The Zero-Armed Bandit

“I don’t think it belongs here.” Such was the assessment of Bob Vinson, the graveyard shift supervisor at Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Casino in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. The “here” Vinson referred to was a nook just outside the telephone equipment room in the employees-only portion of the second floor of the hotel. The “it” was a curious piece of equipment of unknown origin loitering conspicuously in the cramped side room. It was a metallic gray box about the size of a desk, with a smaller box attached on top near the rear right corner. The front face of the smaller box was an incomprehensible control panel occupied by 28 metal toggle switches in five neat rows, each labeled with a numbered sticker. All of these switches were situated in the down position except for #23, which was toggled up—an oddly ominous asymmetry.

The Blood of the Crab

Horseshoe crab blood is an irreplaceable medical marvel—and so biomedical companies are bleeding 500,000 every year. Can this creature that's been around since the dinosaurs be saved?

The Magic In The Warehouse

Costco became a phenomenon by doing things its own way. But with Amazon ever more powerful, millennial shoppers burgeoning, and a new generation of leaders awaiting its turn, can the company preserve its edge?

Stowaways and Crimes Aboard a Scofflaw Ship

Few places on earth are as free from legal oversight as the high seas. One ship has been among the most persistent offenders.

The Really Big One

Among natural disasters, tsunamis may be the closest to being completely unsurvivable. The only likely way to outlive one is not to be there when it happens: to steer clear of the vulnerable area in the first place, or get yourself to high ground as fast as possible...

How a Technology That Helped Settle the West Became Known as the “Devil’s Rope”

In the mid-1800s, not many (non-native) Americans had ever been west of the Mississippi. When Frederick Law Olmsted visited the West in the 1850s, he remarked that the plains looked like a sea of grasses that moved “in swells after a great storm.” Massive herds of buffalo wandered the plains. Cowboys shepherded cattle across long stretches of no-man’s land. It was truly the wild and unmanaged West, but it was all about to change, due, in large part, to one very simple invention that would come to be known as “the devil’s rope.”

How a Michigan Farmer Made $4 Million Smuggling Rare Pez Containers into the U.S.

It was the first week of January 1994 and snow drifted across the Hungarian border into Austria. The mechanical sputter of a small car approaching the rural checkpoint broke the afternoon silence. Peering through binoculars, an armed guard noticed the car’s driver, his face obscured by dark glasses and a long beard. The guard gestured with his leather-gloved hand for the vehicle to stop. Steve Glew, 42, stepped out of the car wearing a long trench coat, a blue velour tracksuit and Nike sneakers. His son Joshua, a college freshman, emerged bleary-eyed from the passenger side. A bulging military sack occupied the backseat.

The smudged stamps inside their passports told the guard of the Americans’ haphazard route across the freshly divided Yugoslavia. Just days earlier the men had arrived in Slovenia by plane from the U.S. with no luggage and thousands of dollars strapped to their bodies. Now they were trying to cross the border into Austria from Hungary, one of Europe’s most beleaguered countries, with a bag full of mysterious cargo. The guard pointed at the sack with the barrel of his semiautomatic rifle.

“Open,” he said in an iron voice. “Schnell.” Quickly.

The Americans refused.

This is what it’s like to be at war with your body

The compulsion to be free of a limb is no imaginary illness. Meet the man who spent his savings on an amputation—and the surgeon who helped him.

The cold hard facts of freezing to death

As Freezing Persons Recollect the Snow—First Chill—Then Stupor—Then the Letting Go...

The science of rubbernecking

Humans aren't the only creatures who like staring at morbid disaster. What draws us to it?

How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy

Jaroslav Flegr is no kook. And yet, for years, he suspected his mind had been taken over by parasites that had invaded his brain. So the prolific biologist took his science-fiction hunch into the lab. What he’s now discovering will startle you. Could tiny organisms carried by house cats be creeping into our brains, causing everything from car wrecks to schizophrenia?

The 'Wow!' Signal: One Man's Search for SETI's Most Tantalizing Trace of Alien Life

For decades, Robert Gray has been trying to duplicate the most surprising and still-unexplained observation in the history of the search for extraterrestrial life.

The Wrath of the Killdozer

Marvin Heemeyer of Granby, Colorado was a profoundly frustrated muffler repair man. In the late 1990s–after years of protests, petitions, and town meetings–it became obvious to the 52-year-old that he was entwined in a gross miscarriage of justice. His business was ruined by some shady zoning changes, and Heemeyer contended that mayor and city council were corrupt. Even as he was forced to give up his legal fight and sell his land, he hatched one last plan to secretly retool his muffler shop to serve a single malevolent purpose: to construct a machine that would allow him to exact his revenge upon those who had wronged him.

Bound By Tradition

On 20 October 1998, the Zhiqiang Shoe Factory in Harbin, China sent out a press release stating that they were officially halting production of a curious variety of footwear known as “lotus shoes.” This announcement may appear pedestrian to Western eyes, but in a way it was a symbolic epitaph for a bizarre custom which had been in practice in parts of China for about a thousand years: a process known as foot binding.

Getting Bin Laden: What happened that night in Abbottabad

Readers of the Pack: American Best-Selling

IN MAKING THE LIST, his 2001 book about best sellers, former Simon & Schuster editor in chief Michael Korda recalls that the publishing house once commissioned a study of which books made the most money. After a detailed presentation, the consultant said to the editors, "Do you guys realize how much money the company would make if you only published best sellers?" He might as well have told them that they'd do better playing the lottery if they picked the right numbers. Trends come and go, but the best seller remains essentially serendipitous. An editor can be no more certain of finding the next one than a writer can be assured of writing it. "As a rule of thumb," writes John Sutherland, an English scholar who has studied the phenomenon, "what defines the bestseller is bestselling. Nothing else."

El Mirador, the Lost City of the Maya

We were hovering now over the heart of the ancient city of El Mirador, once home to an estimated 200,000 people and the capital of a complex society of interconnected cities and settlements that may have supported upwards of a million people. The last thing you would ever guess from a casual aerial overview was that virtually every topographical contour in the primordial forest was created not by geological and environmental forces but by the vanished inhabitants of one of the world’s foundational civilizations.

Paris From Below

There is an entirely new way to see the City of Light—in the dark. The chic and the daring are going underground to visit some of the best restaurants, jazz clubs, museums and secret tunnels

Pocket Full of Dough

The strange happiness of the Emergency Medic