Nine years after a jogger shoved a woman into the path of a London bus, a suspect with royal connections was arrested. Now he is dead, and his sisters want answers

By Eilidh Hargreaves

The principle that a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty has ancient roots. But the sisters of Nicholas Brandram say it counted for little this past June, when London’s Metropolitan Police turned up at his front door with the press in tow. The 44-year-old army veteran and HSBC director was arrested on suspicion of being the “Putney Pusher”—the jogger who, in 2017, shoved a woman into the path of a moving bus, briefly uniting a Brexit-divided nation in outrage.

The CCTV footage of the incident had caused a sensation: a woman falling into the path of the READ ON

The Theranos documentary that wasn’t

By Ravi Somaiya

“Every person that worked on this movie was going through a similar feeling of cognitive dissonance,” Lance Oppenheim, the documentary director, said recently of You Can See Everything, the film he made with Nathan Fielder about the Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. “We would unpack the day’s events, and no one could agree on the seemingly mundane moments that would transpire.”

When I read that, I felt a wave of relief. Even gratitude. Because in 2016, shortly after leaving The New York Times and joining Vice and HBO, I spent two days inside Theranos with Holmes as her company collapsed and she moved towards the federal fraud conviction that forms the backdrop of the new film. I still do not understand what happened in that building. READ ON

For the techies engineering our future, talking to actual women can be a daunting prospect. Fortunately, there’s a conference for that

By Nicholas Clairmont

It is the first day of the second annual SlutCon, in Berkeley, California. I’m at the Visioning and Erotic Frame session, and a skinny man dressed like a magician has just delivered a lecture on how to speak sexually dominantly. During the workshop that followed, a fellow participant—a straight man—looks deep into my eyes and asks me to fellate him. Both of us break into a smirk and make a joke, which means we have failed. But that’s what the coaching is for. I was the only male member of the press to attend an event that, while it READ ON

A quarter-billion-dollar fortune helped Fergie Chambers pursue his revolutionary ambitions. Now he’s in a Spanish prison, fighting to keep the country he loathes from bringing him home

By Rich Cohen

When Fergie Chambers, the wayward son of the Cox media dynasty, decamped to Tunisia at the end of 2023, he must have known he would return to America someday, but this is probably not how he imagined it. He might have pictured himself like Lenin, shuttled across the border in a sealed railroad car at the height of a revolution. Or like Khomeini, summoned from exile in the wake of a triumphant rebellion. Instead, he sits in a Spanish prison, fighting an extradition request that could send him home in handcuffs to face charges of laundering money the U.S. government says went to Hamas. READ ON

For 16 years, a $20 million Basquiat was at the center of a bitter legal battle between an Oscar-winning Italian producer and his ex-wife. Then, just as mysteriously as it vanished, it turned up in a Miami warehouse

By Mattia Ferraresi

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his summer—in the heat and humidity of Miami—a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting estimated to be worth $20 million was reportedly discovered in a warehouse. It had been missing for 16 years, but its surprising reappearance has done little to settle the question of who actually owns it.

Wine of Babylon, painted in 1984 at the height of the artist’s fame, has been at the center of a bitter legal battle lasting nearly three decades between the Italian film producer Vittorio Cecchi Gori and his ex-wife, Rita Rusic, a Croatian-born actress and singer who became a producer herself.

But the reported discovery came with another twist. Citing leaked documents from the READ ON

How Food52 went from a wholesome home-cook community to a $300 million e-commerce empire—and ended up being sold for spare parts

By Jay Cheshes

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ate last year, a week before Christmas, Erika Ayers Badan, the C.E.O. of recipe site Food52 and its home-furnishing and cookware brands, Schoolhouse and Dansk, called a virtual all-hands meeting for the entire company. Many on her staff assumed she’d be announcing some kind of lifeline, or perhaps new owners. “But no,” says Katie Elliott, the former creative director for all three brands. “It was ‘In five minutes, you’ll get a letter, whether you have a job or not.’” That day, 60 percent of the workforce was terminated. The day after Christmas, another 20 percent were out.

It was an unexpected turn of events for Food52, which began in 2009 as a mom-and-pop recipe site founded by former READ ON

In 2024, the Russian president was left a mysterious art collection said to be worth $2 billion. Is he the world’s luckiest dictator or the heir to a hoarder’s junk pile?

