A librarian stole $8M worth of rare books from Pittsburgh's Carnegie Library over 25 years

Andrew Carnegie donated $56M to build 2,509 public libraries worldwide

Carnegie, who left school at 12 and credited borrowed books for his self-education, began funding libraries in 1881. Of the 2,509 libraries built, 1,681 were in the United States. He required each community to maintain the library as a condition of his gift.

The strange, unsolved story of Filippo Bernardini and the stolen book manuscripts

Over the last five years, a mysterious figure has been stealing manuscripts, often unpublished, from individuals and organizations in the publishing industry across three continents. The scammer, later identified as Filippo Bernardini, was an...

Two men dressed as cops stole artwork from a Boston museum valued at over $500M at the time

On March 18, 1990, the thieves entered Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum pretending to be police officers responding to a disturbance. After overpowering and handcuffing the guards on duty, they stole 13 precious items, including works by Rembrandt and Manet. The theft is the largest art heist in US history. The pieces are still missing, and the museum is offering a $10M reward to anyone who provides valuable information about their location.

Court documents reveal how Anthropic destroyed millions of books to build its AI models

Anthropic cut the bindings from purchased books and discarded them after scanning to rapidly collect high-quality text at low cost for training Claude. This, despite hiring the former head of partnerships for the Google Books project, which nondestructively scanned millions of books borrowed from libraries before returning them.

Explore the unexpected ways people use public libraries in this 'This American Life' episode

Libraries serve as far more than book repositories. This episode follows a family experiencing homelessness that spent months living in their local library, Iranian students reuniting with family across the US-Canada border because the library straddled both countries, and a Vermont man who built his own library to house unpublished manuscripts.

Seventeen strange historical heists

High-dollar chocolate and cheese robberies to art thefts and audacious train robberies. Explore history's most peculiar stories of stealing with this list of seventeen tales of burglaries.

Often dubbed the 'king of bank robbers,' George Leonidas Leslie stole an estimated $7M (equivalent to $200M today) and charged other criminals a $20K fee to evaluate their heist plans

Leslie studied architecture and used blueprints of safes and banks to execute meticulously planned bank heists across the Northeast between 1869 and 1878. Although Leslie was an infamous bank robber by night, he posed as a member of high society by day, providing critical intel on the institutions he'd rob and helping conceal his crimes. Months before his largest planned heist, where he planned to turn on his gang, Leslie's body mysteriously washed up along the Hudson River. His killer remains a mystery.

The inventor of the Dewey decimal system has a complicated legacy due to allegations of sexual harassment

Melvil Dewey—who created the system used to organize library books in nearly 150 countries and founded the American Library Association—was banned from the organization for 20 years after making unwanted advances on four librarians. He later paid to settle a harassment suit.

Art theft is the third-largest source of criminal revenues worldwide, thanks in part to the subjective nature of valuing a work of art.

Georgia inmate pulls off $11M heist—from inside his cell

Prisoner Arthur Lee Cofield Jr., 31, allegedly impersonated Sidney Kimmel, the uber-wealthy chairman and CEO of a Los Angeles entertainment company, with the help of contraband cell phones from inside his prison cell.

In 2023, at least 6 people were charged with stealing body parts

A recent case involving alleged trafficking in stolen human body parts charged that there was a nationwide network of individuals who bought and sold human remains. The charges alleged, among other things, that from 2018 through 2022, the manager of the morgue at Harvard Medical School's Anatomical Gifts Program stole organs and other parts of cadavers that had been donated for medical research and education. In late 2025, that Harvard morgue manager was sentenced to 96 months in prison.

The New York Public Library reveals its 10 most checked-out books of all time

In the library’s 125-year existence, these were the 10 most popular books — and one book that isn’t on the list, but should be.

North Carolina's original copy of the Bill of Rights was stolen during the Civil War and recovered 138 years later

A Union soldier looted the document from the state archives in 1865 and sold it for $5. It remained in private hands for more than a century before an undercover FBI agent posing as a buyer seized it in 2003 at a Philadelphia office building.

A couple was once sent to prison for running a $31.8M extreme couponing fraud scheme

Investigators found fake coupons in “every crevice” of husband and wife duo Pacifico Talens Jr. and Lori Ann Talens’ home. The couple was sent to prison and are serving a combined 19 years.

Inside 'Blood Meridian' author Cormac McCarthy's library of 20,000 books

The reclusive writer published 12 novels and taught himself stonemasonry and quantum physics, among myriad other skills and subjects. Since he died in 2023, scholars have been mining his personal library for lessons on his influences, interests, and more.

Days after her release from prison, Billie Holiday sold out Carnegie Hall

The jazz icon was released early from federal prison on good behavior. Following her arrest, she was effectively prohibited from performing in New York's nightclubs, but she realized she could still perform, so long as it was in a venue that hadn't been deemed a "cabaret." The solution? The famous Carnegie Hall. The show sold out within a week, and the venue became a regular stop for Holiday, who performed there 22 times.

Meet a government agent who laundered millions of dollars for Pablo Escobar

Robert Mazur went undercover for years inside the Medellín cartel, which was sending more than 15 tons of cocaine into the United States every single day. Mazur created more than 30 jewelry stores to create business fronts before he finally got through to the cartel.

How a 19th-century aristocrat scammed the rich to buy fake Caribbean land

Nearly 200 years ago, Gregor MacGregor pulled off one of the most brazen real estate scams in history. A disgraced military leader, MacGregor sold plots of land in what is today Honduras, touting the country of Poyais as a new major region in South America. But no building was taking place, and instead of investing the proceeds of bond sales in construction, MacGregor was lining his pockets. Read the unbelievable story of MacGregor's exploits here.

