I played Red Dead Redemption 2 for the first time this week, and I swiftly caused glorious chaos. Yesterday I sampled a section of Rockstar Games’ upcoming western at their New York City headquarters, a location game-previewing press haven’t had much reason to visit in the last half decade. There, I hoped to finally get a feel for the mega-studio’s first new game since 2013’s Grand Theft Auto V. It’s out so soon, just a little over a month from now on PS4 and Xbox One.

If you had walked on the set of Jim Carrey’s new Showtime series Kidding last spring, you might have thought you were in the wrong place. Instead of the usual premium-cable backdrops, you’d be standing inside a brightly colored children’s television show — in the world of Kidding, it’s the show that Jeff Piccirillo, a.k.a. Jeff Pickles (Carrey) has hosted for 30 years on Columbus, Ohio, public broadcasting — where you might run into the likes of a sad baguette named Ennui Le Triste...

When Matt Lees became a full-time YouTuber, he felt as if he had won the lottery. As a young, ambitious writer, director and presenter, he was able to create low-budget, high-impact films that could reach a worldwide audience, in a way that would have been impossible without the blessing of television’s gatekeepers just a few years earlier. In February 2013, he had his first viral hit, an abridged version of Sony’s announcement of its PlayStation 4 video game console, dubbed with a cheerily acerbic commentary. Within days the video had been watched millions of times.

In recent years behaviours on university campuses have created widespread unease. Safe spaces, trigger warnings, and speech codes. Demands for speakers to be disinvited. Words construed as violence and liberalism described as ‘white supremacy’. Students walking on eggshells, too scared to speak their minds. Controversial speakers violently rebuked – from conservative provocateurs such as Milo Yiannopoulos to serious sociologists such as Charles Murray, to left-leaning academics such as Bret Weinstein.

On Sunday 28 April 1996, Martin Bryant was awoken by his alarm at 6am. He said goodbye to his girlfriend as she left the house, ate some breakfast, and set the burglar alarm before leaving his Hobart residence, as usual. He stopped briefly to purchase a coffee in the small town of Forcett, where he asked the cashier to “boil the kettle less time.” He then drove to the nearby town of Port Arthur, originally a colonial-era convict settlement populated only by a few hundred people.

Formula One is enjoying a boom in young talent. Drivers such as Max Verstappen, Charles Leclerc, Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly, all in their early 20s and the formative stages of their careers, are poised to become the new stars. Yet it is the oldest man on the grid, Kimi Raikkonen, 38, of Finland, who continues to stand out as one of Formula One’s most interesting drivers, breaking with convention through his character and demeanor.

Anna Pavlikova’s parents believed their daughter was the kind of kid who would make Russia truly great. At 17, she read biology textbooks for fun and was hoping to study biotechnology at Russia’s most prestigious school, Moscow State University. She was devoted to animals — when a big storm struck Moscow, she rescued as many injured birds as she could find. She was breeding parakeets in her room, a family that had grown to about a dozen and would sometimes fly around the whole apartment.

“For people who want to make sure the Web serves humanity, we have to concern ourselves with what people are building on top of it,” Tim Berners-Lee told me one morning in downtown Washington, D.C., about a half-mile from the White House. Berners-Lee was speaking about the future of the Internet, as he does often and fervently and with great animation at a remarkable cadence.

We’re eating alone more often than in any previous generation. But why should a meal on our own be uninspired?

The epic effort to rescue Floyd Collins was a battle between heroism and folly, selflessness and selfishness, and life and death.

The long read: The years since 2008 have seen a global crackdown on offshore finance. Yet a few places have doubled down on offering secrecy to the super-rich. Among these, one tiny Caribbean island might be the worst offender.

President Donald Trump is a symptom of a much larger problem. New research suggests that Trump's supporters are so motivated by racism and bigotry that they may be willing to overturn American democracy so that white right-wing Christians like themselves can maintain continued power over our society.

The song “Respect” helped Aretha Franklin soar to fame and became an anthem for the women’s rights movement. But radio royalties for the song went to its writer, Otis Redding.

He was a Hollywood actor who had it all—including a dark side that led to a grisly murder.

