A hundred years ago, in the midst of an American food crisis, two spies who had once sworn to kill each other came together with a plan to feed America: hippo meat.

Increasingly worn down by the pandemic, a dad goes to a baseball game.

The origin story of a now-ubiquitous celebration.

A cloud enthusiast becomes an advocate for a new type of cloud.

How do you write about Hollywood’s most self-referential screenwriter at a destabilizing moment in history? It takes more than one draft.

For eight hours last fall, Paradise, Calif., became a zone at the limits of the American imagination — and a preview of the American future.

It was just a kayaking trip. Then it upended their lives.

A few Silicon Valley executives are experimenting with mortality. “I don’t want death to be such a downer,” says one.

An essay about what we’ll lose, and what we’ve already lost.

Did our ancient cousins get a bad rap?

A palliative-care doctor and triple amputee has built a new kind of hospice in San Francisco.

With The BFG, the filmmaker tackles childhood’s possibilities and terrors once again.

Life on the outside is full of unpleasant surprises for longtime inmates.

A man’s love of pigeons leads him to build a Ponzi scheme out of birds.

How the tech billionaire came to own 87,000 acres, three hotels, a wastewater treatment plant, a cemetery and 380 cats.

On a preacher who counsels and ministers Major League umpires.

Why 85-year-old Jacques-André Istel established a town (population: 2) on 2,600 acres in the middle of the Arizona desert (but not before becoming a sky diving legend, among other things).

A battle against an invasive breed of ants has begun in Texas. It also might be over already.

Inside Brigham Young University’s successful animation program.

The discombobulated existence of polar bears and the people trying to save them.

An excerpt from Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America.

An endangered-species murder mystery in Hawaii.

Digging for Return of the Jedi set remnants in the desert.

On a business that sells packaged pre-sliced apples as snack food.

Freedom, the GOP, and a rhesus macaque on the loose.

The science of same-sex relationships in the wild.