On the life and legacy of one of soccer’s legends, who died Wednesday.

A husband’s stroke, the Australian bushfires, and a trip to the Great Barrier Reef.

How much can athletes really make in niche sports? A whole lot more than you might think.

A celebrated Uyghur writer gives a first-person account of the genocide in Xinjiang.

A profile of the overlooked icon who forever changed the way Indigenous people are depicted onscreen.

The joys—and absurdities—of finding oneself abandoned in a desolate landscape.

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.

Fentanyl is quickly becoming America’s deadliest drug. But law enforcement couldn’t trace it to its source—until one teenager overdosed in North Dakota.

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.

Meet Gene Locks, the onetime Princeton quarterback suing the NFL on behalf of 4,000 former players.

On Ahmad Chalabi, the con man who pushed America to war. Chalabi died on Tuesday at the age of 71.

A profile of Kehinde Wiley, a painter who inserts the “brown faces” that have historically been relegated to the background in Western art.

The inquiry into a nurse’s suicide after she was on the receiving end of a crank call.

A case for why race has been the real story of the Obama presidency all along.

How to buy college football players, in the words of a man who delivers the money.

How a bipolar diagnosis follows you from the top to the bottom of professional basketball.

How the Gingrich-era brain drain crippled the government and led to last year’s shutdown.

The salacious correspondence between the President and his mistress.

The story of a naïve fisherman, a boat headed for Spain and 1.5 tons of cocaine.

The antagonistic partnership that produced Sunset Boulevard.

The perilous existence of confidential informants.

A profile of Griselda Blanco, aka the “Black Widow,” who pioneered the cocaine trade in New York and Miami.

The activists, politicians, and social trends that led to 2012’s gay marriage victories.