On the appeal of astrology.

On the photographer Catherine Opie who has “made a study of the freeways of Los Angeles, lesbian families, surfers, Tea Party gatherings, America’s national parks, the houses of Beverly Hills, teen-age football players, the personal effects of Elizabeth Taylor, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, Boy Scouts, her friends, mini-malls, and tree stumps.”

A preview of the “nuclear option.”

On the insanity of America’s gun laws.

The story of the Grenfell Tower fire.

On the confines of masculinity.

The legacy of Benihana.

On the history of American nationalism.

On the lost-children stories of Australia.

Within the world of law enforcement, bounty hunting is something of an aberration. An accident arising from the combination of common law, frontier justice, chattel slavery, and capitalism. No other job is more American. Bounty hunting’s legality is a mishmash of confusing requirements, regulations, and certifications that vary widely by state.

Adapted by the author of “Black Hawk Down.”

A story of two births.

A profile of the actress.

A profile of Bruce Springsteen.

How Post Malone became pop’s king of heartbreak.

To speak of the human as such, as the modernists did, is like taking a piece of the wild, putting it into a petri dish, adding bleach and antibiotics until more than half of what’s in there is dead and then celebrating the barely-living remains as “the human.” Provocatively put, the human is a sterile abstraction, a harmony of illusions.

On learning persuasion.

Wendy Carlos’s music of the spheres.

On Glenn Gould.

A profile of the director.

Inside the world of competitive fireworks.

How Chicago is key to a business moving tons of drugs for billions of dollars.

A profile of the world’s top photo retoucher, who typically can retouch over 100 images in a single issue of Vogue.

How Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction, all nine-sixteenths of a second of it, changed TV, the internet, and American culture.