Welcome to Epic. Extraordinary True Stories.

The Big Cigar

It was the '60s. The era of change, war, and rebellion. Huey Newton, the co-founder of the Black Panther Party, was a revolutionary with a vision, first for self-defense against racist policing and then for an “intercommunal” world of bottom-up social reform. He wanted to change the world, and he did. Bert Schneider was a Hollywood revolutionary. With Easy Rider, he ushered in the New Hollywood era, a brief, shining decade when art and commerce were aligned on the silver screen.

Bert and Huey were best friends. Together, they wanted to change the world. And they did. 

Then it was the '70s. The high-water mark of the era of idealism was in the rearview mirror. Huey and Bert had become titanic figures, but drugs, ego, and reactionary action from the government took their toll, and by 1974, Huey and Bert were on the ropes. Huey was being accused of a murder but said he was framed. After two years in solitary confinement on an overturned conviction, he refused to be mistreated in prison again.

So he showed up at Bert’s house in the Hollywood Hills in the middle of the night and said: I need to get out of here. Bert’s only question was: Where? Huey said: Cuba. 

And so Bert, along with his producing partner, Huey, and the Black Panthers, planned a daring escape…

This is the story of Joshuah Bearman’s article, "The Big Cigar," originally published in Playboy and now on the silver screen in a limited series on Apple TV+.

Varnamtown

Two years ago, Twin Peaks star Kyle MacLachlan called Epic co-founder Joshua Davis with a strange story. Kyle had heard that Pablo Escobar did a deal with an entire town of 300 people in rural North Carolina. The story went like this: In exchange for vast wealth and limitless cocaine, the town would create a hidden transshipment site for the Colombian narcotrafficker. Follow Josh and Kyle as they head into the swamps to find out what really happens when a firehose of money and cocaine is turned on a small, tight-knit community.

Radical

Epic's 2023 Sundance winner tells the story of the sixth graders at Jose Urbina López Elementary in Matamoros. The kids are among the worst performing students in Mexico, and their classrooms are marked by hardship and overbearing discipline. It might seem like a dead end, but it is also the perfect place for new teacher Sergio Juárez to try something different. There’s just one problem: Sergio (played by Eugenio Derbez) has no idea what he’s doing. 

Based on an article by Epic co-founder Joshua Davis and directed by Chris Zalla, Radical is a playful, powerfully inspiring film about a teacher who takes an unconventional approach.

The Last Gamble of Tokyo Joe

Ken “Tokyo Joe” Eto was unusual for a high-ranking leader in the Chicago mafia. A Japanese American mobster who spent his formative childhood years during World War II in an internment camp, Eto became a rising star, an enormous earner, a trailblazer of modern mob operations — until his Italian colleagues mistakenly questioned his allegiance and shot him in the head. Three times.

Unfortunately for them, Eto survived. In the hospital, Eto was greeted by law enforcement; he'd been on their radar a long time. There, a federal prosecutor talked a bloodied Eto into turning his back on his personal code of ironclad loyalty and becoming an informant.

Co-published by Epic and Chicago Magazine in a glorious 14-page print spread, Dan O’Sullivan’s atmospheric story starts with a bang, in the literal and figurative sense. And it only gets more captivating from there.

Little America Season 2

A Japanese baseball enthusiast whose midlife reckoning leads her to start her own women’s league. A Somali chef racing against time to prepare his camel-on-a-stick stand for the Minnesota State Fair. A Belizean bra fitter who finds community with the Orthodox Jews of Crown Heights. These are just a few of the true immigrant stories that make up Little America's second season, out December 9, 2022 on Apple TV+.

From Epic and an Oscar-and-Emmy-nominated team of producers including Sian Heder (Academy Award winner for CODA), Lee Eisenberg, Kumail Nanjiani, Emily V. Gordon, Alan Yang, and Natalie Sandy, this critically acclaimed anthology series examines the American experience through slice-of-life portraits that are poignant, funny, sometimes weird, and always nuanced and human.

And! If you haven’t had a chance, check out Little America: The Official Podcast, hosted by Kumail Nanjiani and made with our pals at the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Secrets of the Christmas Tree Trade

In the weeks before Christmas, we enter the Yuletide season of collective decorative mania. In New York City, a hundred-foot pine rises over the rink at Rockefeller Center, storefront windows fill with gifts, and the few empty corners of the city’s prized real estate become short-term showrooms for stately green trees. Hundreds of thousands of Christmas trees pass through these lots each year. And where there is big business on the streets of New York City, there is turf, rivalry, and cutthroat competition. In New York, a half dozen Tree Men control the trade, as they have for decades, locked in an annual game of brinksmanship, betrayal, and wary alliance.

Epic’s holiday release, co-published with New York magazine, takes you behind the scenes of the familiar sidewalk tree stand. Our tale comes from writer Owen Long, who sells Christmas trees himself around New York. His boss, Greg, looks like Santa and sees Christmas as a year-round sport, where January through June are merely the preseason to the real fun.

