The trackball is the thing. Roll it soft and the ball floats. Roll it hard and the ball screams — hundred yards of digital air, a trajectory bent by wind and elevation and the particular cruelty of whatever imaginary course the game has chosen for you. The physics have not meaningfully changed since 1989, when the game was first built in an office park outside Chicago. The man who has designed the courses since then — more than 150 of them — still plays every day, still trying to beat his own best score. According to the company, they have produced over 150,000 machines since 1989, placed in every state, and in twelve countries worldwide. And once a year the people who are best in the world at rolling that ball fly to Las Vegas to find out who is better.

“I’ve tried to stay hidden for the past 20 years,” Lisa tells us when we first make contact with her. 

"I preferred leaving the past behind," she explains, "and instead built a new life." 

She always does.

The post arrives unceremoniously. Just a single user posting on an internal bulletin. Then, it spreads to a series of messages circulating through secure offices in Fort Meade, Maryland. 

By the following week, employees inside one of the most secretive intelligence agencies in the world are given a new directive: a certain category of device is no longer permitted inside the building. Anyone who has brought one in is instructed to remove it immediately.

The devices are small enough to sit unobtrusively on a desk — battery-powered, inexpensive, and widely available in stores across the country. No one can say exactly how many have already made their way into the building. What worries agents most is that they might be able to listen, store fragments of information, and repeat them later, transmitting top-secret information. 

In a place where nearly every conversation contains something classified, the possibility alone is enough to cause worry.

Within weeks, the restriction spreads beyond Fort Meade. The Pentagon considers it a security threat. A naval shipyard circulates similar advisories. National airlines warn against use during plane take-offs and landings. Hospitals overseas remove them from their wards. 

But these objects are already everywhere. Millions of them have entered American homes only months earlier in thin cardboard toy boxes with plastic casings. They are the envy of every school-aged child. The latest obsession. The newest fad. 

Six inches tall, running on AA batteries with oversized eyes, soft fur, and a habit of speaking in strange, babbling sounds that gradually give way, almost imperceptibly, to English words.

No one can say what they might hear, what they might repeat. Or where those words might end up. 

And by the time anyone starts asking these questions, it is already too late. 

He’s put into maximum security. It's where they house a lot of inmates with targets on their back. But he can still hang with other inmates here. And he’s doing that, watching TV news with them one night when a story airs that catches his attention.
“A Utah Department of Correction guard is arrested for smuggling drugs into the prison…”
As Jesus watches, a realization settles over him: the letter he sent to the warden years earlier had been the first domino to fall, setting in motion what would become one of the largest trafficking scandals in the history of the Utah Department of Corrections.
“Cards Jess?” his cell mate holds up a grubby deck to him.
Jesus is so distracted he almost forgets to join in.

In one hand, she holds six red solo cups, the kind easily found at house parties at nearby universities. In her other hand, she carries a gallon of her own well water. Lisa steps right up to the folding table and slams the jug onto its surface. The men stare back. Her eyes bear into theirs as she opens her mouth.

“Your letter tells me that this water is safe to drink,” she says. “I want to see every one of you drink it.”

If there is any illusion that Fernald officials are in control of the narrative, it collapses in this moment. By dawn, the front pages deliver a verdict they cannot spin.

The solo cups are left untouched.

Abby Ellin is the author of "Duped: Double Lives, False Identities and the Con Man I almost Married," the executive producer and host of the podcast "Impostors: The Commander" (season 2), and producer/reporter on The New York Times Presents documentary "To Live and Die in Alabama." She is a frequent contributor to the NY Times and a former columnist for the New York Times Sunday Money and Business section. Her greatest claim to fame is naming Karamel Sutra for Ben and Jerry's.

Who was really to blame? The woman who built the lie — or the world that made her need it? Was John foolish to believe, or just early to a kind of faith the internet would come to demand from all of us?

And when Facebook, MySpace, and Instagram soon arrive, when connection becomes currency and confession becomes content, the pioneers of CollegeClub look at it all and think, with bleary-eyed certainty: See? We weren’t wrong. We just came too soon.

Somewhere in Kansas, Debbie Swenson carries on — as the world she built online fades quietly into pixels. When she dies on April 3, 2020, in Peabody, Kansas, at the age of 59, some part of the truth dies with her.

