Inside the thriving subculture of Japanese men who eschew sex and romance with real live people in favor of real relationships with 2-D characters printed on body pillows.

Firefighter Kevin Shea, one of the first responders on September 11, 2001, was “the survivor who couldn’t remember what no one else could forget.”

Balancing the creation of a house with living in it as a home.

Why Berhanu Nega traded a tenured position in Pennsylvania for the chance to move to a rustic Eritrean bungalow and lead a revolutionary force against an oppressive regime.

Oliver Stone wanted a hit—and the chance to put America’s most iconic dissident onscreen. The subject wanted veto power. The Russian lawyer wanted someone to option the novel he’d written. The American lawyer just wanted the whole insane project to go away. Somehow a film got made.

Only 16 counties regularly impose death sentences, and they have three things in common: overaggressive prosecutors, defense lawyers who aren’t up to the task and cultural legacies of racial bias. Florida’s Fourth Judicial Circuit is among them.

A full-issue length, 42,000-word history of the dissolution of the Middle East, from the invasion of Iraq 13 years ago until present.

When the most famous amnesiac in history died, the battle for custody of his brain began.

Five years after the tsunami that killed tens of thousands in Japan, a husband still searches the sea for his wife, joined by a father hoping to find his daughter.

Jonathan Kos-Read’s long, strange trip to movie stardom.

Black excellence in the land of tennis.

A profile of the woman who wants to declutter the world.

In the face of death threats, a forensic anthropologist has spent two decades exhuming the victims of a “dirty” civil war. Now his work might help bring justice for their murders.

What started as a DVD-mailing service has changed the way we watch TV. Now Netflix has to do it again. (And again. And again.)

More than 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, New York’s schools remain separate and unequal.

Using several email addresses and a lot of exclamation points, teenager Jonathan Lebed worked finance message boards in the morning before school and made almost a million bucks. Then he made the head of the S.E.C. look like a fool.

Did Afghan forces target the M.S.F. hospital?

A profile of the man who helped invent the modern art of presidential spin and came to embody the blurry line between journalist and government official.

In the basement of the White House, in an office with no windows, an MFA grad named Ben Rhodes is telling the story of America’s foreign policy.

A cloud enthusiast becomes an advocate for a new type of cloud.

A central Massachusetts city enabled the author’s ancestors to move into the good life of the middle class. That move is more complicated today.

Happiness is a warm pool.

The activists fighting for police reform in the wake of a video that showed a black teenager shot 16 times by a white cop.

It involves a former 1960s bondage film actress, a Jewish neo-Nazi, the husband of the speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives, and a whole lot of creative marketing.

A profile of Broadway producer Jeffrey Seller, whose show makes more than $500,000 in profit every week.