Greg's rivals are a rogue’s gallery, including but not limited to: a secretive, Scientologist tree tycoon who created the modern tree trade and is rumored to live on a boat in the Atlantic; a part-time carnival operator who once served time for impersonating a police officer during a robbery; and a diminutive man called Willie the Hat who is known for wearing sharkskin gloves because sharkskin is the only material thin enough to count cash with. Then there are the strange characters and incidents from the long history of the Christmas tree, like flammable trees in orphanages, the turn-of-the-century entrepreneurs who transformed Christmas in the city from a “drunken, city-wide riot” into a network of snow-dusted holiday bazaars, and even a murder.

Join us and Owen in this rousing, surprising report from the world of Christmas cheer, an advent calendar of the strange but true life in the world of the Tree Men.

Swamp Boy

In 2015, the day before Halloween, a mild-mannered teenage boy suddenly became delusional. He informed his parents that a demonic voice had begun speaking to him. Over the next weeks, his psychosis deepened: He believed he had transformed into his favorite comic book character, the Swamp Thing. And he was convinced that a family cat was possessed and was telepathically instructing him to murder his own brother.

The family panicked. What the hell happened to their sweet boy? Doctors pronounced that the teen had sudden-onset schizophrenia and he was repeatedly sent to a psychiatric ward. “Schizophrenia from one day to the next?” his parents wondered, dumbfounded. The specialists had few answers, so the parents began an 18-month journey to solve the mystery on their own.

This harrowing medical mystery was published in collaboration with NowThis and illustrated by comic artist Mado Peña, who brought the teenage boy’s hallucinations to life.

Collision Course

Smacked with a brick or a frying pan; sliced with a razor: Mize hurt you one at a time, pulling tools from a briefcase. The wounds needed to look gory enough that the insurance company would buy your story. You’d pop aspirin to make your blood stream faster. Spill a bottle of your urine on your pants like you’d blacked out. Then Mize would get in the “at-fault” vehicle, hit the accelerator. After the impact, Mize would vanish before the responders arrived. You’d tap your scrapes to conjure fresh blood as sirens approached.

Mize wounded you, then he promised to take care of you. He’d give you money, a piece of the insurance claim, and promise a place in the family. Because Mize was family: You may have known him as your Uncle Bill, your friend, your husband, or Dad.

Over many years, Bill Mize turned his own family into a factory for insurance fraud. An ostentatious patriarch who loved speedboats and his costumed Chihuahua, Mize carefully scripted crashes that brought in more than $6 million—before it all came crashing down, bringing the fractured family with it. Writer Lauren Smiley chronicles this twisted crime family in this Epic feature, co-published with New York magazine.

Art Brut

Cesar Arechiga transplanted his living room — and his art studio — into one of Mexico’s most notorious prisons. His idea, at once simple and audacious, was to teach art to seasoned criminals and help them become better people. He realized he’d need backup, so he invited other artists to join him. It was supposed to be an exploration of how art can heal.

But, as Cesar and his friends began critiquing the inmates’ clay sculptures and oil paintings (a dangerous business), the situation got murky. Could art really help these students, or were the teachers naïve? How close is any one person to becoming a criminal, if one mistake kicks off a chain of unfortunate events? And what would happen after the easel stands were folded up, the paint brushes cleaned, and life in the prison resumed?

Sam Edwards recounts what happened when sculpting gouges, canvases, and a group of artists-in-residence came to high-security Puente Grande.

Breaking

On July 7th, 2017, Brian Brown-Easley walked into a bank in the Atlanta suburbs and told a teller that he had a bomb in his backpack. Soon, the bank was surrounded by an army of police who didn’t seem to understand Brian’s simple request: He wanted the VA to pay him the $892 they owed him. He didn’t want the bank's money.

This major motion picture captures Brian’s attempt to be heard when no one was listening. Brian is played with riveting humanity by John Boyega, and his performance is one for the books. "It’s the actor’s ability to reflect, with poise and command, the competing, often incongruent layers of a man most of us will never know that makes this absorbing drama," the Hollywood Reporter writes.

The film won a Special Jury Award for Ensemble Cast in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at Sundance for the nuanced relationship between Boyega and his co-stars. Nicole Beharie and Selenis Leyva play the bank employees that Brian held hostage, Connie Britton plays a reporter he calls, Olivia Washington plays Brian’s wife, and Michael K. Williams, in his final film role, is the police negotiator.

The Magic in the Can

You’d never have guessed it from the location, nearly hidden on a dingy stretch of Ventura Boulevard, but Oil Can Harry’s was something of a gay mecca.

The bar wasn’t glamorous, but that was part of the appeal. Ever since opening its doors in 1968, the place vibrated on a wavelength of earnest inclusivity. When you entered its front doors, beneath the hand-painted profile of Oil Can’s mascot, and stepped onto that scuffed-up dance floor, it didn’t so much feel like you were going out as you were coming home.

