Just after sunrise on the morning of August 9, 2012, in the Houston suburb of Katy, Scott Catt, a fifty-year-old structural engineer, was awakened by the buzzing of his alarm clock in the master bedroom of the apartment he shared with his twenty-year-old son, Hayden, and his eighteen-year-old daught

When Bill Fong approaches the lane, 15-pound bowling ball in hand, he tries not to breathe. He tries not to think about not breathing. He wants his body to perform a series of complex movements that his muscles themselves have memorized. In short, he wants to become a robot.

After 14 summers excavating in Yellowstone National Park, Doug MacDonald has a simple rule of thumb. “Pretty much anywhere you’d want to pitch a tent, there are artifacts,” he says, holding up a 3,000-year-old obsidian projectile point that his team has just dug out of the ground.

At 1:30 p.m. on Friday, November 29, 1983, a man the FBI called the Yankee Bandit walked into the lobby of a Bank of America in the Melrose district of Los Angeles and stood in line.

There are three moments in the yearlong catastrophe of the COVID-19 pandemic when events might have turned out differently.

Around the nursing home where she lives, in Phoenix, Dorinda Lopez, seventy-one, mostly keeps to herself. People can tell she’s from somewhere else, on account of her southern accent. When she gets angry, as she sometimes does when she talks about the past, it gets thick.

This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly. Growing up in Arizona in the 1990s, Justin Posey wanted to be Indiana Jones.

A New Jersey family bought their ideal home. But according to the creepy letters they started to get, they weren’t the only ones interested in it.

Of course he had impressed Lucille Ball. In the late seventies, the actress, a regular on the game-show circuit, had been a fan of the flashy daytime competition “High Rollers”—in large part because of its dignified host, a young mustachioed Canadian named Alex Trebek.

Not long ago, Mike Reynolds was working at Cody’s Bait and Tackle when two men entered the shop with a jingle. He identified them right away by their accents as Russians. The two men began rifling through fishing poles that didn’t yet have price tags. Reynolds asked them to stop.