A serial killer has allegedly been preying on Louisiana prostitutes. But a new investigation reveals a far scarier theory.

Many Scientologists regarded David Miscavige’s wife to be a “shock absorber” for her husband’s temper. Until late 2006.

Writing my first book got me into debt. To finish the next one, I had to become solvent

In 1982 three teenagers were killed near the shores of Lake Waco in a seemingly inexplicable crime. More than three decades later, the tragic and disturbing case still casts a long, dark shadow.

Princeton’s near-upset of Georgetown in a 1989 first-round game made sure Cinderella would always get invited to the ball.

Residents of Terlingua mourned the murder of the town's most popular bar owner. Then, as conflicting accounts of the victim and his last night emerged, they started picking sides.

Growing up on a remote prison compound made for an oddball upbringing, but the hardest thing I ever had to do was leave.

Last summer a trim guy with wavy brown hair, high cheekbones, and a broad smile could be found making Whoppers, working the drive-through window, and scrubbing bathrooms at a Burger King in Miami. His name was Daniel Schwartz. He learned to make a Whopper in less than 35 seconds and blended in well with his fellow employees, except for the fact that Schwartz had a guy with a video camera trailing him. “I cleaned about 15 toilets in the past two days,” he boasted at one point, as if he’d just com

For more than a decade, Michelle Lyons’s job required her to watch condemned criminals be put to death. After 278 executions, she won't ever be the same.

How a culture shift nearly doomed an iconic local company that once dominated the telecom industry.

“The silent sniper fire of overdoses from pills and heroin has hit Staten Island harder than anyplace else in the city.” Ian Frazier reports.

How do you believe in something that — to the rest of the world — doesn't exist?

What began as a supposedly routine search of this single-wide in the Tennessee woods took a terrible turn when one cop shot his partner dead. Was it just a tragic accident—or was it premeditated, cold-blooded murder?

She was 22 when her memory was obliterated. Twenty-six years later, Su Meck is still learning about the family she raised and the husband she has no recollection of marrying.

In 1990, Susan Orlean published a book called Saturday Night, in which she set out to document how Americans spend their weekly reprieve from work. “Saturday night,” she wrote, “is when you want to do what you want to do and not what you have to do.” One thing people want to do on Saturday night is go out to dinner, so Orlean dedicated a chapter to the restaurant experience. She set this section of the book at the Hilltop Steakhouse, in Saugus, Massachusetts.

Escorts make $100 a hand job — but entrepreneurs like me? We make $5,000 a night. Welcome to the new economy of the oldest profession.

Jamie Smith says he was recruited into the CIA as an undergraduate at Ole Miss, cofounded Blackwater, and has done clandestine intelligence work all over the world, operating out of a counterterrorism boot camp in the woods of north Mississippi. Plenty of people believed him, including the Air Force (which paid him $7 million to train personnel) and William Morrow, which signed him up to write his memoir. There's just one little question: How much of it is true?

As if losing a child to kidnapping wasn’t horrifying enough, ineffective law enforcement agencies and predatory private investigators only add to the confusion and pain. Deana Hebert’s long, maddening search for her daughter — and the ex-husband who took her — may be the rule, not the exception.

Where is Santa Iris Guzman? The question had taken on almost folklore status in Mellisa Sanchez’s family. Like a precious heirloom, it was passed down through four generations, ever since a summer day in 1949, when the little girl with the big brown eyes and soft curls disappeared in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico.

Every few seconds the chatter in the lobby is punctuated by a succession of short, rapid cracks so loud I can feel the concussions in my chest. No one else seems to notice. The Phoenix Convention Center’s southern building is packed with hawkish-looking white men in muted suits who somehow continue networking amid the piercing sound. They’re all wearing convention badges around their necks that display their ominous affiliations: DOD, DOJ, DHS, Raytheon.

By the first days of October, the outdoor basketball court at the Rural Teachers College in Ayotzinapa, a town in the Mexican state of Guerrero, had become an open-air waiting room of despair. Pain emanated like heat. Under the court’s high, corrugated tin roof, the families of 43 missing students gathered to face the hours between search expeditions, protests, and meetings with government officials, human-rights workers, and forensic anthropologists. Assembled in clumps at the court’s edges...