On the morning of October 11, 1994, Carol Mabin left her apartment in Medford, Oregon, for her shift at a hospital laundry facility. She never came back. Her nine-year-old daughter, Brin, was watching from her bedroom window when her mother walked down the path to the parking lot. A dark sedan sat at the far … Read more

In 1992, the engineers at SyQuest Technologies held the future of the removable storage industry in their hands. Fuji had approached the Fremont, California company with a new kind of disc drive, one that used a flexible magnetic medium instead of the rigid platters that had made SyQuest the standard. The SyQuest engineers tested it … Read more

December 1941. The marble-floored gallery at 30 West 57th Street in New York. Peggy Guggenheim, art dealer and heiress to a copper-mining fortune, stands before her guests at the opening of her revolutionary gallery, Art of This Century. On her arm is Max Ernst, the 49-year-old German surrealist painter whose work covers the walls. Champagne … Read more

On April 12, 1945, General George S. Patton, the most ferocious commander in the American army, walked behind a wooden shed in a forest in central Germany and vomited against the wall. He was fifty-nine years old. He had led tanks in two world wars, but he had never done this before. What he had … Read more

In June 2016, between Sicily and Tunisia, a wreck was found on the Mediterranean seabed at a depth of 85 meters. At first, experts believed it was an RAF Bristol Beaufort, but photographs soon made it clear the aircraft was not British-built. Six years of research followed, relying on eyewitness accounts from the region and … Read more

In the hill country of Middle Tennessee, a piece of land passed through four different owners between 1884 and 1903. Every deed filed at the Rutherford County Courthouse carried the same strange addition, a single handwritten clause reproduced from one sale to the next, word for word. It read: “The cabin at the eastern edge … Read more

On the afternoon of July 14, 1882, a teamster named James Yoast was hauling a load of wood along the bottom of West Turkey Creek Valley in Arizona Territory, about fifty miles east of Tombstone. The July heat pressed down on the creek bottom and the blackjack oaks gave the only shade for miles. Yoast … Read more

In the autumn of 1884, a carpenter stood on a wooden trestle above Loop Creek in the Selkirk Mountains of British Columbia, driving spikes into a timber nailer at a height that left no practical option if his balance failed. The creek below was not far, but it was far in the way that mattered … Read more

In a Murfreesboro attic sits a box of wedding photographs that Corinne Hadley has not opened in a long time. In one of them she stands at the altar in a pale yellow dress, holding daisies, smiling the way you smile when you believe something completely. The groom is on her left, their arms nearly … Read more