For sheer spectacle and shock value, if not quality of play, the 2014 World Cup will go down as the most memorable in history. With three matches to play, this tournament is four short of the 1998 record for most goals scored in a World Cup. It already has a first-class villain in Luis Suárez and his teeth, and an indefatigable underdog in Costa Rica. Now, with Germany’s semifinal 7–1 humiliation of hosts Brazil, the tournament has a match that will be remembered for as long as people care about soccer. “Something like that happens every 100 years,” said former Germany captain and current ESPN commentator Michael Ballack. This was not an exaggeration...

Drunk History is about getting loaded and telling tales you should have learned in school. Not only are there celebrity re-enactors, but watch sober and you might learn something...

James H. Simons likes to play against type. He is a billionaire star of mathematics and private investment who often wins praise for his financial gifts to scientific research and programs to get children hooked on math.

But in his Manhattan office, high atop a Fifth Avenue building in the Flatiron district, he’s quick to tell of his career failings.

He was forgetful. He was demoted. He found out the hard way that he was terrible at programming computers. “I’d keep forgetting the notation,” Dr. Simons said. “I couldn’t write programs to save my life.”

After that, he was fired...

Iraqi antiquities officials are calling on the Obama administration to save Nineveh and other sites around jihadist-occupied Mosul. But are drone strikes really the answer?

More than two and a half millennia ago, the Assyrian King Senaccherib descended on his enemies “like the wolf on the fold,” as the Bible tells us—and as Lord Byron wrote in cantering cadences memorized by countless Victorian schoolchildren: “His cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold; And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea.”...

The Germans were pushing toward Paris in 1918 when untested American troops helped stop them at the Marne River in a pivotal World War I battle...

I was 13 when Saigon fell in 1975. I watched the evening news as the last American helicopter lifted off from the United States Embassy roof. In 1977, in the closet of a rented house, I discovered a pile of dusty Life magazines that pictured the Vietnam War: dust, heat, blood, tanks and helicopters, faces contorted with pain and desperation or just impenetrable. 1966, 1967, 1968. Tet, Hue, Khe Sanh, the Perfume River, Ben Tre, Dak To. Dates and names that grabbed and held.

I became a war correspondent because of those pictures...

Did you know there was a revolutionary war fought on American soil earlier this spring? It's true! Back in April, a small band of militiamen led by a rabble-rousing Nevada rancher named Cliven Bundy defeated the United States of America without firing a single shot. And so a brand-new country—sand-choked, heatstroked, and very heavily armed—was formed inside this one. GQ's Zach Baron spent a few days behind the borders of the fledgling republic and discovered that the uprising was the easy part...

Charles Seife is a pop historian who writes about mathematics and science, but his abiding theme, the topic that makes his heart leap like one of Jules Feiffer’s dancers in the springtime, is human credulity...Mr. Seife’s new book, “Virtual Unreality,” is about how digital untruths spread like contagion across our laptops and smartphones. The author is unusually qualified to write on this subject, and not merely because his surname is nearly an anagram for “selfie.”...

The big networks say they care about uncovering the truth. That's not what I saw.

Ernest Hemingway famously said that "the most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have it."...

In 1961, T. S. Eliot wrote Groucho Marx a fan letter requesting a photograph of the comic actor and humorist. Groucho enthusiastically complied, and the two continued to correspond until they finally met, in June of 1964, in London, when Groucho and his fourth wife, Eden, went to the Eliots’ house for dinner. So far as I know, Eliot never gave a public account of what transpired that evening. Groucho, though, described the occasion in a letter that he wrote to his brother Gummo the following day...