How a state that was never in doubt became a “national embarrassment.”

A pilgrimage to J.D. Salinger’s New Hampshire home:

The silence surrounding this place is not just any silence. It is the work of a lifetime. It is the work of renunciation and determination and expensive litigation. It is a silence of self-exile, cunning, and contemplation. In its own powerful, invisible way, the silence is in itself an eloquent work of art. It is the Great Wall of Silence J.D. Salinger has built around himself.

Part two of the history of the Educational Testing Service.

The interior life of a sniper, the most misunderstood icon of the modern military.

One man’s quest to save the music of the Holocaust.

A grandmother from Chicago, she’s one of those people who knows everybody. And those people who know everybody, the connectors, make the world work. A study of the power of (offline) social networking.

Each soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan generated around 10 pounds of garbage per day. Most of that trash—along with used equipment and medical supplies and other wastes of war—was burned in open-air pits, emitting a toxic smoke that many soliders blame for their poor health today.

“I come to America, I go to England, I go to France…nobody’s at risk. They’re afraid of getting cancer, losing a lover, losing their jobs, being insecure. … It’s only in my own country that I find people who voluntarily choose to put everything at risk—in their personal life.”

A son, the illusion of his dead father and where technology intersects with real life.

A woman bonds with her terminally ill sister over food, memories, and shaky lives.

“Editing is crucial because in my experience anything you try to make - what YOU want is for the story to be AMAZING. But what the story wants to be is MEDIOCRE OR WORSE. And the entire process of making the story is convincing the story to not be what it wants to be, which is BAD.”

The broadcasting behemoth is up for a charter renewal in the United Kingdom, and it’s exposing every crack in the organization.

Solving the mystery of the corpse in the Eleganté Hotel.

How the Keystone XL became the defining environmental test of Obama’s presidency.

The three men vying to be the next publisher of the New York Times.

How a father and son solved the mystery of the dinosaurs’ demise.

On the arrival of Formula 1 in India.

The jewels of America’s landscape should belong to America’s original peoples.

Like major contagions throughout history, the new coronavirus causes fear as well as illness. The remedy for both, it turns out, is the same.

How Mitt Romney made his millions.

On nineteenth century invalidism and how societies have drugged themselves through tough transitions across history.

A year with a high school support group for boys who have lost a parent.