Then came the pandemic. After 52 years of service and history, Oil Can Harry’s shut its doors for good. And yet, it lives on in the memories of its patrons — collected here in an oral history that traces the evolution of what it was like to be queer and progressive in the US through the lens of a single space.

The Gauntlet

Kara Hultgreen and Susan Still were trailblazing female aviators who took very different paths toward a shared goal: flying Navy fighter planes destined for combat.

Hultgreen, an unflappable and wickedly competitive Texan who went by the call signs “Hulk” and “Revlon,” rabble-roused in the press, Congress, and everywhere else against the ban restricting women pilots from combat. Susan Still, her friend, rival, and squadron-mate, was poised and careful, and chose not to ruffle feathers.

Both became pilots of the storied F-14 Tomcat, the aircraft immortalized in Top Gun. This is a story about the soaring — and plummeting — path to breaking the Navy’s glass ceiling en route to skyward dreams.

Buckle in for “The Gauntlet” by Katie Hafner and Sophie McNulty, a high-flying, real-life tale co-published with Vox's The Highlight.

Searching for Susy Thunder

In the '80s, Susan Headley was one of the best hackers in the world. A foremother of phone phreaking, she could do just about anything a modern hacker could do with just a landline at her disposal. She’d void bills, scam free calls—and once, alongside a couple friends, she came close to shutting down LA’s phone system altogether.

Then, she disappeared.

Over thirty years later, writer Claire L. Evans decided to go looking for her. Published in partnership with The Verge, Searching for Susy Thunder is a corrective to the predominantly male creation myth of hacking, and the story of one writer’s quest to find a legend who didn’t want to be found.

Sons of Guns

In a convention center in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio, the air turned humid, and the vending machines emptied their final sodas. More than two thousand members of the National Rifle Association stared, expectantly, at the stage before them.

It was 1977, and they had all gathered in Cincinnati for the NRA's annual convention. In the front of the room, men paced the floor with walkie-talkies, wearing bright orange hunting caps. They had spent the last 24 hours plotting a coup. Now, it was time to carry it out.

On the 150th anniversary of the NRA's founding, "Sons of Guns" by Elena Saavedra Buckley looks back on the 1977 Cincinnati Coup—one of the most formative but little-known events in the gun group's history—and how it changed the NRA forever.

Last Resort

This is the story of a father and son on their way to rock bottom. Patrick Allocco Sr. is a broke music promoter and Patrick Allocco Jr. is deep in heroin addiction when they hatch a plan to get their lives back on track by organizing a blowout Nas concert. On New Year’s Eve. In Angola. But instead of a big pay day, the Alloccos find themselves on the run, stranded in a Luandan hotel, thousands of miles from home.

Mercenaries. A rooftop chase. An unfinished hotel that never stops playing Christmas music. "Last Resort," written by Epic co-founder Joshuah Bearman with Rich Schapiro and co-published with New York Magazine, is a fish-out-of-water travelogue like no other. As the Alloccos try to figure out how to get back to New Jersey, they confront not only the predicament of their misadventure, but the emotional reality of one another. Equal parts intrigue and comedy of errors, what begins as a tabloid thriller becomes a story of surprise self-discovery, second chances, and the relationship between father and son.

The Ballad of the Chowchilla Bus Kidnapping

On July 15, 1976, a bus carrying twenty-six children vanished without a trace, in broad daylight, just outside Chowchilla, a tiny town in the heart of California's Central Valley.

It was the largest kidnapping ever in the United States. The town, then the world, went into a panic.

Forty-five years later, Central Valley native Kaleb Horton returns to the forgotten town of Chowchilla to talk to the people who remembered what happened. Co-published with Vox’s The Highlight, "'Nobody's Gonna Talk': The Ballad of the Chowchilla Bus Kidnapping" retells the harrowing tale of a crime that briefly captivated the nation—and its long-term repercussions for the people involved, from the bus driver to the sheriff to the perpetrators and, most importantly, the children.

The Haunting of Girlstown

The haunting began at the end of 2006. At first, the students at the all-girls Catholic boarding school outside of Mexico City complained of a piercing sensation in their legs, rendering them unable to walk. Some were overcome with nausea and fevers. Then they began to see things. Bloody fetuses dragging their umbilical cords through the dorms at night. Apparitions of veiled women dressed in white. Dead girls hanging in the hallways. It was as if the school had been cursed.

"Girlstown," by Daniel Hernandez and co-published with Vox, revisits the chilling outbreak that struck the boarding school that fateful year. It follows the young women who came to Girlstown hoping to escape countless horrors outside its walls. And how these horrors, in some form, had followed the girls inside.

Monster Mythology

A shapeshifting spirit who doles out misfortune to those too drunk to find their way home. A floating head who hunts for infants to eat, using her exposed entrails to lure them into her waiting mouth. A tribe of cannibals who live underground, snatching anyone foolish enough to cross overhead.

