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.

In 2008, a federally owned power plant spewed coal sludge over 300 acres in Tennessee. Now, 40 people who helped clean up the mess are dead and 300 ill.

From the beginning, Intuit recognized that its success depended on two parallel missions: stoking innovation in Silicon Valley while stifling it in Washington. Indeed, employees ruefully joke that the company’s motto should actually be “compromise without integrity.”

People said that women had no place in the Grand Canyon and would likely die trying to run the Colorado River. In 1938, two female scientists set out to prove them wrong.

The Estonia was carrying 989 passengers when it sank in 30-foot seas on its way across the Baltic in September 1994. More than 850 lost their lives. The ones who survived acted quickly and remained calm.

In 1978, an eighth grader killed his teacher. After 20 months in a psychiatric facility, he was freed. His classmates still wonder: What really happened?

Banned in Russia and cut by Condé Nast from the GQ website, this story (presented in full) details the intrigue behind the Moscow apartment bombings, blamed on Chechens, that allowed Putin to rapidly ascend to power.

The chef, who died last year, was one of San Francisco’s culinary stars in the 1990s. She created a space for the city’s queer women to thrive in the kitchen.

In the fall of 1966, billionaire Doris Duke killed a close confidant in Newport, Rhode Island. Local police ruled the incident “an unfortunate accident.” Half a century later, evidence suggests she got away with murder.

Scientists are studying the extreme weather in northern Argentina to see how it works—and what it can tell us about the monster storms in our future.

Shut out of the employment market in their 20s, hikkomori shut-ins continue to search for direction in middle age.

When the business icon died in a fire last week, questions abounded. The answers seem rooted in a Covid-period spiral, where he turned to drugs and shunned old friends.

A drone sighting caused the airport to close for two days in 2018, but despite a lengthy police investigation, no culprit was ever found. So what exactly did people see in the sky?

The author teaches a college class about what it means to be white in America, but interrogating that question as a black woman in the real world is much harder to do.

In the ’90s, a frustrated artist in Berlin went on a crime spree—building bombs, extorting high-end stores, and styling his persona after Scrooge McDuck. He soon became a German folk hero.

In Taipei, young people like Nancy Tao Chen Ying watched as the Hong Kong protests were brutally extinguished. Now they wonder what’s in their future.

The comedian speaks to his alma mater about the importance of taking risks, and his own rocky path from college to the late-night stage:

What else can you expect in the real world? Let me tell you. As you leave these gates and re-enter society, one thing is certain. Everyone out there is going to hate you. Never tell anyone in a roadside diner that you went to Harvard. In those situations, the correct response to, “Where did you go to school?” is “School? I never had much in the way of book learnin’ and such.” And then get in your BMW and get the hell out of there. Go.

Former Washington Post opinion page editor Greenfield on not being overwhelmed by the past in the search for a “better truth”:

History helps guard against moral smugness too, or it should, anyway. For you are obliged, if you are honest, to acknowledge at least some reflection or resonance of the fallen ones in your own nature. Such humility is a conspicuously missing aspect of our contemporary culture, however. What might be a becoming spell of moral introspection, tends instead to become an orgy of bashing and blaming. I observe that now, as always in this country, when people speak of a terrible, all embracing decline in ethical standards, they are invariably speaking of the decline in their next door neighbor's standards, not their own.