Longform

Three days in the creative wilderness with Francis Farewell Starlite, the reclusive muse to Kanye West, Bon Iver and Drake.

The polar icecaps are melting. Is it OK to have a child? Australia is on fire. Is it OK to have a child? My house is flooded, my crops have failed, my community is fleeing. Is it OK to have a child? It is, in a sense, an impossible question.

The Spanish-flu epidemic of 1918 reached virtually every country, killing so many people so quickly that some cities were forced to convert streetcars into hearses.

What happens when immigrant-rights advocates reach a breaking point?

Like major contagions throughout history, the new coronavirus causes fear as well as illness. The remedy for both, it turns out, is the same.

On the shadowy machinations driving pro-Russia conspiracy sites like Zero Hedge.

New neighbors meet, told from a unique point of view.

Anatomy of an outbreak.

How Big Oil and Big Soda kept a global environmental calamity a secret for decades.

Gus Weiss, a shrewd intelligence insider, pulled off an audacious tech hack against the Soviets in the last century. Or did he?

And what can we do to fix it?

'It’s raised the bar,' Craig finally conceded. 'It’s fucking raised the bar.'

And it is wild.

How a dating app helped a generation of Chinese come out of the closet.

A statewide movement wants to remove populist Mike Dunleavy from office.

What happens when SpaceX takes over your sleepy Texas town.

A profile of Erik Prince, then the CEO of America’s largest and most controversial mercenary force, Blackwater, who happened to be a C.I.A. agent.

The arson case that may have led Texas to execute an innocent man.

Despite decades of research, myth and fear still surround the animals.

For decades, the artist’s Saturday Evening Post covers championed a retrograde view of America. This is the story of the politically turbulent 1960s, a singular painting, and Rockwell’s unlikely change of heart.

A secret hope of mine, which I now find hilarious: I imagined that once I had a child, I would become a faster writer. Faster, and also better. It’s hard for me to reconstruct the optimistic logic that led me to this hypothesis. I think I honestly believed that if I did not have the option to write badly, I would simply evolve, like that Lamarckian giraffe, into a more efficient creature.

The fossil-fuel companies expect to profit from climate change. I went to a private planning meeting and took notes.

After decades among the hidden homeless, Dominic Van Allen dug himself a bunker beneath a public park. But his life would get even more precarious.

A family stops at a Jersey travel plaza on the way to a New York medical center.