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John Barrymore annihilated his wife in a Manhattan courtroom in 1928. He did not need to be present. He sent attorneys. He was on a film set in California earning more money than Blanch Olri would see in the rest of her life. The papers were filed, the arguments made, the judgment rendered. Primary custody…

In November 1941, Joseph Patrick Kennedy Senior had his daughter’s brain surgically destroyed. He arranged the procedure without telling his wife, without telling Rosemary. He told the doctors she was difficult. He signed what needed to be signed. The doctors drilled through her skull and began cutting while she was still awake. She was 23…

Room 80, Glennham Hotel, Broadway and 22nd Street, Manhattan. It is a Sunday afternoon in April 1882. The curtains are drawn. The room smells of stale tobacco and the particular staleness of a man who came in at 6:00 in the morning from a gambling house and went to bed without washing. He is 51…

August 1918, a marble column townhouse on East 64th Street, Manhattan. A telegram arrives. Alen Tub Burchchard is 46 years old, listed in the social register, married to the vice chairman of General Electric, owner of a Paris address, a Newport cottage, a wardrobe that costs more per season than most families earn in a…

August 25th, 1932. Fourth floor of the Drake Hotel, Chicago. Edith Rockefeller McCormick is dying. The cancer has hollowed her face until she looks exactly like him. John D. Rockefeller, the man who trained her to be perfect and then destroyed her for becoming something else. She weighs 89 lb. The room smells like morphine…

Newport, Rhode Island, November 21st, 1881. She died at 27. In a mansion by the sea, surrounded by servants and physicians who could do nothing. Her husband watched. Her mother-in-law prayed. The baby survived. Emily Aster Van Allen, great-g grandanddaughter of America’s first multi-millionaire, daughter of the woman who ruled New York society, died the…

We are taught that money buys freedom. We look at the gilded mansions of Newport, the marble facads of Fifth Avenue, and we see absolute power. But if you look closely at the life of Muriel Vanderbilts, you encounter a terrifying destabilizing truth. Extreme wealth doesn’t liberate you. It dehumanizes you.  To the world, she…

In the winter of 1919, George J. Gould sat in the suffocating silence of his library at Georgian court and committed a murder on paper. He did not use a weapon, and there was no body to bury, but the violence was absolute. With the stroke of a fountain pen, he drafted a cautisle to…

There is a photograph taken in the high desert of New Mexico, years after the ballrooms of New York had faded into memory. In it, a woman stands wrapped in layers of velvet and denim, her neck heavy with silver, her wrists [music] bound in thick cuffs of turquoise. To the uninitiated eye, she looks…

Nobody saw this coming. Not the Pentagon, not Iran, and certainly not Russia. Because right now, in the middle of one of the most consequential military conflicts in decades, the country that everyone wrote off is quietly pulling off one of the most brilliant geopolitical moves of the entire war. And that country is not…