But on the internet, nothing ever really goes. The story lingers — cached, copied, reassembled by strangers decades later. And maybe that’s the real illusion: that anything, or anyone, can ever truly disappear. Twenty-five years on, the questions remain the same. We’re still reaching for each other through screens, still chasing truth through connection, and connection through lies.

“Calm down,” he bellows back. “I had no idea that was going on.”

“Well, how can you have no idea? You're the head of this office. You're the face of this office. I mean, this is the largest mass murder in Orange County history. How are you not involved in it?”

No response will be enough for Paul at this point. A part of him wonders if he should reel it in.

Nah.

“You’re a fucking idiot.”

Paul lets it all out. No filter.

“This is huge,” Scott says. “We’re going to expose these guys for what they really are.”

Scott pauses. Cathy looks back, waiting anxiously for him to finish. The word comes out heavy, dripping with the years of frustration Scott’s endured from prosecutors who were just a bit too smug and righteous.

“Cheaters.”

The evidence is straightforward, airtight. It should have been a case of swift, uncomplicated justice. Instead, Scott Dekraai’s unfathomable crimes are going to tear down a curtain that has been stitched shut for more than three decades.

The cold-blooded murder of innocent friends will not just shatter a community. It will expose a system where some of the very people sworn to uphold the law had long since abandoned it. The worst mass murder in Seal Beach in decades is about to become one of the largest law enforcement scandals in U.S. history.

For 30 years, Orange County kept a heavy thumb on the scales of justice. And now, criminals as loathed as Dekraai — and even worse — are about to discover they have a second shot at freedom.

"The warehouse door is metal, unmarked, ordinary. Tom raises a hand. The signal. They move.

Inside, it’s all industrial chill and fluorescent light. No guards. No resistance. Just boxes. More of them than anyone cares to count. Still labeled with the names of different processors, a mass of cardboard boxes that — they check — are full of the stolen goods.

Not gold bars. Not jewels. Not electronics, or cash, even.
No, what Tom finds are almonds."

But what I found at Hot Dog U wasn’t just a quirky trade school with a great logo. People arrive from burned-out careers and unexpected life turns, from family kitchens and military mess halls, carrying stories as varied as their menus. They leave with a cart, a diploma, and — if it works — a shot at something better.
There’s something quietly radical about that. In a country where “entrepreneur” has become a buzzword for tech bros and hustlers, the students at Hot Dog U are a different breed. They're working-class dreamers.

Over the course of eight days, this fire chewed its way through 2.5 million cubic feet of cold storage and almost 30 million pounds of food therein. Including over 13 million pounds of surplus butter, purchased by the federal government as part of a longstanding price stabilization scheme and stashed away until they could figure out what to do with it. As it melted, this burbling lactic slurry blended into millions of gallons of hose and sprinkler water and oozed its way out of the rubble, down a hill and into the streets where it turned into a fast-flowing "butter river." A torrent of goop soup carrying a parade of charred fruitcakes, canned hams, and the occasional cob of corn past a line of slipping and sliding firefighters, and towards the city's beloved lakes. A literal flood of environmental ruin.

The 'Great Butter Fire,' as it came to be known, melted itself into Wisconsin lore. Despite its notoriety, the full story of the blaze remains unknown to most — yet unforgettable to those who lived it.

But the more I dig, the more I realize that the case of Goldie Fine isn’t just about one unsolved murder. It is about all of them. If police had admitted the truth about Goldie’s murder, might they have found the real Boston Strangler? We will likely never know.

Her heart is racing. For three years, the Nixons have been searching for Kari Lynn. She should be 19 now, wherever she is. For Kathy, hope rises and falls like the banks of the river. But tonight, it’s overflowing. The tape — a copy of the latest hit video from the New Kids On The Block — supposedly holds a clue.

Kathy presses play. Hangin’ Tough, a quintessential 80s pop track about persistence, about not giving up, about aggressive unyielding, begins to play in their living room.

From the stillness, you might think she’s waiting for someone. She has that air about her — the quiet confidence of someone who’s lived a life with an audience.

It’s only now, engine running, phone lit up with the next order, one foot hovering over the gas, that you realize:
Susan Powter — once a media phenomenon, the platinum-haired icon who yelled at America to "Stop the Insanity!" — is now delivering someone’s dinner in the Nevada sun.