Hear from both sides of the attempt to ban books across the country, which spiked by more than 1,100% between 2020 and 2022

During that period, more than 2,500 titles were challenged across 37 states, with activists targeting books on race, slavery, and gender identity. This CBS report hears from the founders of Moms for Liberty, a teacher removed for giving students access to banned books, and "Maus" cartoonist Art Spiegelman.

Moss provided the evidence to convict Chicago cemetery grave robbers

In 2009, employees at Burr Oak Cemetery were accused of exhuming graves to resell burial plots, but they argued the events took place before their employment. An analysis of moss, whose metabolic activity deteriorates at a known rate, with the transported human remains helped establish a timeline that placed the accused at the crime scene.

Explore rare artifacts from the archives at Mount Vernon

This series from Washington's Presidential Library showcases rare books, maps, letters, and artifacts from his collection. It illuminates how he learned, governed, traveled, and understood the world around him.

Inside the Sarah Lawrence College sex cult scandal

In late 2010, a middle-aged man, freshly released from prison, moved into his daughter's college dorm and created a group that had all the hallmarks of a cult. Over the decade that followed, he extorted millions of dollars from vulnerable young adults through violence, psychological torture, and forced sex work. Authorities credited his arrest to a magazine article published in 2019 detailing victims' allegations.

In 2019, a laptop loaded with six of the worst malware in history and described as 'an exhibit of historical weaponry' sold for $1.3M.

Did a Smithsonian anthropologist steal people's brains?

This comic examines "racial brain collection" of Ales Hrdlicka, the Smithsonian's head of physical anthropology during the early 1900s. Hrdlicka was a white supremacist who sought physical evidence for his theories on anatomical differences between...

The bats that live in and protect Portugal's libraries

Two 18th-century libraries in Portugal, the Joanina Library at the University of Coimbra and the Library at the National Palace of Mafra, are home to colonies of bats. These bats are welcome guests because they eat insects that could damage the manuscripts. Visitors can try to see the bats emerge at nightfall in Coimbra or visit on a rainy day and hear them. While catching a glimpse of the bats in Mafra is difficult, the library displays taxidermied remains of former residents.

Cardboard thieves are making millions

The global market for recycled cardboard is worth billions of dollars—and it's attracting criminals. Specifically, people are making a fortune from taking used cardboard that's been left outside to be recycled, then proceeding to sell it. As a result, legitimate recycling firms and local authorities are missing out on millions. Learn more here.

The story of Dollree Mapp, whose legal challenge over her 1957 conviction for possessing "obscene material" led to a major strengthening of the Fourth Amendment

The Washington Post's Janet Cooke returned her Pulitzer

When Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke published her profile of a 8-year-old heroin addict named Jimmy in 1980, it created an instant uproar. Social workers, police officers, and even the mayor of Washington, DC all jumped into action to try to get the child help, but no one could find him. Within hours of Cooke receiving a Pulitzer for the piece, everything began to unravel as it was revealed that she had fabricated not just Jimmy's story, but her own as well. She eventually returned the award.

A vending machine run with Anthropic's AI went out of business after it was convinced to give away items for free and sell a video game console.

Against his wishes, Albert Einstein's brain was removed before his cremation, and the pathologist responsible stored it for decades in mason jars within a beer cooler.

The tragic Pulitzer Prize-winning image 'The Vulture and the Little Girl' (1993) generated controversy, raised concerns about ethics in photography, and eventually led to the photographer's death.

Search a massive database of over 4 decades of clues from the TV quiz show 'Jeopardy!'

When a Paris department store hesitated to sell Estée Lauder's perfume, she 'accidentally' broke a bottle, causing the smell to spread throughout the store and shoppers to start asking to buy the scent.

Exploring the Larry Bird punch that almost changed March Madness

In 1915, workers recovered a submarine-like vessel from the Chicago River, prompting fears of German espionage

In its famous catalog, Sears sold $600 DIY house kits from 1908 through the 1940s, resulting in an estimated 100,000 'Sears and Roebuck homes.'

Explore a list of the 100 best novels of all time, compiled by some of the world's best living writers, including Salman Rushdie, Stephen King, and Jennifer Egan.

Explore the archaeological treasures of Pompeii, the city buried under volcanic ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE.

Warren Buffett's former professor Benjamin Graham is known as the 'father of value investing,' a strategy in which investors seek to buy stocks trading below their intrinsic worth.

US intelligence allegedly pursued more than 600 schemes to assassinate Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro.

Before writing 'Walden,' transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau nearly burned down his hometown with a campfire that grew out of control.

The USPS spent $3.97B in 2024, accounting for .058% of the federal budget.

During the French Revolution, a botanist's letter asking about "dear Rhus" (poison ivy) was intercepted, leading authorities to suspect he was conspiring with the Russians.

The Brothers Grimm were lawyers before they were storytellers, and became interested in fairy tales as they began investigating how rules and customs had been passed down through cultures.

The distributor behind 'Rocky Horror' pulled the film from its scheduled national release, believing it would be a failure, though it eventually amassed a dedicated fanbase through midnight showings, a trend that continues over 50 years later.

Gerrymandering works through two techniques: cracking opposing voters across districts to dilute their power, and packing them into a few to waste their votes in lopsided majorities.

Learn how to read a prospectus, the juicy document that any company must file with the SEC before going public.

The term 'algorithm' originated from the Latinized name of al-Khwārizmī, a 9th-century mathematician whose works introduced Arabic numerals and the decimal-based numeral system to Europe and whose treatise 'Al-Jabr' gave algebra its name.

Hotels in Cannes, the glamorous city on the French Riviera, hire hawks to ward off seagulls during the city's famous film festival.

The first image of a black hole was captured by creating an Earth-sized virtual observatory from a network of eight radio telescopes.