By George Nelson

For years, a Moscow widow claimed she was leaving Vladimir Putin one of the world’s greatest art collections: more than 1,000 objects, supposedly worth $2 billion, including works attributed to Leonardo, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Rubens, and Velázquez.

The bequest was taken so seriously that a 24-hour police detail was stationed on the street outside her apartment, while city officials relocated her upstairs neighbors in case their plumbing leaked. Putin himself acknowledged the bequest, signing a directive to accept it as state property, and to find a building in which to exhibit it.

There was just one problem: it was widely READ ON

Facing charges of human trafficking and rape, the manosphere’s most notorious siblings hired their lawyer’s cousin to stage an image makeover. Can you blame a girl for trying?

By Roisin Kelly

Not many people make momentous career decisions at their grandfather’s funeral but in December 2022, Mateea Petrescu did exactly that. Petrescu, a publicist from Bacau, Romania, was asked by her cousin, a lawyer, if she would help to manage the publicity for one of his clients, who had just been arrested on charges of human trafficking, rape, and forming an organized crime group in Bucharest. That client’s name was Andrew Tate.

“I immediately said yes,” says Petrescu, 42. “I’m a girl from the butthole of Romania who does PR and I was asked to do the PR for the READ ON

Two historic jewelry houses claimed a giant yellow-sapphire piece worn by the actress on a Spider-Man red carpet as their own. Now it has seemingly disappeared. What happened?

By Marion Fasel

When a star borrows jewelry to wear on a red carpet, the information about it is typically announced in a simple press release issued by the jeweler or their publicity firm. On July 24, however, a major credit quickly gave way to a tangled web of confusion.

It all started at 10:53 A.M., when Chopard, the Swiss jeweler and watchmaker, sent out a press release featuring two pictures of Zendaya at the Shanghai premiere of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, alongside a description of the massive diamond-and-19-carat-yellow-sapphire spider brooch the actress wore pinned to the hip of her archival READ ON

The abuse was well underway when 14-year-old Jeffrey Epstein first arrived at Interlochen Arts Camp. It got worse decades later when he returned to groom his next victims

By Josie Ensor

It was the summer of 1997 and Amber, a student at Interlochen, an elite arts school in Michigan, was on a lunch break from class. As she walked down a winding path linking the school’s cabins, the 14-year-old was approached at a wishing well by a couple and their Yorkshire terrier. Amber remembers them asking if she was enjoying her studies and whether she planned to return the next year. She wasn’t sure, she told them—it would depend on whether she was able to secure a scholarship. That couple were Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

In hindsight, Amber, who has requested anonymity, realized they were seeking a “perfect candidate” for abuse. “I guess what they were sensing at that moment was that I was financially vulnerable,” she told READ ON

Harvard has come for what may be its last campus outlier: Dudley Co-op, a lefty co-living alternative to the polished, increasingly bland school culture

By Sage Lattman

Looking back now, the stripper pole may have been the beginning of the end. Dudley Co-op, the only “alternative” dorm on the Harvard campus, had its share of lefty undergrad accoutrements—a Communist Manifesto mural, communal vegetarian meals—but when the school banished the living-room stripper pole a few years ago, it was a sign that the historic co-living house had perhaps overstayed its welcome.

Last week, Harvard made it official, announcing that Dudley, the co-op’s parent organization, was shutting down. The e-mail was notably unspecific about the fate of the co-op itself, based across two sprawling Victorians a short walk READ ON

As Majorca strains under record tourism, next week’s total solar eclipse threatens to push the once quaint Spanish island to a breaking point

By Alice Lindsell

On Majorca’s rugged west coast, there’s a cliffside restaurant where diners order paellas the width of the table while looking out at Sa Foradada. Its name—“the pierced one”—refers to the rock formation’s 60-foot-wide hole, which frames the Mediterranean like a natural picture window.

Lately nicknamed the less poetic “Billionaires’ Bay,” this stretch of coastline has become a favored anchorage for the super-yachts of the rich and famous. This summer alone, David Geffen’s 82-room Rising Sun has been moored there, with Kris Jenner, Pedro Pascal, Courteney Cox, and Jennifer Aniston among those spotted aboard.

