In 2003, a platoon of American soldiers opened fire on a family in a Baghdad intersection. A decade later, one of the shooters tracks down the survivors.

On Christmas Day, an elevator operator cons holiday charity out of a variety of tenants.

"On the way home from work a few nights earlier, Charlie had seen a woman and a little girl going down Fifty-ninth Street. The little girl was crying. He guessed she was crying, he knew she was crying, because she'd seen all the things in the toy-store windows and couldn't understand why none of them were for her. Her mother did housework, he guessed, or maybe was a waitress, and he saw them going back to a room like his, with green walls and no heat, on Christmas Eve, to eat a can of soup. And he saw the little girl hang up her ragged stocking and fall asleep, and he saw the mother looking through her purse for something to put into the stocking—This reverie was interrupted by a bell on 11. He went up, and Mr. and Mrs. Fuller were waiting. When they wished him a merry Christmas, he said, 'Well, it isn't much of a holiday for me, Mrs. Fuller. Christmas is a sad season when you’re poor."</p>

An amateur linguist loses control of his creation.

Inside one of the biggest antiquities-smuggling rings in history.

A father and son work the Chinese cattle markets in this story from the 2012 winner of the Nobel in Literature.

"People trusted him implicitly. If a transaction reached a stalemate, the parties would look at him to acknowledge that they wanted things settled. 'Let's quit arguing and hear what Luo Tong has to say!' 'All right, let's do that. Luo Tong, you be the judge!' With a cocky air, my father would walk around the animal twice, looking at neither the buyer nor the seller, then glance up into the sky and announce the gross weight and the amount of meat on the bone, followed by a price. He'd then wander off to smoke a cigarette."

The legacy of a secret Cold War program that tested chemical weapons on thousands of American soldiers.

Tracking cyberextortionists and their roving swarms of bots.

Los Angeles’ Wolvesmouth and the unlicensed dining industry.

A profile of Henry Hook, crossword puzzle master.

A profile of photographer Richard Avedon from early in his career.

The Grateful Dead’s afterlife.

A week in the author’s life when it became impossible to control the course of events.

As immigration turns red states blue, how can Republicans transform their platform?

How America used to vote.

On the gay community’s political progress.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, profiled.

In the slums adjacent to Mumbai’s airport.

How a high-speed rail disaster exposed China’s corruption.

On the rise of K-pop.

A tale of romance gone wrong, from MacArthur Fellowship winner Junot Diaz's new collection This Is How You Lose Her.

"Alma is a Mason Gross student, one of those Sonic Youth, comic-book-reading alternatinas without whom you might never have lost your virginity. Grew up in Hoboken, part of the Latino community that got its heart burned out in the eighties, tenements turning to flame."

A new teacher begins work at a TB hospital in rural Canada.

"The number of students who showed up varied. Fifteen, or down to half a dozen. Mornings only, from nine o'clock till noon. Children were kept away if their temperature had risen or if they were undergoing tests."

The rise of drug-resistant gonorrhea.

The invention of political consulting.

How child molesters get away with it.

How the fatwa changed his life.