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.

First the red bees arrived. Then a Red Hook cherry factory’s true purpose came to light.

Flying straight from the future.

South Florida is being overrun with cane toads, which can weigh almost six pounds. No one knows why they are swelling in numbers or when their population growth will slow.

Growing crops in the city, without soil or natural light.

If you don’t get sick, was it really a vacation?

“As the world’s best-known oceanographer—Sylvia is to our era what Jacques Cousteau was to an earlier one—she feels a heavy responsibility. In her lifetime, she has seen the ocean damaged in ways humans never thought it could be. The ongoing disaster leaves her mournful, desolate, and sometimes scary to talk to. Since her first dive, in a sponge-diver’s helmet in a Florida river when she was 16, she has spent 7,000 hours, or the better part of a year, underwater.”

On the troubled, legendary Deschutes River fly-fishing guide.

“Russian humor is slapstick, only you actually die.”

The article that kept the New Yorker alive was written by a debutante. Who happened to be married to Irving Berlin.

The homeless population of New York City is higher than it’s been in decades. Nobody seems to notice.

In 1963, William Zantzinger was convicted of manslaughter in the death of Hattie Carroll and then immortalized – and somewhat defamed – by Bob Dylan. What’s he been up to since then?

A cultural history of feral swine.