How the Keystone XL became the defining environmental test of Obama’s presidency.

On life with amnesia and the role that music plays in memory.

A profile of Claire Danes.

Life inside Za’atari, a camp for Syrian refugees just across the Jordanian border, where “the dispossession is absolute. Everyone has lost his country, his home, his equilibrium. Most have lost a family member or a friend. What is left is a kind of theatrical pride, the necessary performance of will.”

What kind of New York is Mayor Mike leaving behind?

On Martha Stewart, business icon.

On the lesbian separatists of the 1970s, who “created a shadow society devoted to living in an alternate, penisless reality.”

The use and abuse of civil forfeiture.

Was justice served in Steubenville?

From a Tokyo smash-and-grab to driving a car through the window of a Dubai jewelry shop, how a ragtag band of Balkan thieves set a new bar for audacious heists.

A member of the Pink Panthers, Milan Poparic, escaped from prison yesterday.

Why some innovations spread quick while others take decades to catch hold.

The hunt for a secretive network of British men obsessed with accumulating and cataloguing the eggs of rare birds.

How a secretive Israel billionaire seized control of an untapped iron ore deposit beneath one of Africa’s poorest countries.

The Lyme-disease infection rate is growing. So is the battle over how to treat it.

“As a matter of historical analysis, the relationship between secrecy and privacy can be stated in an axiom: the defense of privacy follows, and never precedes, the emergence of new technologies for the exposure of secrets. In other words, the case for privacy always comes too late.”

The emerging political consciousness of Silicon Valley.

On writer James Agee.

A profile of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, prime minister of Turkey.

On decorated sniper Chris Kyle and the troubled young veteran who took his life.

The trade in fake olive oil.

The meaning of the Eurovision Song Contest.

The possibilities and pitfalls of massive open online courses (MOOCs).

Inside the White House debate over Syria.

A series of mysterious, dangerous interactions in a Mexican bathhouse.

"In every public bath, there tends to be a fight from time to time. We never saw or heard any there. The clients, conditioned by some unknown mechanism, respected and obeyed every word of the orphan’s instructions. Also, to be fair, there weren’t very many people, and that’s something I’ll never be able to explain, since it was a clean place, relatively modern, with individual saunas for taking steam baths, bar service in the saunas, and, above all, cheap. There, in Sauna 10, I saw Laura naked for the first time, and all I could do was smile and touch her shoulder and say I didn’t know which valve to turn to make the steam come out."

Kosovo’s leaders have been accused of grotesque war crimes. But can anyone prove it?