Scott Sayare

1 week ago | theguardian.com | Scott Sayare

On a late-summer day in 2001, at the University of Poitiers in west-central France, the palaeontologist Michel Brunet summoned his colleagues into a classroom to examine an unusual skull. Brunet had just returned from Chad, and brought with him an extremely ancient cranium. It had been distorted by the aeons spent beneath what is now the Djurab desert; a crust of black mineral deposits left it looking charred and slightly malevolent. It sat on a table. “What is this thing?” Brunet wondered aloud.

3 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Scott Sayare |Esther Opoku-Gyeni |Nicola Alexandrou |Ellie Bury

We are raiding the Guardian long read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors. This week, from 2021: An intrepid expert with dozens of books to his name, Stéphane Bourgoin was a bestselling author, famous in France for having interviewed more than 70 notorious murderers. Then an anonymous collective began to investigate his pastBy Scott Sayare. Read by Simon Vance

Jun 13, 2024 | nytimes.com | Scott Sayare

As a boy, Les Milne carried an air of triumph about him, and an air of sorrow. Les was a particularly promising and energetic young man, an all-Scottish swim champion, head boy at his academy in Dundee, a top student bound for medical school. But when he was young, his father died; his mother was institutionalized with a diagnosis of manic depression, and he and his younger brother were effectively left to fend for themselves.

Nov 10, 2023 | rsn.org | Scott Sayare

In 1988, in an elevator at a film festival in Havana, the director Oliver Stone was handed a copy of On the Trail of the Assassins, a newly published account of the murder of President John F. Kennedy. Stone admired Kennedy with an almost spiritual intensity and viewed his death on November 22, 1963 — 60 years ago this month — as a hard line in American history: the “before” hopeful and good; the “after” catastrophic. Yet he had never given much thought to the particulars of the assassination.

Nov 9, 2023 | nymag.com | Scott Sayare

Lee Harvey Oswald and CIA officer George Joannides. Photo: JFK Assassination Records Collection (Oswald) & CIA FOIA files (Joannides) This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly. In 1988, in an elevator at a film festival in Havana, the director Oliver Stone was handed a copy of On the Trail of the Assassins, a newly published account of the murder of President John F. Kennedy.