My partner Stephanie swore Eddie Ibanez was a fraud before I ever laid eyes on him, before I witnessed how the shape of him, his face, eyes, teeth, jaw, chin, his cartoon abdomen–his hair pieces–changed appearance as frequently as his biography. But I wasn’t listening. I was packing. Like everybody who surrounded Eddie, I wanted to believe in him.

I remember coming across the fact that the oldest cypress tree in the United States is 2,600 years old. Older than this country ten times over. Older than the British and Byzantines and the Romans. Not quite as old as Walls of Jericho. But older than Christendom. And older than Christ.

Suddenly, quietly, you see a long shadow rising from the lake.
Jack's hand emerges from the lake, and a pair of goggles fly towards the Louisiana sunshine.

“Yeeeeeeeee—”

Neither side, the Green nor the Gray army, has ever won. If you spend the time to read through the 2,500 after-action reports and 40-plus war summaries, the conclusion would be that the war has been a 60-year stalemate. But winning was never the point, anyway. The war is a political statement and the war is an escape. But maybe, the war has always been about reaching back ceaselessly through the decades, past Provincetown and Wolfeboro, past Salem and Greenwich Village, past the blue Yucatan and a white Alaska and into a solitary Long Island bedroom.

Just outside the high desert ski haven of Taos, New Mexico, shortly after the adobe boutique stores give way to untamed, fenced lawns and the paved roads turn to dirt, a swarm of unusual structures begins to appear on the mesa. Glass-faced Earth homes with giant berm walls pop out from the ground, adorned in greenery. A circular Earthen fortress looks out over the horizon, resembling the turret of a castle. To its right, there’s a pyramid built with used beer bottles, wired and plastered together into packed walls. Inside, a ladder leads to a small altar, where a votive candle displays a recognizable figure:

A gray-maned man, holding up a peace sign, under an inscription reading…

I’ll never say die.

Until now, Anna has only been known as Associate 1 – peppered throughout an 81-page federal complaint as an accomplice to a political mob family.

What she lived and what she witnessed has been written about from many other points of view – that of prosecutors, FBI agents, informants, and defendants. But through everything that’s happened, Anna’s perspective has been a mystery. She’s never shared, until now, what she saw and what she lived.

Her story straddles two very different worlds: the inside of what authorities call a “criminal enterprise” and then the quiet workings of a federal prosecution. This story is hers. It’s told how she saw it, how she reflects on everything that happened, and how it changed her life forever.

Forget dry reports and sanitized accounts. This is the unfiltered, unpredictable, and unapologetically honest diary of a witness.

“So then I guess the big question,” she says, “is how do you know our esteemed host Fahim?”

It should be an easy question, one I’ve had plenty of time to ponder. Yet the words refuse to roll off my tongue. I know him as a man I have always admired, a mythic figure since my earliest memories, a charismatic jetsetter I saw occasionally when I was a kid, more frequently the older I got. After waiting more than 30 years to visit his homeland, I travelled to Lebanon to better understand the secrets he carried, embarking on a road trip to excavate mysteries that shaped me. I let loose a meek chuckle to lighten the weight of my answer. 

“Fahim,” I say, “is my dad.” 

"Each blast of the jackhammer shoots through Jeff’s wrists and elbows, rattling his clenched jaw. He barely flinches, keeping the bit inside the tiny gap between the safe’s door and frame. Just a little more, a little more.

When the lock finally snaps, there’s a sudden rush of silence as the jackhammer rears up. Jeff tosses it to the side just before he loses control. The bit is stuck, but the force has busted the lock in half.  Jeff grabs the forgotten pry bar. With what feels like no effort at all after more than an hour of trying to tame the jackhammer, the older brother gingerly pulls open the safe door."

Beyond its cardboard parlor rooms lies a surprising connection to real-life crime solving, a legacy profound beyond pawns.

And, by 1996, a mystery surrounded the game itself.

Pratt, the game’s enigmatic inventor, had gone missing.

“Out of India's population of 400 million, the players are waived off by three lonely figures who stand at Ballard Pier shouting well wishes and good luck. Rex squints as the figures grow smaller, eventually disappearing into the horizon. Little does he realize how different his return will be.”