With a brutal cancer prognosis, a woman learns to live on borrowed time.

The history of a Japanese archipelago and its inhabitants, through rebellions and famine, a 20th century exodus for prostitution work across Asia, and finally depopulation and isolation.

After all these years, it’s still there, in the back of her mind, lurking. No matter how good things are going, it never quite goes away, this feeling that she should have died that day. And her brush with death is the first thing that strangers tend to notice about her, like a limp or a disfigurement. Once they find out where she went to high school, that’s all they want to talk about.

For the first time, the giants of the tech industry are spending more on creating, buying, and fighting patents than they are on R&D.

Part of New York Times’ ongoing iEconomy series.

Al Seckel held legendary parties in the 1980s and 90s, with attendees ranging from Slash to Francis Crick. He later became a collector of optical illusions and gave a TED talk on the topic. He may have also misled and defrauded many of the people he came into contact with.

For almost 20 years, Greg Torti has lived the life of a convicted sex offender—carrying a blue ID card with him at all times, avoiding schools and parks, living on the outskirts of town. It’s a just punishment for the crime, he says. It’s just that he didn’t commit it.

On the mid-sixties birth of America’s underground newspaper movement and the rise of The Realist, East Village Other, Berkeley Barb, and more.

A review of Treme, the new HBO show about post-Katrina New Orleans from David Simon, creator of The Wire. “The series virtually prohibits you from loving it,” Franklin writes, “while asking you to value it.”

How did a Kentucky entrepreneur, a Louisiana politician, and the vice president of Nigeria end up in one of the biggest scandals to hit America’s black elite in decades?

An interview with rapper Drakeo the Ruler after he was released from prison, having previously faced the possibility of 25 to life despite being previously acquitted of murder charges related to a 2016 killing.

Buyers from all over America—some of whom had never heard of the Illinois town—came searching for wealth amid the Rust Belt ruins.

The enduring disadvantage of getting locked up.

The story of a whale attack.

The best women’s tennis player of all-time opens up.

A profile of Russell Baze, the winningest jockey in American history.

A trip to the U.S. Open of ping-pong.

The future of beer behemoth AB InBev.

Inside one of the biggest antiquities-smuggling rings in history.

How the corpses of Hitler’s victims still haunt modern science—and American abortion politics.

The incentives for and ethics of writing other people’s books.

On the history, science, and rise of ACL tears.

The unraveling of Lisa Frank, Inc.

A profile of Barack Obama as he turns toward the finish line.

The story of Daily Kos and its founder, Markos Moulitsas.