When his father was murdered, Wasil Ahmad vowed revenge. He was 8 years old.

When a creature mysteriously turns up dead in Alaska, veterinary pathologist Kathy Burek gets the call.

During the 90s, David Bazan was Christian indie-rock’s first big crossover star. Then he stopped believing.

Even soldiers who fight wars from a safe distance have found themselves traumatized.

Inside Iraq’s most notorious prison, an Army interrogator named Joshua Casteel came fact to face with a truth about the war—and himself.

It was just a kayaking trip. Then it upended their lives.

The first epicenter is coming back to life, but not as anyone knew it.

How a self-taught doctor from Delhi cornered the black market in kidneys, building one of the world’s most lucrative organ-trading rings, until it all came crashing down.

A profile of the Hot 97 DJ a few months after “he told the truth about who he is, even if it’s not entirely clear—even to Mister Cee himself, even now, to this day—what exactly that truth is.”

Cassie Chadwick pulled her first con in 1870, at the age of 13. Over the next 30 years, she would scam her way to $633,000, about $16.5 million in today’s dollars.

How a Canadian used a Mohawk reservation’s lakes to smuggle tons of marijuana to stash houses in Brooklyn and Staten Island, resulting in nearly a billion in profits, which he laundered through the Sinaloa Cartel.

Since the Syrian rebel leader Hassan Aboud joined ISIS, taking with him fighters and weapons, he has been behind a sprawling mix of battlefield action and crime.

The tragic final days (and very weird afterlife) of a radio legend.

A gay freshman at Rutgers, a spying roommate, and the trial that followed.

Update 3/16/12: The roommate, Dharun Ravi, has been found guilty of hate crimes.

Almond growing in California is a $7.6 billion industry that wouldn’t be possible without the 30 billion bees (and hundreds of human beekeepers) who keep the trees pollinated — and whose very existence is in peril.

Stéphane Breitwieser robbed nearly 200 museums, amassed a collection of treasures worth more than $1.4 billion, and became perhaps the most prolific art thief in history.

Anyone who wants to know what the Occupy Wall Street protests are all about need only look at the way Bank of America does business. It comes down to this: These guys are some of the very biggest assholes on Earth. They lie, cheat and steal as reflexively as addicts, they laugh at people who are suffering and don't have money, they pay themselves huge salaries with money stolen from old people and taxpayers – and on top of it all, they completely suck at banking. And yet the state won't let them go out of business, no matter how much they deserve it, and it won't slap them in jail, no matter what crimes they commit. That makes them not bankers or capitalists, but a class of person that was never supposed to exist in America: royalty.

Steve Miller had a clear-cut legal case when the Geto Boys used his guitar-hook in their raunchy 1990 single “Gangster of Love.” The racial implications weren’t so simple.

Excerpted from The Geto Boys(Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series, 2016) .

In the past the only people who wrote autobiographies or memoirs were very important, those who had a crucial role in the history of their own country—Napoleon, Goethe—or were witness to major events or people who had singular, adventurous lives. Otherwise, it is ridiculous to write your autobiography.

A profile of Norman Lear, the producer behind All in the Family and The Jeffersons, who is still making TV at age 94.

Who simultaneously did business with the U.S. government, the besieged Syrian regime, and the Libyan rebels last month? The group of 16 trading houses that collectively are “worth over a trillion dollars in annual revenue and control more than half the world’s freely traded commodities.”

Hundreds of thousands of single-family homes are now in the hands of giant companies—squeezing renters for revenue and putting the American dream even further out of reach.

Kids consider changing their personalities and relationships.