The call came into the New York State Police on a winter afternoon, a teletype alert that had been passed from department to department. It was the kind of routine bulletin that detectives skimmed and set aside, but Frank Lawrence read it twice. A man named Lewis Lent had been arrested in Pittsfield, Massachusetts after … Read more

In the mid-1990s, a mall restaurant in Florida could stop you mid-stride. The smell of wood smoke, citrus, and chicken skin turning gold over an open flame drifted out before you even reached the door. Warm corn muffins slid across the counter, and families carried trays to plastic booths beneath a sign bearing the smiling … Read more

In July 2018, a rooftop sign in Kansas City, Missouri, came back on after eighteen years of darkness. It had not been relit to advertise anything. There were no stores left to promote, no products to sell. The sign, which had once been visible from the highway, simply spelled out the name Western Auto, and … Read more

There is a place in Wyoming where the wind behaves oddly, and the man who built his home there learned its secret the hard way. In the autumn of 1910, Anel Kirkbride kept a homestead of 160 acres northwest of a settlement called Lost Cabin, between the Big Horn Mountains and the Powder River. He … Read more

In the middle of a February afternoon in 1981, a car pulled up to the curb at the corner of Broad and Walnut Streets in downtown Philadelphia, stopping beside a pair of uniformed police officers. The driver threw open his door and ran. In the back seat sat a man named Jimmy DeGregorio, a methamphetamine … Read more

Royal Typewriter did not begin in Hartford. The company’s roots lay in a partnership between Edward Hess and Lewis Myers, two men who looked at the typewriter market at the turn of the century and saw a problem. The machines then being sold were expensive, complicated, and built around the assumption that the operator was … Read more

In the autumn of 1881, a cavalry lieutenant and two scouts out of Fort Clamoth in southern Oregon followed the smoke of a dying signal fire for three days through the central Cascades, over the Breakhorse River, and up the long back of a ridge no map at that date carried a name for. On … Read more

In 1979, a gaunt woman lay alone in a Los Angeles hotel room, weighing barely eighty pounds. Her name was Barbara Hutton, and she was dying. Once celebrated as the richest girl in the world, she had inherited fifty million dollars, married seven times, and been courted by princes and movie stars. Now she had … Read more

The two-fingered typing caught the filmmaker’s eye first. Winifred Wagner, at seventy-eight, sat at her desk in Bayreuth, pecking out letters the way she had done for sixty years—quick, efficient, unglamorous strokes that had once managed an international festival and a friendship with the most dangerous man in Europe. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s camera held on her … Read more