Our field guide to the world's creepiest myths, "Monster Mythology" is an ongoing series produced in partnership with Atlas Obscura. The series explores spooky folk traditions, local legends, and campfire stories from around the world with an open mind and a new appreciation for the stranger things in life, from trickster spirits to good old-fashioned creatures that go bump in the night.

Homebound

A year ago, time stopped. Offices emptied. Shelves emptied. Streets emptied. Everyone stocked up and holed up, and waited to see what would happen — to themselves, to their loved ones, to the world. It was in this moment that writer Davy Rothbart had to make one of the biggest decisions of his life: whether or not to pull his aging father out of a nursing home two thousand miles away. Afraid but determined, he strapped his young son to his back, and flew home in the middle of the largest pandemic in a century.

In Epic’s latest feature, "Homebound," co-published with Vox’s The Highlight, Rothbart recalls his journey home and all the painful realizations that came with it, including how this last year has changed us, who we label “expendable,” and ultimately, how we chart a path forward now that hope is on the horizon.

They Didn't See Me As Innocent

When George Floyd was killed by police last May, people around the world took to the streets in protest. Yet for many non-Black and non-brown people, the fight to end police brutality was still intangible—a headline rather than a lived experience. And for writer Kiana Moore, closing this gap, and showing how young so many Black and brown people are when first given a reason not to trust the police, felt like a necessity to move forward.

"They Didn't See Me As Innocent," written by Moore and co-published with Vox's The Highlight, is a collection of first person stories detailing Black and brown people's harrowing first experiences with police. These stories hope to shed light on the ongoing realities Black and brown people have endured at the hands of those sworn to protect us, as well as the scars these experiences left behind—in order to show why we need change now.

Go For Broke

“Go For Broke" is a new podcast that examines historical moments of irrational exuberance. Moments when people became caught up in an idea that, because of their blind enthusiasm, expanded into a bubble that eventually popped.

The first season, hosted by Julia Furlan and produced with Vox Media Podcast Network, unpacks the dotcom bubble of 2000, in which the rise of venture capital money and stock market speculation, combined with early ecommerce, led to trillions of dollars created and lost, seemingly overnight. It dives into the stories of the people who bought into and caused the dotcom bubble—and questions whether we've really learned from our mistakes.

The Rise and Fall of Pot's Superman

In 2012, father-and-son weed activists Carl and Forrest Anderson set in motion one of the most surprising investigations in Bay Area history—one that would last three years, redefine the landscape of legal cannabis in the region, and lead to a 15-count indictment of their former union leader.

His name was Dan Rush, and he was the Cannabis Director for the United Food and Commercial Workers, a powerful labor union with 1.3 million members and close ties to the Democratic Party. To many, Rush was better known as "Superman." He rode around Oakland on a Harley adorned with Superman's iconic red-and-yellow shield decals. When his cell phone rang, it played the theme from the Superman movies.

Superman had, at the time, become the face of the legal pot movement in California and beyond, giving quotes to national magazines and lobbying politicians to pass cannabis-friendly laws. And then, he crossed the wrong weed dispensary—the Andersons'—and things turned ugly.

"The Rise and Fall of Pot's Superman," by Jason Fagone, unveils Rush's corrupt apparatus of shakedowns, bribes, and shady financial dealings over bowls of pho. And it exposes how the utopian ideals of the weed movement evolved into the dirty reality of legalization, giving rise to a different kind of illegal activity. Co-published with The San Francisco Chronicle, this is the story of the weed entrepreneurs who partnered with Rush—and ultimately plotted his undoing.

Order "Little America" the Book!

Nearly everyone in America came from somewhere else. This is a fundamental part of the American idea—an identity and place open to everyone. People arrive from all points distant, speaking a thousand languages, carrying every culture, each with their own reason for uprooting themselves to try something new. Everyone has their own unique story. Little America is a collection of those stories, told by the people who lived them. Together, they form a wholly original, at times unexpected portrait of America’s immigrants—and thereby a portrait of America itself. The book includes over one hundred color photographs and an introduction by Kumail Nanjiani.

The Awakening of Norman Rockwell

For most of his life, Norman Rockwell was the patron saint of white, middle-class Americana. He was a staunch Republican with a secured artistic legacy and a tenured job at the Saturday Evening Post drawing portraits that defined the nation's most idyllic self-image. But then, something shifted: Semi-retired and newly widowed, Rockwell found himself swept up in the counterculture of the Sixties. He began to question his long-held beliefs and reevaluate his standing in the world. As his politics moved further left, his art followed. Beginning with the infamous civil-rights era painting The Problem We All Live With, Rockwell dove headfirst into upending everything he previously stood for. "The Awakening of Norman Rockwell," published on Vox's The Highlight, traces the story of Rockwell's radical rebirth.

Flex

The rules of competitive yoga are simple: three minutes, seven poses, five seconds each. The road to reach the Yoga World Championship, however, is a little more complicated.

