“It is a beautiful hand: strong, with long, slender fingers and smooth skin, its nails ridgeless and pink. If you didn’t know Jonathan Koch—if you first met him, say, on the courts at the Calabasas Tennis & Swim Club—you might not suspect that his hand previously belonged to someone else.”

At age 17, Eustace Conway moved into the North Carolina woods. He hasn’t compromised since.

The Brooklyn Nets were built to be an unbeatable superteam of eccentric basketball superstars. Will they dominate the N.B.A. playoffs?

The inside story of a cartel’s deadly assault on a Mexican town near the Texas border—and the U.S. drug operation that sparked it.

In October 2006, a four-year-old from Corpus Christi named Andrew Burd died mysteriously of salt poisoning. His foster mother, Hannah Overton, was charged with capital murder, vilified from all quarters, and sent to prison for life. But was this churchgoing young woman a vicious child killer? Or had the tragedy claimed its second victim?

More than 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, New York’s schools remain separate and unequal.

What the sensation of uncontrollable itch and the phantom limbs of amputees can tell us about how the brain works.

Dee Dee Blancharde was a model parent: a tireless single mom taking care of her gravely ill child. But after Dee Dee was killed, it turned out her daughter Gypsy had never been sick at all.

Looking back on the George Floyd rebellion.

Armed only with their psychotic courage, they were running, dancing, singing, smashing, burning, screaming, storming heaven: all rapturous varieties of Baraka’s “magic actions.” I listened to 19-year-olds talk nonstop throughout the night we spent in jail, as they howled insults at the officers and swapped stories of humiliation by police. It struck me that they were too young to have seen even the initial phase of BLM. Though well-acquainted with power and violence, they were tasting “politics” for the first time. Whatever the fate of the movement, I suspect that much of their future thinking will be measured against the feelings that filled the nights of 2020: the vastness and immediacy, the blur and brutal clarity.

The soul of an octopus.

For decades, flying saucers were a punch line. Then the U.S. government got over the taboo.

A fugitive from the US started fresh on Vancouver Island—then bilked new victims out of millions of dollars while law enforcement refused to act.

On the joy of watching Roger play live at Wimbledon.

On October 17, 1973, John McClamrock was paralyzed playing high school football. Doctors doubted he would make it through the night. But he and his mother refused to give up—for more than three decades.

The story of the loneliest whale in the world.

As mass detentions and surveillance dominate the lives of China’s Uyghurs and Kazakhs, a woman struggles to free herself.

The origin story of a now-ubiquitous celebration.

A year of isolation made me consider all the casual, unwanted touch women endure — and why it’s so hard to refuse it.

How phone phreakers, many of them blind, opened up Ma Bell to unlimited free international calling using a technical manual and a toy organ.

On Bill May, considered to be the greatest male synchronized swimmer who ever lived, and his long quest for Olympic gold.

Expropriated Indigenous land is the foundation of the land-grant university system.

What if people don’t just invent medical symptoms to get attention—what if they feign oppression, too?

She escaped a crazed psychopath at 16. Decades later, as the BTK serial killer terrorizes Wichita, she has to run for her life again. The identity of her tormentor is too chilling to believe.

The author teaches a college class about what it means to be white in America, but interrogating that question as a black woman in the real world is much harder to do.