On August 12, however, all eyes READ ON

This week, Bryan Kohberger withdrew his guilty plea for the murder of four University of Idaho students, seemingly without the help of a lawyer. What’s his next move?

By Howard Blum

Strategy is patience. You have your plan and you keep it close. No need to hurry. No need to rush. You have all the plays locked in your mind.

So you make your move, and then you wait—until it’s time to push the next piece across the board.

There’s no fear. You know no power on earth can touch you. You are fortified by a hidden strength.

Because you possess something they don’t: You know the whole story. You were there.

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ust when it seemed that Bryan Kohberger, a self-confessed multiple murderer, had been locked away forever, the key to his cell as good as thrown away, the 31-year-old former criminal-justice grad student resurfaced. “My actual innocence is my truth,” he trumpeted in a defiant statement he released to READ ON

A look inside Villa Certosa, which played host to all manner of politics and misbehavior (plus, an artificial volcano) during Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s controversial bunga-bunga years, before being sold to the Qataris

By Mattia Ferraresi

Before Mar-a-Lago, there was Villa Certosa. Donald Trump bought his Florida estate in 1985, a few years before the late Silvio Berlusconi acquired his Brobdingnagian property on the northeastern coast of Sardinia, but it was Italy’s bombastic prime minister who provided the contemporary model of a villa where international politics and frat-house spirit merged. During the 2000s, Villa Certosa became a global catalyst of international political discussion, while remaining at a comfortable remove from the protocols and formalities of the traditional places of government.

For decades, Mar-a-Lago existed merely as the holiday home of a real-estate developer of dubious READ ON

The Russian-born fraudster Anna Sorokin, better known as Anna Delvey, has turned notoriety into a career, with campaigns from Goop to French Playboy—and zero signs of remorse

By Lauren Bans

At first scroll, her Instagram presence is like any other influencer’s. There’s a close-up of her bare, pretty face trying a salmon-DNA facial; a recommendation for the best place to go in New York to achieve “glass skin”; heavily curated photos of her in designer dresses as she emerges from taxis or poses in front of Coney Island rides. Then there’s a recent reel that focuses on Anna Delvey’s slim legs as she demonstrates to her 1.1 million followers how to pull up nylons under her ankle monitor. You know, the one that ensures she doesn’t go outside a READ ON

Georgia’s government unveiled the dictator’s “lost” bottles before an audience of collectors, auction-house executives, and the president of Château d’Yquem. It didn’t take long for the official story to unravel

By Jay Cheshes

“Stalin’s wine cellar,” read the subject line of an e-mail I received from a West Coast P.R. firm. The message promised adventure and intrigue. The story it told had everything: Nazis, a Soviet dictator, and some of the world’s most precious wine. Joseph Stalin—the Soviet Union’s supreme ruler from 1929 to 1953 and a murderous tyrant legendary for drinking friends and enemies under the table—was a closet oenophile, the e-mail explained. He had a soft spot for grand cru Bordeaux and hoarded thousands of bottles seized from the Romanovs during the Russian Revolution.

When Hitler’s armies roared across the READ ON

In 2017, a jogger in a fashionable neighborhood shoved a woman into the path of an oncoming bus. The suspect, arrested this week, is reportedly a private banker with ties to the House of Windsor

By Diana Fox

It was the most quintessential London scene: a Friday morning bathed in dappled sunlight in Putney, an upmarket yet unflashy corner of the city. The kind of place where bankers settle down with their young families for a change of pace. There were commuters making their way over Putney Bridge to work. A brown-haired man, running in a gray T-shirt and dark shorts. A red bus rolling along the road. Nothing you would expect to watch again on CCTV, or to go viral, garnering millions of views on social media, or result in a near decade-long investigation.

But that’s what happened on May 5, 2017, at 7:40 READ ON

Did law enforcement make a colossal—even fatal—mistake in the investigation’s early days?

By Howard Blum

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rime doesn’t pay—until you pocket the money. And that is the central issue, one as perplexing as it is disturbing, that continues to challenge investigators as the abduction of Nancy Guthrie stretches into its fifth grim month. Not only has Guthrie, an 84-year-old grandmother with a heart condition, vanished without a trace, but so has her kidnapper. And if he’s no longer trying to land the $4 million payday he had demanded of the family, then what was the point of the entire monstrosity?

