The war between Major League Baseball and Alex Rodriguez, “fought with six-figure payoffs in the tanning salons and strip malls of South Florida.”

After circulating Lolita in secret amongst a small circle of New Yorker editors and publishers, Vladamir Nabokov finally placed it at Olympia Press. Three weeks before publication, a slumping and broke Dorothy Parker appeared in The New Yorker with a story entitled “Lolita” about a teenage bride, her jealous mother, and a much older man.

A tour of our greatest conspiracy theories.

Notes from a Black Panther fundraiser on Park Avenue.

On Twitter’s pleasures and perils.

Eleven months after Sandy Hook, Newtown’s mourning remains incalculable, especially that of the parents who lost their children. And the influx of sympathy—and money—has sometimes made the grieving more difficult rather than less.

He’d blown the Denver debate. Now he was on the verge of blowing the second and risking his reelection. “I just don’t know if I can do this,” Obama told his team. The story of how they turned things around, excerpted from Double Down: Game Change 2012.

A profile of the comedian.

Tyson on his childhood in Brooklyn and the man who changed his life. An excerpt from his upcoming memoir, Undisputed Truth.

Filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón and his four years of production on Gravity.

A post-acquisition profile of Tumblr’s David Karp.

“They cruise the city in chauffeured cars, blasting rap, selling pot to classmates. How some of New York’s richest kids joined forces with some of its poorest.”

“Will you show me all of the man-in-the-street, sympathetic, mayoral candidates? The last time I met one of them on the subway was a long time ago. Let’s not get too carried away.”

“Now Pynchon hides in plain sight, on the Upper West Side, with a family and a history of contradictions: a child of the postwar Establishment determined to reject it; a postmodernist master who’s called himself a ‘classicist’; a workaholic stoner; a polymath who revels in dirty puns; a literary outsider who’s married to a literary agent; a scourge of capitalism who sent his son to private school and lives in a $1.7 million prewar classic six.”

How New York City built its own CIA.

A profile of New York Times Company CEO Mark Thompson.

Script doctor Damon Lindelof explains the new rules of blockbuster screenwriting.

The cult author, 57 years into his writing career.

Monica Lewinsky’s post-scandal life in New York City.

Remembering the indie rock club that The New York Times once said was “so New York that it’s in New Jersey.”

The durable ineffectiveness of John Boehner.

How a high-stakes poker game that started at Tobey Maguire’s house became part of a $100 million gambling and money-laundering operation orchestrated by the Russian mob.

The weird history and uncertain future of New York City’s shoreline.

Inside the world of high-priced online reputation management.

How an informant helped authorities nab a notorious anti-abortion activist.