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

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.)

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 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.

Over four months, a methane well in southern California’s Aliso Canyon leaked Lebanon’s equivalent of yearly emissions into the atmosphere. No one knows what the long-term effects will be.

The revival of a landmark 1921 musical opens a door on the deep and twisted roots of black performance in America.

For thousands of years, sailors in the Marshall Islands have navigated vast distances of open ocean without instruments. Almost nobody on Earth understands how they do it. And soon, the few people who do will be gone.

Wayne Simmons was ideal conservative commentator. A former C.I.A. operative, he ate lunch with Donald Rumsfeld, took trips to Guantánamo aboard Air Force Two, and pumped the party line on Fox News. There was only one problem: Simmons had never been in the C.I.A.

Be nice and listen.

Was Edwin Raymond punished for not meeting quotas?

A profile of Paul Reubens and his subversive alter ego.

What two years in Gracie Mansion have meant for a woman who aspired to be the “voice for the forgotten voices.”

A profile of the editor behind Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Jay Z’s Decoded, and more.

The surprising bond between damaged birds and traumatized veterans.

The search for answers after the worst American rail disaster in decades.

More than 4 million Syrians have fled the war. 2,647 have made it to the United States.

A sociologist’s controversial first book and the debate over who gets to speak for whom.

Rob Billot spent eight years defending corporate clients in environmental cases. Then Wilbur Tennant called.

“In this scene, set at a government dacha, they are joined by their American counterparts at the State Department for a daylong picnic that grows increasingly informal, involving drinks, flirtation, a guitar jam and (spoiler) contact between two spies. At times in my new job, I feel like a spy myself, and one with a shaky cover. I don’t have a good answer for how I got here.”