Yet, with one lead after another petering out, with suspects taken into custody only to READ ON

The planned 236-acre Six Senses luxury wellness retreat in the Hudson Valley has many locals feeling very un-Zen

By Jonathan Butler

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he first thing to understand about Six Senses Hudson Valley, the proposed luxury destination that InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) has spent three and a half years seeking approval for on a 236-acre estate in the town of Clinton, New York, is that it is not a hotel. It is, the developer’s lawyers insist, a conference center. At various hearings, it has also been described as an agrarian retreat, a wellness hub, and even a camp. But as far as Warren Replansky, an attorney representing a group of locals opposed to the project, is concerned, “if it walks like a hotel and quacks like a hotel, it’s a hotel.” READ ON

Trump spent decades trying to stop planes from flying over his club. Now his tony Palm Beach neighbors say he has finally succeeded—and made their palatial homes unlivable

By Poppy Wood and Natasha Leake

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t was 6:05 a.m. in October last year when Sterling Hamill was awoken by the unmistakable screech of a plane flying low over his home. The 86-year-old retired businessman had moved 11 years earlier from a home near Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s luxury club in Palm Beach, Florida, to avoid the noise of aircraft.

At first, Mr Hamill dismissed the shuddering vibrations as a one-off. Mr Trump has spent around a month at Mar-a-Lago, known as the Winter White House, each year since he made the Florida resort his official residence in 2019.

It is everyone’s business when the president READ ON

As “Jerry Gogosian,” Hilde Lynn Helphenstein found fame skewering the industry online. But after making her, the Internet destroyed her

By Elena Clavarino

Last Sunday, Hilde Lynn Helphenstein was found dead in her hotel room overlooking the lush gardens of the Rosewood in São Paulo, Brazil. She was surrounded by just a few stray objects: an empty vodka bottle, a shattered glass, and prescription-pill bottles. Outside, it was sprinkling rain, and the clouds hung low over the city.

Helphenstein, 40, had undergone a cosmetic procedure three weeks earlier, and was staying in the city to recover. When her surgeon called to check in on her and didn’t hear back, he contacted the hotel staff to get access to her room, where he found her lying lifeless in bed. READ ON

After the billionaire founder of the fast-fashion label plunged to his death on a Catalan mountain trail, his ineffectual heir became a prime suspect

By Katie Gatens

Wearing tortoiseshell glasses and a tweed blazer, Isak Andic didn’t look much like a titan of the Spanish fashion industry when he appeared at the Association of Young Entrepreneurs of Catalonia in 2011. The Mango founder laughed warmly as he fielded questions from fresh-faced students and admitted that even he, on occasion, got it wrong.

The clothing brand had recently chosen the Barcelona footballer Gerard Piqué to front its latest advertising campaign. But Isak Andic readily admitted: “It was the idea of my son, Jonathan.” The billionaire businessman explained that he had been reluctant, preferring Rafael Nadal, the tennis READ ON

Her kidnapping riveted the nation—as did the botched hunt for Guthrie’s abductor. Yet even as hopes dim, a resourceful task force soldiers on

By Howard Blum

Time sure as hell doesn’t heal all wounds. Not when an 84-year-old grandmother with a heart condition has been abducted. Not when there are droplets of dark red blood staining the stone slabs trailing away from the front door of her desert home. Not when the ransom notes have stopped coming. And not when “missing without a trace” is another word for “dead.”

This is the anxious situation that the Special Task Force, a combined F.B.I. and Pima County, Arizona, Sheriff’s Department unit, investigating the kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie, is trying to come to terms with as the search READ ON

The art world is reeling over a murder-for-hire trial accusing famed New York gallerist Brent Sikkema’s husband of his killing, over an alimony dispute involving sex, drugs, and parties

By Stuart Heritage

Divorce is rarely amicable. Given all the heartbreak, frustration, and unending financial attrition, one would expect a little bad feeling to seep out from time to time. However, in the case of famed New York gallerist Brent Sikkema, there is a possibility that things got out of hand. For Sikkema was stabbed to death in 2024, and his estranged husband now finds himself at the center of a salacious murder-for-hire trial.

Sikkema was a well-known figure on the art circuit, counting the Obamas as friends. Championing diverse contemporary artists from his Chelsea gallery, Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, long before the READ ON