Most tycoons give big to one or two universities as their children approach college age. David Shaw gave to seven.

Murder in the Juarez Valley:

A few weeks after Saul Reyes and his family fled Mexico, I drove to an immigrant shelter in downtown El Paso to see him. As the former city secretary of Guadalupe, Saul had once been in charge of recording the births and deaths of everyone in his hometown. He’d taken it upon himself now to collect every single name of those who had died or disappeared in Guadalupe since the killing began in 2008. Through media reports and meetings with the many valley exiles now living in Texas, Saul had compiled a list of the town’s dead and disappeared. Showing me the book, he turned page after page of names. So far he had counted 180 dead, 26 disappeared, and eight unknown bodies dumped in his small town of 3,000 people. “There are a lot more, but these are the ones I’ve been able to collect,” he said. In his careful, spidery script, he had written on one page the names of his six family members.

On Enrique of Malacca, “the closest thing there is to a hero in the story of Ferdinand Magellan’s horribly botched attempt to circumnavigate the world.”

For the purposes of this essay, I’ll call it ‘ambient privacy’—the understanding that there is value in having our everyday interactions with one another remain outside the reach of monitoring, and that the small details of our daily lives should pass by unremembered. What we do at home, work, church, school, or in our leisure time does not belong in a permanent record. Not every conversation needs to be a deposition.

It started as simple teenage rebellion but ended up tearing Syria apart, setting in motion events that continue to rock the Middle East — and the world. The boys behind the graffiti would become unlikely revolutionaries and reluctant refugees. Not all of them would survive the upheaval they helped unleash.

Black men and women are still dying across the country. The power that is American policing has conceded nothing.

A profile of David Yerushalmi, the little-known Hasidic Jew from Brooklyn leading the campaign casting Islamic law as the greatest threat to American freedom since the cold war.

Twenty-five years ago, the tragedy at the World of Primates building broke the city’s heart and raised a loaded question: What, exactly, do we owe the animals in our care?

Slowly, Bobo pulled off his shoes, his socks. He stood up, unbuttoned his shirt, dropped his pants, his shorts. He stood there naked. It was Sunday morning, a little before 7.

How Alphonse “Buddy” Fletcher Jr., an openly gay hedge fund star, came to marry Ellen Pao, a partner at a powerful Silicon Valley firm, before they “went to war with their elite worlds.”

The early days of Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers.

An exposé of the New York Police Department’s Civilian Complaint Review Board.

“Too much is being asked of the Delta.”

Fighting to the finish in the most dangerous region of Afghanistan.

The breathable outerwear industry is at war with Bob Gore—the inventor of Gore-Tex.

A profile of Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian Prime Minister.

The New York Times reveals the deception of 27-year-old reporter Jayson Blair.

The story behind the fall of Saddam’s statue in Baghdad.

On the future of the liberal Israeli newspaper Haartez.

A faked marriage between undercover agents leads to the arrest of a dozen drug dealers.

The story of the landmark musical’s improbable success.

A physiological theory of mental illness.