In 2004, Jared McCann was coming off a three-day bender when he paused in front of a hot-yoga studio. Hungover from a cocktail of cocaine, Ecstasy, and booze, he realized that partying wasn’t helping him face his inner demons—and it was time to try something new.

Around the same time in Dallas, an overweight guy named Joseph Encinia felt like he would always be defined by his rheumatoid arthritis. One evening, he spotted a girl seated in full lotus and wondered if yoga could heal him in a way that medicine and surgery had not.

When their journeys began, neither man imagined he’d make it to the Yoga World Championship. Co-published with Esquire, "Flex" by Ben Paynter tells the story of an unlikely rivalry and how two extremely flexible, Speedo-clad men stretched their way to the heights of competitive yoga

The Ticket

When Allen Goldenblue was 12 years old, he made two decisions. The first was to swear to obey the commandments of the Mormon Church. The second was to scalp four thousand dollars worth of tickets to the 1997 Final Four basketball games.

By the time he turned 30, Allen had become fully embedded in the world of high-end Mormon ticket hustlers, selling tickets everywhere from the World Cup in Germany to the Winter Olympics in Sochi. He’d worked street corners at the Kentucky Derby and hotel lobbies by the Super Bowl, all while evading security guards, police squads, and teams of search helicopters. With a crisp suit and a tidy Mormon haircut, no one suspected a thing.

In The Ticket, Goldenblue reflects on his journey from the priesthood in Idaho to the barricaded police station in Porto Alegre, Brazil where everything came crashing down. Co-published with SBNation, this is a story about the freedom dirty money provides, the toll it takes on the soul, and whether, once you’ve tasted success as a con artist, you can ever set the the tricks of the trade aside.

Lilith Fair: An Oral History

It was 1996 and singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan was rapidly ascending through the music industry, with over 2.8 million albums sold. Sheryl Crow, Melissa Etheridge, and Tracy Chapman had all hit the top 40. Jewel had gone ten times platinum. The Dixie Chicks had exploded. Shania Twain was the biggest star in America.

But these artists kept hearing “no.” No, we can’t play your song, we already have a woman artist in rotation. No, you can’t put two women on the same concert bill, it's ticket sales poison. McLachlan decided to prove them wrong, assembling a bill of over 250 female superstars to play massive outdoor venues. The festival was called Lilith Fair.

Two decades later, writer Jessica Hopper revisits Lilith Fair’s creation, its swift backlash, and its dual legacy as a visionary event and cultural punchline. Building a Mystery: An Oral History of Lilith Fair,” co-published with Vanity Fair, is the real story of how Lilith came to be—and what it ended up meaning to a generation that had never seen anything like it before.

Mueller and Me

Late in the winter of 2018, as the tally of guilty pleas and jail sentences from Robert Mueller's Trump-Russia investigation ticked upwards, W. Sam Patten took stock of his resume. The political consultant and lobbyist had spent time in Ukraine, sharing an office with Paul Manafort. He had done very-possibly-kind-of-shady work in Africa and Mexico for Cambridge Analytica. He was in frequent contact with Steve Bannon. On the whole, Patten felt this didn't look great. That was about when the FBI arrived and Patten started to talk.

"Mueller and Me" is a window into the baffling misadventures of W. Sam Patten, whom Robert Mueller cites in his 448 page report as a valuable source. This darkly funny, piece—co-published with our partners at New York Magazine—unravels Patten's character, as he learns his way around the Special Counsel's vending machines and decides to take up boxing to "train to fight in prison." The end result isn’t just a peek behind the curtain of the Mueller investigation—it's a look at a new generation of American lobbyists and consultants-for-hire who went out to impart the good word of democracy and ended up undermining our own.

The Bicycle Thief

Tom Justice was a gifted cyclist on track for Olympic gold. From his early years, he was groomed by coaches to represent the US on its national team. A charming and popular high schooler, Justice's peers predicted he'd be on the cover of a Wheaties Box one day.

And then he started robbing banks.

Described by tellers as clean cut, Justice wore a button down, khakis, and, curiously, a Rick James-style wig when he’d walk up to teller windows and politely demand cash. Then he’d thank the employees and calmly exit the bank. Once outside, he'd strip down to a patriotic spandex body suit, snap on a silver helmet, and pedal quietly into the night. For years, Justice evaded police and the FBI, robbing a total of 26 banks across the country. He never used a weapon. And, for years, he never kept the cash.

"The Bicycle Thief" is the story of one of the most prodigious bank robbers in American history. It traces Justice's journey from a teen lavished with praise to a young adult struggling to find a sense of distinction. Justice’s life and historic crime spree is just as much about the American imperative for fame and a life of consequence as it is the thrill of the steal.

Precocious

Patrick Burleigh was 18 months-old when he grew his first pubic hair. By the time he turned three, he had a mustache and the testosterone levels of a teenager. At nine he could pass for an adult nearly twice his age.

