In December, Jeb Bush posted an update on his Facebook page which began by reporting that, over Thanksgiving, he and his family had “shared good food and watched a whole lot of football.” He added, “We also talked about the future of our nation. As a result of these conversations and thoughtful consideration of the kind of strong leadership I think America needs, I have decided to actively explore the possibility of running for President of the United States.”

For most teenagers, getting out of bed in the morning is a drag. But when Lloyd Johnson was 13 years old, he suddenly found waking up not just irritating, but agonizing and confusing. Sometimes he would open his eyes and already be in the car on the way to school — with no memory of showering or getting dressed. Other days, his family would drag him outside and pour water over his head to stir him, but still he’d remain asleep. His toughest mornings began when he woke up in an empty house...

No American ATM has ever been robbed with explosive gas. The same was true in Britain — until 2013. Now there have been more than 90. Inside the birth of a bomb spree. Along the western coast of England, under a half-moon hidden by clouds, a dark Audi sports car with fabricated plates followed an empty road toward a Barclays bank. Inside were five men, dressed all in black, and their gear: crowbars, power tools, coils of flexible...

When Hugo Lucitante was a boy, his tribe sent him away to learn about the outside world so that, one day, he might return and save their village. Can he live up to their hopes?

Chiloé Island, in the Los Lagos region of southern Chile, is home to a fiercely independent seafaring people who have thrived culturally in defiance of the Chilean government. The islanders have developed a distinctive mythology made up of powerful shamans who wear waistcoats made from the flesh of dead virgins, hidden caves that are inhabited by deformed, goat-like mutes and even a phosphorescent ghost-ship that many islanders still believe haunts their coast and harvests...

From imitation Gauguins to a piece of the true cross, how two small-town crooks fooled art collectors around the world and built an epic empire of fakes.

How did a homeless kid from Boston transform himself into a major overlord in Chinatown's criminal underworld?

On a cold, sunny New Year’s Eve in 2014, I am sitting at the edge of my king-size bed at the Four Seasons hotel in New York, munching through a stack of Wagyu beef slices and demolishing a bottle of pinot noir while watching a woman play a man playing a bearded woman on Russian state television. Standing on a stage lit by gleaming chandeliers before an audience of Russia’s elite celebrities, the parodist Elena Vorobei...

America's constitutional democracy is going to collapse. Some day — not tomorrow, not next year, but probably sometime before runaway climate change forces us to seek a new life in outer-space colonies — there is going to be a collapse of the legal and political order and its replacement by something else. If we're lucky, it won't be violent. If we're very lucky, it will lead us to tackle the underlying problems and result in a better, more robust, political system.

The Pigeon King delivered his closing statement to the jury dressed in his only suit. His name was Arlan Galbraith, and he was representing himself. He had abruptly fired his lawyer nearly two years earlier, during the long lead up to the trial, and then ignored the judges who advised him to hire another. He seemed adrift but also supremely confident.

As we toured the finishing department, Nancy DiBella, Rochester Film Finishing Operations Manager for Kodak, pointed out the role of each machine and person we passed. She wore a white lab coat and protective glasses, speaking with a quiet modesty that the other workers shared. I asked DiBella if she gets the chance to see movies shot on the film that goes through her hands. “If I know it’s on print, I’ll go see the movie”, she said. “Even if it’s bad.”

In the 1960s, hundreds of pounds of uranium went missing in Pennsylvania. Is it buried in the ground, poisoning locals—or did Israel steal it to build the bomb?

If you knew where a million dollars' worth of blow was buried, would you go dig it up? Rodney Hyden would. We pick up the story at this critical juncture.

The winning words are often richly onomatopoeic: clarty (muddy), dunderknowle (idiot), nesh (fragile), and others.

By the time Cornelis Drebbel built an oven with a simple thermostat, one of the first manmade feedback mechanisms in history, in the 1620s, he was regarded in Europe as a magisterial, if not mad, inventor.

Three years ago I walked out of my house and put a .32 pistol to my head.” Jared Allen, a property manager from Idaho, chokes up as he tells this story, a tear running down his weathered face. Jared didn’t kill himself that day. He fell to the ground and begged the Lord for help, and soon, his brother-in-law arrived from Canada with a dietary supplement he had designed, EMPowerplus Q96.

On Sept. 13, 2005, Nick Yee died. A few moments later, he came back to life. Then he died again. And he wasn’t the only one. His city was littered with bodies, bones scattered across the floor of the auction house and town square. “It was simply hilarious,” he said, “that everyone was dying and no one was sure what was happening.”

The story of a rapidly expanding industry that has little reason to exist, except the clearest reason in the world.

The scientist and bestselling writer has become the face of a new crusading atheism. But even his closest allies worry that his online provocations do more harm than good

What responsibility does the artist have to society? Speaking at Amherst College in 1963, John F. Kennedy gave one answer to that perpetually nagging question. For a politician it was a highly unusual one, though perhaps less so then than now. “Society must set the artist free,” Kennedy declared, “to follow his vision wherever it takes him.”