Inside the world of competitive fireworks.

How John, a father of 14, lost Christmas.

The writer, deaf since birth, on the intricacies of reading lips.

Many people dream of building their own home in the country, but one family finds more of a struggle than they bargained for.

The author visits the 9/11 Memorial Museum, 13 years after his sister’s death.

Reporting undercover from inside the online-shipping industry.

A former NBA player describes his own unraveling.

On surfer girls in Maui; the story that led to the film Blue Crush.

Madewell’s authenticity problem, written by the great-grandson of the company’s founder.

A grandmother’s tale of the night her first love had to leave town.

The need for a new letter on an old manual machine leads the author to the shop of Martin Tytell — repairman, historian, and high priest of typewriters.

A trip to a lobster festival leads to an examination of the culinary and ethical dimensions of cooking a live, possibly sentient, creature.

“I had inherited a Rolodex full of useful phone numbers (the College Board, a helpful counselor in the UCLA admissions office), but the number I kept handing out was that of a family therapist.”

“I was never falling-down drunk. I was never belligerent. I always got my work done. I was never unkempt. I was always clean, I was always shaved, I always performed at work. I was always kind and gracious in the dining room. But I lived in hell.”

The parallel lives of a KGB defector and his CIA handler.

The excerpts from a diary of an anonymous Russian special-forces officer who served twenty tours of duty in Chechnya during the Second Chechen War (1999-2009).

Laura Levis did everything she could to save herself when an asthma attack began. How could she have been left to die just outside the emergency room?

Live from the World Series of Poker.

An essay about the weeks after the author’s brother nearly died.

“Choice is a great burden. The call to invent one’s life, and to do it continuously, can sound unendurable. Totalitarian regimes aim to stamp out the possibility of choice, but what aspiring autocrats do is promise to relieve one of the need to choose. This is the promise of “Make America Great Again”—it conjures the allure of an imaginary past in which one was free not to choose.”

Life and debt as a young writer in New York.

Philip Seymour Hoffman’s widow on addiction, loss, and recovery.

Teaching Emily Dickinson at Santa Fe Community College in Gainesville, Florida.

A journey to Disney World with kids and weed.