The men in Burleigh’s family carry a gene that causes them to experience an extremely early onset of puberty. From his great grandfather’s stint in WWI at age 11 to the author's own way-too-youthful misadventures with LSD and tagging across Venice Beach in the 1990s, the Burleigh boys have been saddled with the burden and responsibilities of manhood while still children. But it wasn’t until Burleigh was set to have a son himself—a son very much at risk to inherit his genetic mutation—that he dug into his family history and confronted his own tortured childhood.

"Precocious " is a recollection of Burleigh's fraught early years as unnaturally advanced young man, and an incisive examination of the baggage that men pass down to their sons. His condition was extreme, but if illness is metaphor, then Burleigh's story has a lot to say about how we teach our boys how to confront the promise and peril of masculinity.

The Priest of Abu Ghraib

In May of 2004, Joshua Casteel, a 22-year old evangelical from Iowa, received a letter of deployment. He’d be going to Abu Ghraib prison. Everyone who knew him was surprised.

Casteel was devout and deeply opposed to the war on terror. And yet he would be an interrogator. And he turned out to be good at it. Casteel sat with Iraqi schoolboys, taxi drivers, farmers, and imams. He asked them about their personal lives, their families, and their children. He gained their trust. And from that, he gained information. He was deeply conflicted, but his superiors were in awe. His platoonmates nicknamed him “Priest.” And he continued his work right up until the day he fell terribly ill.

Our latest article by Jen Percy—published in partnership with Smithsonian—traces Casteel's journey from Cedar Rapids to Baghdad and back. It's an odyssey marked by pain and moral quandary; the story of a brilliant-but-tortured man working to reconcile his own faith with the stark realities of war and crushing expectations of patriotism.

Landfall

It was sudden. A brilliant fireball flashed over a tiny village high in the Peruvian Andes. A local radio host announced the appearance of a UFO. One villager figured it must be Superman. Others swore it was an antahualla, a mythical creature in local lore that soars between mountaintops, menacing those below. For those on the ground, it was the brightest thing anyone had ever seen in the sky.

What they in fact saw was a rock, ten tons of chondrite burning at 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit as it entered the atmosphere as one of the largest meteorites in living memory. But it was a strange arrival. Scientists were shocked that it left such a large crater. Some locals feared it was a malevolent omen. And collectors wanted a piece of it. Which meant that very soon meteorite hunters—a small, rivalrous clan of field adventurers in the high-end market for rare celestial stones—would be coming for it.

I'm Still Here

The winter of 2011 wouldn’t be the last time Clancy Martin ended up on psychiatric hold. His whole life has been one long suicide watch, from childhood onward. Martin has rendered his ordeal into a darkly funny autobiographical essay—published in collaboration with The Highline—that takes us through the aftermath of his fifth suicide attempt. From the doctors who give him advice about “how to do it better next time”, to the patients' ghosts who haunt the halls at the Research Psychiatric Center, Martin illuminates the mind of the chronically suicidal with startling candor and insight. And in the process what he learns about humanity has meaning for every one of us.

Demon Underneath

Perhaps you recall John DeLorean, the engineering prodigy turned playboy automaker? His eponymous car was a symbol of Reaganonomic chic. It was cemented into pop-culture by Marty McFly. It was stylish, it was expensive, it was the future. It was also a fateful disaster.

Perhaps you also recall the grainy footage of DeLorean in an airport hotel, clinking champagne glasses over twenty-seven kilograms of cocaine. It was meant to be a $6.5 million down payment on a larger drug deal to save his doomed company. But it was not meant to be at all. DeLorean’s toast was followed by a tragicomic discovery—that he was the only person in the room not working for the federal government.

“Demon Underneath” by Alex Pappademas revisits DeLorean's notorious yarn. And what a yarn it is. There are palm readers, messengers in mink, proclamations from a nuclear shelter, an ill-conceived toiletry line, and two grocery bags of stolen documents that bring it all crashing down.

Lady Leadfoot

Denise McCluggage was the kind of woman who turned heads. Whip-smart, stylish, and poised, she became a pioneering sports journalist and race-car driver in an era when those achievements were all-but-impossible for women. And when she wasn't racing the cars she loved, Denise was leading a free-wheeling American life among the cultural vanguard of her time—hobnobbing with (and occasionally dating) the likes of Miles Davis, Steve McQueen, and Dave Brubeck—and breaking barriers everywhere she went.

Written by Amy Wallace and published in Sports Illustrated, this story brings to life a uniquely modern and largely forgotten Feminist icon who broke through the barriers of her time in her beloved ’49 black MG-TC. Or her Fiat-Abarth 750 Zagato. Or her Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint Veloce. And especially in her Ferrari 250 short wheel-base Berlinetta, which is the car Denise drove with verve and bravado in her legendary Sebring win in 1961, the first for a woman behind the wheel in professional racing.

