David Grann

Rudd was driving toward his home, in Hereford, England, when a colleague called him to say that Worlsey’s journey had ended tragically. Rudd pulled over to the side of the highway, and, as cars rattled by, thought about his friend. He remembered an expedition that they had gone on together, in 2011-12, in which they had reënacted the race to the South Pole, a century earlier, between the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and a British party led by Robert Falcon Scott. Rudd and Worsley followed t…

In the twenties, the members of the Osage Indian Nation became the world’s richest people per capita. Then they began to be mysteriously murdered off.

In August, 2011, the trial of the alleged assassins of Khalil Musa and his daughter Marjorie was completed in Guatemala. I had mentioned the slayings in my…

Unravelling the ultimate political conspiracy.

Kemp, a leading scholar of Leonardo, also authenticates works of art—a rare, mysterious, and often bitterly contested skill. His opinions carry the weight of history; they can help a painting become part of the world’s cultural heritage and be exhibited in museums for centuries, or cause it to be tossed into the trash. His judgment can also transform a previously worthless object into something worth tens of millions of dollars. (His imprimatur is so valuable that he must guard against con men f…

As I document in the book, Bourdin had, for more than a decade and a half, serially impersonated children. He was unusually adept at changing his appearance, and was known as the “chameleon.” In 1997, he even stole the identity of a missing American boy named Nicholas Barclay, and went to live with members of Barclay’s family in Texas, who said they believed he was Nicholas. (The story takes an unusual twist when Bourdin suspects that he may be the one who is being conned.) In the summer of 2008…

More on Cameron Todd Willingham and Elizabeth Gilbert

David Grann (whose Reporter at Large piece “Trial by Fire” is nominated for a National Magazine Award) has just released “The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession.” He’ll be blogging all week on the Book Bench. I’m happy to be blogging this week about my new book, a collection of a dozen of my stories from the past decade, nine of which first appeared in The New Yorker. Although Holmes is the subject of just one of them, about the curious death of the world’s foremo…

James Traficant, the flamboyant former Democratic congressman from Ohio who recently completed a seven-year stint in jail for bribery and racketeering, has…

This is an incredibly important and astonishing discovery. It further shows that Percy Harrison Fawcett, who I wrote about in The New Yorker and in my book “The Lost City of Z,” was right about his belief that the Amazon contained a highly complex ancient civilization. And, more important, the discovery contributes to a revolution in our understanding of what the Amazon and the Americas looked like before the arrival of Christopher Columbus. I’ll have more about this tomorrow.