How one of the greatest mathematicians in the world thinks.

Life on the outside is full of unpleasant surprises for longtime inmates.

How do you rollout a candidate whom everyone thinks they already know?

Two pairs of identical twins mismatched in a hospital happen upon each other in their twenties.

What it’s like to be a first responder amid the rise of synthetic marijuana.

A profile of photographer Robert Frank in his 90th year.

A life with bipolar disorder.

On black bodies in the age of the Charleston shootings.

On being South Africa’s “public protector,” charged with watching over the people who once liberated it.

On the kids who are spiritual leaders before the age of ten.

On the service’s multiple origin stories.

“We still have retrograde ideas about how pregnant women should feel, and we need to revise them — not only for depressed women but for all women.”

The culturally-bound mechanics of comedy.

“She has no theories, for example, to explain why she, of all people, felt unburdened by the unspoken rules marking certain subjects off limits for children, or why, for that matter, she has that particular gift, that ability to recall the emotional experiences of adolescence, the confusion, the longing, the rivalries — the memories, in other words, that most of us try to bury as quickly and deeply as we can.”

A gender studies professor, diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, decides to take control of her death.

Following two leading figures of the #BlackLivesMatter movement through five months of protests.

What happens when a successfully funded Kickstarter product fails to launch?

On Brent White, the joke whisperer who edits the largely improvisational comedies of Paul Feig, Judd Apatow and Adam McKay.

In 1992, a magazine story introduced the world to the photographs of Sally Mann. Here, she responds to the firestorm that article produced.

Before The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen was just another literary novelist with a new book coming out.

Kamel Daoud’s celebrated retelling of Albert Camus’s The Stranger came within two votes of winning the Prix Goncourt. It has also made him a target of radical Islamists.

The Scandinavians had an idea that seems wacky to Americans: make a prison safe and livable.

Can the insights of neuroscience help us get over our prejudices?

She’s 80 now, working 13 hour days, and still won’t take so much as a reporter’s hand to cross the stream.