The Love Story that Upended the Texas Prison System

We've got a love story for you: one for the ages. It's the tale of Fred Cruz, a heroin addict, and Frances Jalet, a divorcee, mother, and one of the first women to graduate from Columbia Law School. Inspired by the civil rights movement, Jalet walked away from her sedate New England life to become a legal aid lawyer in Texas. She met Cruz in prison and their complicated romance upended the Texas prison system forever, landing them in the Supreme Court and inspiring the prison reform movement in the US.

This remarkable story from Ethan Watters was produced in conjunction with Texas Monthly and offers a measure of hope that love and conviction can prevail in the most dire of circumstances.

Little America

Everyone here came from somewhere else. Even Native Americans crossed the Bering Strait at some point. This is the basic American idea — an identity open to all — but it can be easy to forget from inside. And that’s when politics can turn ugly, as it has recently, with our political narrative becoming a story of blame and fear. “Little America” is meant to counter that narrative with a fuller portrait of our most recent arrivals. Here we present just a few stories. You’ll meet a woman who kissed a car for 50 hours. A man who escaped communism via zip-line. A Hindu Mayor of a small Kansas town. These stories are a small, collective portrait of America’s immigrants. And thereby a portrait of America itself.

Heaven’s Gate: The Sequel

Remember Heaven’s Gate? It’s been two decades since 39 members of a millenarian, UFO-obsessed cult laced up identical Nike sneakers, donned matching jumpsuits (with an embroidered patch identifying them as the “Away Team”), ate some applesauce laced with phenobarbital, and laid down to die in unison in a rented mansion outside San Diego.

"Heaven's Gate: The Sequel" is a reprint of a 2007 article about the group, originally published in L.A. Weekly. The piece tells the story of the cult, its members and its beliefs, and a lone survivor named Rio. Because Rio did not stay on Earth because he lost faith or got cold feet. There was a reason, he said, that he was left behind.

Love in the Time of Robots

In 2002, Hiroshi Ishiguro introduced his five-year-old daughter to her android replica—an identical model he’d built from silicon and servos. "Let's play," the robot said. Ishiguro's daughter looked at her mirror image, a strange, blinking, breathing, human-like thing, and burst into tears.

Ishiguro's goal is to crack the code of "humanness"—to imbue a machine with perfectly life-like features and functions, so that one day we might form a relationship with a robot the way we would another person. For all its eccentricities, the inventor's work is an attempt to understand the intricacies of romance, empathy, and friendship. But the search for human connection can be a deeply lonely place.

The Man Who Forgot He Was a Rap Legend

T La Rock was one of the pioneers of hip-hop, an old-school legend sampled by Public Enemy and Nas. But after a brutal attack put him in a nursing home, he had to fight to recover his identity, starting with the fact that he’d ever been a rapper at all.

What Goes Up

If you looked up into the Phoenix sky in the 1970s and saw a helicopter, it was likely Jerry Foster. An airborne cowboy, exploring a new frontier. He'd fly five feet over morning traffic, beaming his footage to local news, and then head to the desert for an afternoon of search and rescue. Until, of course, he flew too close to the sun.

The things that made Foster want to fly were the things that eventually brought him back to Earth. His is a tale of bravery and mid-air chases and heroic rescues, but also of hubris, drugs, and dark nights of the soul. Foster fell, but not before he lived an incredible life of adventure in the air.

For further reading, please check out Jerry Foster's memoir, Earthbound Misfit.

The Door Is The Party

During Joshuah Bearman's first trip to The Sundance Film Festival in 2007, he wound up floating through the social scene and seeing almost no movies. That year, and all years since, Sundance has felt the same: a weirdly balanced amalgam of high art, modest commerce, and meaningless social frenzy — from which Bearman distilled a strangely adaptable principle of life: The Door is the Party.

Unfathomable

Charles and John Deane knew it would be dangerous. But the brothers—raised in the slums of Victorian London—also knew that plundering undersea shipwrecks could make them phenomenally rich. And so, in 1828, they invented the world’s first practical deep-sea diving rig.

Largely forgotten by history, the brothers opened a new frontier for human exploration—and exploitation. They achieved glory but paid the price in suffering, estrangement, and madness.

The Cold War

Dennis Roeper didn’t want to start a war. He drove an ice cream truck in Salem, Oregon, and liked to say that he was in the business of “selling smiles.” He loved rolling into a park and seeing that look of delight in kids' eyes. It was his dream job.

Then Efrain Escobar rolled into town. Efrain worked non-stop and seemed to ignore the informal code of conduct of the Salem ice cream trade. What began as a simple turf war, erupted into an all out ice cream offensive. Before long, the two men couldn’t even remember why they were fighting. Soon, they were on the verge of destroying the thing they loved the most: the joy of ice cream.

Arab Spring Break

Chris Jeon was determined to make it to Wall Street. But after landing his dream college internship with BlackRock, something unexpected happened. Spreadsheets and financial analysis made him feel anxious, stifled. Sitting in his cubicle, he decided it was time to do something drastically different: join the rebels fighting in Libya.

