The first time you picked him up, you felt the weight before you understood anything else. He was heavy, dense, solid in a way that the plastic figures lined up on the store shelf beside him were not. He stood twelve inches tall with twenty-one moving joints, a scar on his right cheek, and a … Read more

Gene Hackman never looked like a movie star. He knew it, said it often, and built an entire career on the irony that his plain, unremarkable face became one of the most expressive instruments in late twentieth-century American cinema. Born Eugene Hackman on January 30, 1930, in San Bernardino, California, he grew up in Danville, … Read more

In the autumn of 1816, Lord Byron talked his way into the Ambrosiana Library in Milan and asked to see two things. The first was a bundle of love letters, nine of them written three hundred years earlier by a woman to a poet. The second was a lock of her hair, long and pale … Read more

The courthouse in Gooding, Idaho, was about as far from a Manhattan church as the American map allows. On February 1st, 1966, Patricia Kennedy Lawford stood before a judge there and ended her twelve-year marriage on grounds the court recorded as mental cruelty. No Kennedy before her had ever divorced, not one, across the entire … Read more

Long before the internet, before department stores dotted every town, and before most American women held jobs outside the home, a door-to-door book salesman named David McConnell discovered something unexpected. During the 1800s, when he offered small bottles of perfume as gifts to housewives in exchange for their attention, the customers showed far more interest … Read more

She was twenty-four years old, engaged to the second in line to the British throne, and suddenly a widow before she had ever become a wife. Six weeks after the engagement was announced to the court and the public, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, was dead of pneumonia, carried off in the worst of … Read more

Casey Kasem had spent nearly four decades as the warmest voice in American radio, the man who counted down the top 40 every weekend and signed off with the same seven words: Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars. He was Shaggy to generations of Scooby-Doo fans, the voice of … Read more

The bullet struck Theodore Roosevelt in the chest just as he began to speak. He had been about to deliver a campaign speech in Milwaukee when a man named John Schrank stepped forward and fired. Roosevelt, a former president of the United States, felt the impact, saw the blood soaking through his shirt, and made … Read more

On January 24, 1989, a crowd gathered outside Florida State Prison through the night, some holding signs that read “Burn, Bundy, burn,” while vendors sold t-shirts and buttons. When word spread that Ted Bundy was dead in the electric chair at age 42, the crowd erupted in cheers. Inside, no family member was present. His … Read more