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In a house in Queens, on January 14, 1979, Tommy DeSimone walked through a door expecting the ceremony he had chased his entire life: wine, cigars, and the ritual of being made. Instead, he was met with bullets. The popular story, the one told in Goodfellas, holds that Tommy died because of a barroom beating … Read more

The death of Peggy Guggenheim’s father did not begin with a loss of love but with a revelation. When the Titanic sank on an April night in 1912, the 13-year-old did not yet know that the father the world mourned as a hero had lived a double life. Benjamin Guggenheim, an heir to the family’s … Read more

A screenplay written by hand on bar napkins in Minneapolis, from a first-time feature writer who loaded trucks for a living, became the biggest box-office hit of Clint Eastwood’s career. The film, which centered on a Korean War veteran in a changing Detroit neighborhood, also became the first mainstream American studio production built around a … Read more

Het kerkgebouw was muisstil, iedere blik op mij gericht. Mijn witte jurk glinsterde in het zachte licht, maar mijn handen trilden terwijl ik de microfoon vasthield. De stem van pastor John echode nog na. “Neem jij, Emily, Jake tot jouw echtgenoot, in goede en slechte tijden? ” Jake stond naast me, zijn glimlach perfect, zoals … Read more

Mariann Bevanon first began showing symptoms around 1906. At first, her hands and feet swelled, which is typical of the pituitary disorder she had developed. Over the years, the physical damage worsened, and her face became increasingly deformed. By the time her husband died in 1914, her features had grown more masculine, and folds of … Read more

Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy kept her children on index cards. Each child had a card, updated in her own hand: date of vaccination, date of whooping cough, height, weight, which tooth, which year. She began the system with two babies and kept it running with nine, and she spoke about it proudly for the rest of … Read more

The dust had not yet risen over the plain of Gaugamela when the Macedonian phalanx began its slow, deliberate march. It was the first day of October, 331 BC, and the sun had barely cleared the horizon. From the front ranks, Alexander’s men could see everything, and everything looked wrong. The Persian line before them … Read more

The night before my daughter’s wedding, her fiancé cornered me in the hallway outside the rehearsal dinner and gave me that smile that never quite reaches a man’s eyes. “Dara,” he said, like we were old friends trading pleasantries. “I think the best thing you can do for Laila right now is simply disappear. ” … Read more

On October 17, 1938, a mob enforcer named Vince Caruso walked into a tailor shop on 135th Street in Harlem and slapped a 61-year-old tailor across the face in front of two customers. The tailor, Isaac Rosen, had refused to pay fifty dollars a month in protection money. Caruso laughed, told him to have the … Read more

By the morning of March 21, 1882, Wyatt Earp was a wanted murderer. The night before, he had been a deputy U. S. marshal sworn to enforce federal law across Cochise County, Arizona Territory. In a railyard outside Tucson in the dark, he killed a former deputy named Frank Stilwell with a shotgun at close … Read more