The making of a convenience store empire.

The paper spiked a #MeToo story. Why?

The timeless allure of looking through other peoples stuff.

Life in Mexico immediately after being forced to leave the U.S.

A two-part series on America’s role in the Syrian civil war.

On calling off a wedding, and studying whooping cranes.

Death, ISIS, and tourism in the Atlas Mountains.

How the Ebola outbreak spread.

On the industry’s gatekeeping.

The inside story of a brutally botched undercover operation.

The life and work of a Manhattan psychoanalyst.

The cost of parents sharing their lives on Instagram.

Trying to parent my Black teenagers through protest and pandemic.

In Minneapolis, a group of activists take over a Sheraton and open it to the homeless, banning police.

How breakfast got served at the Flamingo hotel in Las Vegas.

She posted an ad for a roommate. What’s the worst that could happen?

A 2018 profile of the tennis star.

A profile of the actor, who died Monday.

The author boards the Costa Atlantica for several days of line dancing, burlesque and buffets as part of the cruise industry’s new foray into China.

Undercover as a student at Phoenix University, the largest for-profit higher education company in the country and the second-largest enroller of students (behind the SUNY system), where only 12 percent of first-time students graduate and the ad budget accounts for 30 percent of overall spending.

From 1968-1973, the three teenage Wiggin sisters, guided by a domineering father, played their strange music at New Hampshire ballrooms and recorded a single album. The Philosophy of the World LP goes for over $500 today, but the intervening decades have not been kind to the Wiggins.

I first learned about cloud lovers in a police report concerning a man who received a blowjob from a young woman and went mad. The man — let's call him Carl (police reports have the names of suspects and victims redacted) — was in his 40s, and the woman, let's call her Lisa, was almost 18. The two first met in the fall of 2003 at a local TV station that was holding a contest to find the best video footage of Northwest clouds. According to the report, which was lost when I cleaned my messy desk in 2005 (I'm recalling all of this from an imperfect memory), Carl, who was married and well-to-do, fell in love with Lisa, whose family was not so well-off, upon seeing her for the first time. He had a videocassette in his hand; she had a videocassette in her hand. He showed his tape to the station's weatherman (sun, sky, clouds). She showed hers (clouds, sky, sun). During the contest, his eyes could not escape her beauty. After the contest, the impression she made on his mind intensified. That bewitching coin in the short story by Jorge Luis Borges, "The Zahir," comes to mind. If a person sees this coin only once, the memory of its image begins to more and more dominate his/her thoughts and dreams. Soon the coin becomes the mind's sole reality. Lisa's face was Carl's Zahir.

How Google used artificial intelligence to transform Google Translate, one of its more popular services — and how machine learning is poised to reinvent computing itself.

What does satire do? What should we expect of it? Is it crucial to Western culture that we be free to produce it?

Norma Claypool earned notoriety for welcoming 15 “hard-to-adopt” children into her Baltimore home. Norma Claypool is also elderly and blind.