Premise One: Eight years ago a drunk Joe Hazelwood piloted the Exxon Valdez into a reef. Premise Two: Eight years ago Joe Hazelwood martyred himself out of pride. Resolution One: After much suffering and introspection, Joe Hazelwood has found peace. Resolution Two: He's resolved absolutely nothing.

In the dusty realm of big-league map collecting, one man cut a darker figure than his milquetoasty colleagues. Armed with an X-Acto knife and an arsenal of fake identities, he systematically ransacked the nation's libraries, hoping in his own peculiar way to dominate the globe.

Along the 43rd parallel in North America, raising pumpkins isn't just a sleepy backyard pursuit—it's an extreme sport. And nowhere are the stakes higher, or the intrigues thicker, than at the annual weigh-off of the World Pumpkin Confederation, the Olympics of garden-patch gigantism.

They are virulent, microscopic menaces, diseases so deadly that they could swiftly destroy our nation's livestock and send the economy into a free fall—which leaves the government with the daunting task of keeping them from our shores. It's a battle being waged across the globe, and in the command center on tiny Plum Island, the folks in the lab coats are on red alert.

Six young men set out on a dead-calm sea to seek their fortunes. Suddenly, they were hit by the worst gale in a century, and there wasn’t even time to shout.

What kind of person sticks a ferret down his pants for more than five consecutive hours? Our writer tried to find out.

As a young climber, David Roberts believed in the greatness of risk. Then death came suddenly, too easily. And it came again and again.

For 90 million years the turtles have massed to lay their eggs. This time they gathered for their own mass murder…