This unlikely millionaire couldn’t have been a better advertisement for the lottery: a day laborer down to his last dollar, suddenly rocketing to exorbitant wealth. 

Using greyhounds for sport was always a haphazard affair. No one had the slightest idea of how to race dogs other than by turning them loose in a large pen to chase wild rabbits.

“Mushmouth” Johnson’s life was in constant tension between corruption and philanthropy

How Steve Schillinger went from a stockbroker to the pioneer of a multibillion-dollar industry to a fugitive from justice who would die in exile.

With a simple invention, Tommy Carmichael broke the slot machines. “You got a credit card that won’t run out,” he marveled.

The art of the gamble, one famous gambler at a time.

With a roll of the dice, we escape to a time when superstition enchanted the world.

You wouldn’t expect James McMillan to bluff. He once called Lyndon Johnson “the most bigoted bastard that I’ve ever known.”

The true story of “Admiral” Cornero, the gambling outlaw who inspired Raymond Chandler, Cary Grant, and Martin Scorsese.

The elegant dealer with the mustache was one of the most notorious women in the West—Eleanor Dumont. Only two things were known about her for certain: she was always alone, and always making money.

The art of the gamble, one famous gambler at a time. 

Parrott’s extraordinary life took her to the heights of literary New York and pre-Code Hollywood, then left her jailed, penniless, and alone. Today, her books are out of print, and her name is all but forgotten.

Javier Marías on celebrating birthdays, smoking cigarettes, and dining with John Ashbery.

  Nico believed in fate, and she was fated to be an icon. In her youth, she was the femme fatale of Andy Warhol’s Factory and the spectral singer of the Velvet Underground. Later in life, she became an allegory of rock ’n’ roll’s excess, t…

Why we don’t need to decode “the world’s most mysterious book.” Medieval manuscripts are survivors—of Viking raids, of damp and decay—but even with delicate, fragile pages and binding, many of them remain luminous, their vellum illuminated in gol…

Does Shakespeare really have “universal appeal”?“People frequently ask me why I devote so much time to seeking out facts about man’s past,” the paleontologist Louis Leakey said in 1964. “The past shows clearly that we all of us have a com…