In the midst of one country's revolution to rebuild, grow, and change, Chris saw an opportunity to do the same for himself. But what started as an effort to break with the past escalated into something different; it wasn't long before Libya unleashed a side of Chris that he couldn’t control.

Silk Road Part II

All systems are vulnerable to corruption. In Part II of the true crime saga of the Silk Road, federal agents are mounting a wide-ranging manhunt for the ruthless Dread Pirate Roberts. They are counting on the fact that in the era of informational perpetuity, you only have to be careless once. As they follow the digital breadcrumbs linking DPR to Ross Ulbricht, it becomes clear that Ross’ remarkable transformation from Eagle Scout to ruthless kingpin is complete, proving that ordinary people--sons, friends, boyfriends, idealists--are capable of terrible things.

Silk Road Part I

Ross Ulbricht was a young, handsome, and charming physics student who played in drum circles, made crystals, and lived in cheap Craigslist shares. Online, he was also the Dread Pirate Roberts, multi-millionaire proprietor of a 21st Century drug empire and the target of a massive federal manhunt.

This extraordinary story chronicles Ross’ transformation from Eagle Scout to Silk Road kingpin, and follows the government’s nationwide race to bring him down. It is a true crime saga for our digital age, a non-fiction novella in two parts that tells a tale of corrupted ideals and the allure of power, and how easy it is to become lost.

Spare Parts

The kids at Carl Hayden High School were never expected to succeed. Many were poor and the drop out rate was high. The last thing anyone thought they would do was enter the national underwater robotics championship.

After all, Carl Hayden didn't even have a swimming pool and their robot team consisted of four immigrant kids with no budget. But they figured they'd give it a try, pitting themselves against the best college engineers in the country. MIT would be there, backed by Exxon-Mobil, but these kids didn't know enough to be scared. All they knew was that they had built a damn good robot.

Pipino Gentleman Thief

On October 9, 1991, a centuries-old painting was brazenly stolen from the Ducale Palace, one of Venice, Italy’s most famous landmarks. Newspapers declared that “expert thieves” had pulled off the incredible heist, but detective Antonio Palmosi knew it was the work of one man: Vincenzo Pipino, the most accomplished thief the city had seen in a generation.

Pipino had been robbing the rich for decades, but the Ducale caper upended his life. The police knew he was responsible and gave him 20 days to get the art back. The problem: Local mob boss “Angel Face” Maniero now had the painting.

The heist, as it turned out, was only the beginning.

Into The Zombie Underworld

On November 7, 2006, something terrible happened to Nadathe Joassaint, a 26 year old Haitian beauty. Somebody called her out of her house and, when she came back in, she collapsed and died. There were no visible wounds.

Two months later, a large mob gathered in front of Judge Isaac Etienne's home. They demanded a trial and shoved forward two badly beaten men. Nadathe's mother then leveled one of the few accusations in the criminal code more spectacular than murder:

"He turned my daughter into a zombie!" she shouted. "Give her back."

The Mercenary

When a gold mine was robbed and two guards killed, Roy Peterson got hired to track down the loot in Southern Peru. Problem was, he had two replaced hips and one blind eye. But the former Special Forces operative was sure that one good job could fix everything.

Maria was a cop in Lima who had been divorced and sitting at a desk for a decade. She wasn’t looking for adventure anymore. Then she met Roy. In the rugged mountains of Peru, the two set off to solve the case with the hope that this time, things would be different for both of them.

Argo

In 1979, the U.S. Embassy in Iran was overrun by an angry mob. Fifty-two employees were taken hostage, but six Americans escaped and were hiding in Tehran.

CIA agent Tony Mendez got the job of bringing them home. His plan: pretend he was a producer making a science fiction film in Iran, hook up with the hostages, and sneak them out. It wasn't the usual cover for "exfiltrations." Then again, there's a fine line between statecraft and stagecraft. And why not use a movie as cover? This wasn't just any movie. It was a movie that would save six people's lives.

Deep Sea Cowboys

In 2006, a Coast Guard helicopter plucked the panicking crew off the deck of a capsized ship off the coast of Alaska, leaving behind its $100 million dollar payload.

That's when the salvage experts at Titan Maritime showed up, and helicoptered on to the ship. Their mission: flip the 654-foot vessel upright and sail it to shore.

Over 10 days, the Titan team fought the weather, each other, and time to save the stricken vessel. They'd make millions if they succeeded. If they failed, they'd all die.

La Vida Robot

The kids at Carl Hayden High School were never expected to succeed. Many were poor and the drop out rate was high. The last thing anyone thought they would do was enter the national underwater robotics championship.

After all, Carl Hayden didn't even have a swimming pool and their robot team consisted of four undocumented immigrant kids with no budget. But they figured they'd give it a try, pitting themselves against the best college engineers in the country. MIT would be there, backed by Exxon-Mobil, but these kids didn't know enough to be scared. All they knew was that they had built a damn good robot.