New research finds Pb is the hidden villain behind violent crime, lower IQs, and even the ADHD epidemic. And fixing the problem is a lot cheaper than doing nothing.

It was just a favor to dear old dad. But the next thing Nathan Nicholson knew, he was jet-setting around the world under cover and selling state secrets to the Russians. You know what they say: Like father, like spy

Photo: Jaap Scheeren On a bright May afternoon in 2007, a German artist and printmaker named Hans-Jürgen Kuhl took a seat at an outdoor café directly opposite the colossal facade of the Cologne Cathedral. He ordered an espresso and a slice of plum cake, lit a Lucky Strike, and watched for the buyer.…

George Wright, America’s most elusive fugitive, ran for forty years. He ran from the cops after escaping from prison. He ran from the feds after the most brazen hijacking in history. He ran from the authorities on three continents, hiding out and blending in wherever he went. It was a historic…

Illustration: Mark Allen Miller Had Narrative Science — a company that trains computers to write news stories—created this piece, it probably would not mention that the company’s Chicago headquarters lie only a long baseball toss from the Tribune newspaper building. Nor would it dwell on the fact…

In early 2010, Karl Rove convened a group of businessmen for lunch at a private club in Dallas. The guests included some of the richest and most influential people in Texas. T. Boone Pickens, the corporate raider from Amarillo, was there, as was Harlan Crow, the prodigal son of Trammell Crow, the…

For years before they caught him, the Italian police had no idea that Paolo Di Lauro was one of Naples’s most powerful crime bosses, running a drug and counterfeit-goods empire—and responsible for a peace his turf had rarely known. Now authorities may long for the days when he was in charge. The…

What really happened to Russia’s missing cosmonauts? An incredible tale of space hacking, espionage and death in the lonely reaches of space.

William Trubridge going deep. Photo: Igor Liberti Watch Video Trubridge is a world-record freediver from New Zealand. Lost, then found: Risian The diving flotilla near Kalamata, Greece. James Nestor takes a freediving lesson. JUNKO KITAHAMA’S FACE is pale blue, her mouth agape, her head craned back…

No one would accuse Jaroslav Flegr of being a conformist. A self-described “sloppy dresser,” the 53-year-old Czech scientist has the contemplative air of someone habitually lost in thought, and his still-youthful, square-jawed face is framed by frizzy red hair that encircles his head like a ring of…

The story of the Polgar sisters, chess whizzes who were trained by their father from an early age: "When Susan was the age of many of her students, she dominated the New York Open chess competition. At 16 she crushed several adult opponents and landed on the front page of The New York Times. The…

Canada’s paper money, with its rainbow of colours and picturesque drawings, had become one of the most forged currencies in the G20, a group of the world’s biggest economies – ranking behind countries such as Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Italy, France and Spain for the number of counterfeit notes…

The junior executives’ office at Thinkscope Visioncloud was nicer than any room within a fifty-mile radius of the “Office” studio. After I finished pitching one of my ideas for a low-budget romantic comedy, I was met with silence. One of the execs sheepishly looked at the other execs. He finally…

For this complete-ish oral history in celebration of Wet Hot's 10th anniversary, we asked director and writer David Wain, his cowriter and creative partner, Michael Showalter, and stars including Janeane Garofalo, Paul Rudd, David Hyde Pierce, Elizabeth Banks, and Amy Poehler to reminisce about the…

Watch a major college game, and the action gets weird. You immediately see plays that simply can’t happen in a pro game. At the subdivision and Division II tiers, things get stranger still. And by the time you hit Division III, you begin to see football games that are more philosophical than…

Drones are not remarkable because of their weaponry. There is nothing especially unusual about the missiles they carry, and even the largest models are relatively lightly armed. They are not fast or nimble. What makes them powerful is their ability to see and think. Most of the bigger drones now…

Eleven years since reality programming came to prime-time network television in the United States, thousands of people have been featured on unscripted series across nearly every channel. Does reality TV attract or prey on people who are more likely to engage in horrific or illegal behavior? Does…

Apple was already one of the hottest tech firms in the country. Everyone in the Valley wanted a piece of it. So Steve Jobs proposed a deal: he would allow Xerox to buy a hundred thousand shares of his company for a million dollars—its highly anticipated I.P.O. was just a year away—if parc would…

I met Saleem Shahzad nine days before he disappeared, and he seemed to know that his time was running out. It was May 20th, and Islamabad was full of conspiracy theories about the Abbottabad raid: bin Laden was still alive; Kiyani and Pasha had secretly helped the Americans with the raid. Mostly,…

A gallon-sized jar of whole pickles is something to behold. The jar is the size of a small aquarium. The fat green pickles, floating in swampy juice, look reptilian, their shapes exaggerated by the glass. It weighs 12 pounds, too big to carry with one hand. The gallon jar of pickles is a display of…

Most Americans think of the SAT as the ultimate high-stakes college admissions test, but the Accuplacer has more real claim to the title. (As it happens, the same company, the Education Testing Service, produces both exams.) When students apply to selective colleges, they’re evaluated based on high…

Among those who remember, Vaughn Meader was one of the most famous names in America for a 12-month period from 1962-1963. After that, his cultural significance evaporated almost overnight, his name thoroughly erased from public consciousness to the point of sub-trivia. To get from there to here…

Anyway, the record will probably be Mike Powell’s for many years to come because, like I say, we just don’t jump like we used to. Nobody in years has jumped close enough that the NFL chain gang would even bother to come out and measure. The longest jump of 2010 wasn’t even 28 feet. And the longest…