The unlikely rise of the 1983 national croquet champions.

A profile of the overlooked icon who forever changed the way Indigenous people are depicted onscreen.

She was the biggest tipper the waiters at some of the country’s most gourmet restaurants had ever seen. She treated casual acquaintances to elaborate vacations. Few saw the tiny bungalow where she lived amongst hundreds of boxes of unopened jewelry, and none knew the source of her wealth. When her multi-decade embezzlement scheme was revealed, the artisans and waitstaff whose lives had been changed by her generosity were left to sort out the pieces and consider their own relationship to her scam.

The prosecutor in the case of hacker turned F.B.I. informant (but still hacker) Albert Gonzales and his organization Shadowcrew : “The sheer extent of the human victimization caused by Gonzalez and his organization is unparalleled.”

The circus Roger Ailes created at Fox News made his network $900 million last year. But it may have lost him something more important: the next election.

To this day, no one (outside of the movie's own crew) knows how the Muppets rode bicycles in The Great Muppet Caper, the classic Henson movie from 1981. In that scene, Kermit stands up on one frog-leg on the seat of his bicycle to impress Miss Piggy, and then the whole gang joins them on their bikes, doing circles and figure eights, singing “Couldn’t We Ride?” It's a wonderful piece of filmmaking, and still a complete delight to watch because the effect relied on the ingenuity and bravado of the puppeteers and crew, not CGI wizardry. Contrast the joy and ebullience of this scene to the elegant chiaroscuro slickness of the post-Henson Muppet Christmas Carol in which we see old fogies Statler and Waldorf, as the Marley brothers, floating in mid air. No viewer is impressed; no one really thinks about it at all. And that's because when a then 29-year-old Brian Henson directed that film, he threw the rules out the window. Statler and Waldorf “float” because Goelz and Nelson, the men working the old guys, were standing behind them during filming and then were removed in post production. It’s an elegant fix—a cutting of the Gordian knot—but it is a complete break with an aesthetic 35 years in the making.

Sarah Marquis’s very long hike.

A Chicago housing project resident reports intruders breaking into her apartment through a medicine cabinet. Days later, she’s found dead.

How a doctor and an S.A.C. trader got entangled in a financial scandal.

“My cousin became a convicted felon in his teens. I tried to make sure he got a second chance. What went wrong?”

How a state that was never in doubt became a “national embarrassment.”

Meet Mel Bernstein. He goes by the name Dragonman, and he’s one of the largest independent purveyors of firearms in the western United States, and the self-proclaimed most armed man in America. At Dragonland—his home, shop, shooting range, and military museum outside Colorado Springs—no gun sells quicker than the weapon used in the most recent mass shooting. Amidst a new gun conversation, it’s business as usual. But even here, it turns out there’s a price to pay.

What happens when a great deal of cocaine suddenly washes up on the shores of a very small island.

“Let me say that again: Hedy Lamarr, arguably the most glamorous star of the pre-war period, also helped invent your cell phone and WiFi connection.”

To some, Baltimore Jack’s choice to live off the grid was irresponsible. Others celebrated that he’d managed to break the shackles of convention. We look back on the life of an AT antihero.

Just before his first NBA game, an 18-year-old LeBron James was asked about the pressure of controlling the combined fortunes of a city, major corporations, and the league. “I can handle it,” he said.

A profile of Heather Armstrong, a mom in Salt Lake City who has more than 1.5 million Twitter followers and a personal blog generating $30,000-$50,000 monthly.

Each soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan generated around 10 pounds of garbage per day. Most of that trash—along with used equipment and medical supplies and other wastes of war—was burned in open-air pits, emitting a toxic smoke that many soliders blame for their poor health today.

What do you do when you hear that Mike Tyson is opening a weed resort in the middle of the California desert? You go investigate.

An American, born into privilege, became a bootleg DVD kingpin in Shanghai and then, in an unprecedented development, landed in Chinese prison.

On office chairs.

In the 1950s and '60s, the distinctions between rank found blunt expression in chair design, naming and price point; Knoll, for example, produced "Executive," "Advanced Management," and "Basic Operational" chairs in the late 1970s. Recall the archetypal scenes where the boss, back to the door, protected by an exaggerated, double-spine headrest, slowly swivels around to meet the eyes of his waiting subordinate, impotent in a stationary four-legger.

The broadcasting behemoth is up for a charter renewal in the United Kingdom, and it’s exposing every crack in the organization.

On Ilya Zhitomirskiy, an idealistic young developer who committed suicide 18 months after founding Diaspora, his well-publicized, open-source alternative to Facebook.