Activist investor Bill Ackman set out to destroy the multilevel marketing company. But did he wind up helping it succeed instead?

How an up-and-coming company went bust.

An interview with the experimental filmmaker and Hollywood chronicler Kenneth Anger, 85.

On the psychological damage punitive isolation inflicts upon Guantánamo and American prisoners alike.

Academics are convinced it’s an intelligent satire.

How an L.A. high school dropout became an enforcer for Mexican cartels and ended up on the F.B.I. Most Wanted List.

An interview with R. Crumb on how he adapted Genesis into comic form.

On the longstanding human fascination with a light source we could borrow but not share.

“There’s no blueprint for remediating a radioactive town and then moving people back into it.”

Can a $100,000 robot that makes a delicious crab bisque replace a real chef?