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

On the old-man project.

When a ring of thieves steals a poet’s beloved dog, one of the world’s most famous women must break her long domestic oppression and discover herself in the process.

A new Ned Kelly film explores the masculinity behind the mask.

Was she the reason he was alive today?

How history forgot Felipe and Vivián Espinosa, two of the American West’s most brutal killers—and the complicated story behind their murderous rampage.

A restless history of Washington Heights.

Half a century on from the summer of love, marijuana is big business and mindfulness a workplace routine. Nat Segnit asks how the movement found itself at the heart of capitalism

The lives of elevators.

In 1997, the former Soviet leader needed money, and Pizza Hut needed a spokesman. Greatness ensued.

For 40 years, journalists chronicled the eccentric royal family of Oudh, deposed aristocrats who lived in a ruined palace in the Indian capital. It was a tragic, astonishing story. But was it true?

On the author of How the Irish Became White.

How the Lyubov Orlova became the infamous “cannibal-rat ghost ship.”

The history of a sundown town.

How did feeling good become a matter of relentless, competitive work; a never-to-be-attained goal which makes us miserable?

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.

When a down-and-out doctor finds his rundown mansion is haunted, he pulls the quintessentially American move: opening the house to the public for a fee. Everything goes wrong from there

How demons destroyed a Florida school.

A white friend admitted that she had never seen a single photo of a lynching. I was shocked, but not surprised. A lynching was a warning. She didn’t need to be warned.

On the meaning of an ancient practice: collecting seashells.

Twenty years ago my hometown made national headlines when the local college staged an internationally acclaimed play about gay men and the AIDS crisis. The people I grew up with are still feeling the aftershocks.

Retracing the writer’s life nearly 60 years after her death.

Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. If the Japanese have conquered south Asia, then they will keep south Asia for ever, if the Germans have captured Tobruk, they will infallibly capture Cairo; if the Russians are in Berlin, it will not be long before they are in London: and so on. This habit of mind leads also to the belief that things will happen more quickly, completely, and catastrophically than they ever do in practice. The rise and fall of empires, the disappearance of cultures and religions, are expected to happen with earthquake suddenness, and processes which have barely started are talked about as though they were already at an end.

According to the movie version, they died side by side, guns blazing, in the crosshairs of half a Bolivian regiment. It’s a great Hollywood ending that happens to be true, mostly: they left America… then died in Bolivia. What Hollywood didn’t know is that Butch and Sundance escaped.

The unlikely rise of the 1983 national croquet champions.