The hunt for rare 1933 Double Eagle coins:

The U.S. Secret Service, responsible for protecting the nation’s currency, has been pursuing them for nearly 70 years, through 13 Administrations and 12 different directors. The investigation has spanned three continents and involved some of the most famous coin collectors in the world, a confidential informant, a playboy king, and a sting operation at the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan. It has inspired two novels, two nonfiction books, and a television documentary. And much of it has centered around a coin dealer, dead since 1990, whose shop is still open in South Philadelphia, run by his 82-year-old daughter.

Stare at the game long enough and the distance between everything—players, league, game, court, self, other—begins to collapse. Everything becomes a metaphor for everything else, the league and your life each generating infinite layers of meaning for the other.

On the ethics of putting the internet’s spotlight on a neighborhood restaurant.

The chaos of a group home in Long Beach, California.

How the game gets made.

A veteran with PTSD takes on the fighter jets that fly above his sanctuary on the Olympic Peninsula.

On video game collectors’ “holy grail” – a Nintendo World Championships cartridge:

Wired.com tracked down some of the Nintendo World Championships participants and serious videogame collectors whose lives have touched by these coveted artifacts of a bygone 8-bit era. Here are their stories.

On the star who is re-writing the rules for the next generation.

People used to think the crowdsourced encyclopedia represented all that was wrong with the web. Now it’s a beacon of so much that’s right.

In 1936, Karp Lykov whisked his family into the Siberian wilderness to escape Bolshevik persecution. They remained there, alone, until discovered by a helicopter crew in 1978.

On playing chess and waiting to get arrested.

It’s a club “filled exclusively with people who do not want to be members.”

The llamas, the dress, and the day the internet broke.

But not for want of programmers trying.

How a teenage gamer in the hottest new esport, Overwatch, became a reluctant icon for South Korea’s feminist movement.

Walking the East Tennessee woods with a Carol, aka “The Forest Granny,” a woman who lives off the land.

The parallel lives of a KGB defector and his CIA handler.

An oral history of the Tinderverse.

The growth of an immersive universe that is “part game and part soap opera and part shadow economy.”

How airlines woo the rich.

The intricate dance between highly organized ultras fan organizations, the teams they support, and the mafia for control of the center of curva and the lucrative ticket-touting opportunities that come with it.

The limited vision of the news gurus.

On the current state of the global economy and the inevitable decline of the U.K. and the U.S.:

A decade-long slowdown would accelerate this shift in global wealth and power and would be a grim thing to live through, but from a world-historical perspective it might not be a game-changer: it might just be the non-scenic route to the place we’re going anyway.

This is what happens when you concoct game-fixing allegations against a Major League pitcher because of a perceived slight on Facebook.