On trying out for the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

How Curt Schilling’s video-game company went bust.

The science of same-sex relationships in the wild.

On the workings of Sarah Palin’s inner circle.

On the evolution of New Jersey’s governor.

A tour of Manhattan’s nightlife.

On female rage.

Can blockchain create a new, better internet?

And I fear what it has become.

Why does prenatal care ignore the topic altogether?

Sam Patten’s wild life as a cooperating witness.

On the meaning of an ancient practice: collecting seashells.

On Rudolph Giuliani and the enduring power of shamelessness.

How New Jersey’s first coronavirus patient survived.

Can genetic engineering bring back the American Chestnut?

The “mean high water line” and how public beaches are being turned private.

The writer, deaf since birth, on the intricacies of reading lips.

Could the pandemic teach us why our sense of smell matters?

Pete Dexter, profiled.

"I'm sick and tired of the story," says Dexter, though he knows it is a signature moment of his trajectory from newsman to writing some of the most original and important novels in American literature, including the National Book Award–winning Paris Trout (1988), a riveting tale of an unrepentant racist who brutally murders a 14-year-old black girl in a small Georgia town in the late 1940s. Settling deep into a dark-green leather chair near a patio window that offers a commanding view of ferries chugging across the cold blue waters, Dexter begins: "It was not a good column. I was trying to write something I didn't feel." Dexter is referring to the column that almost got him killed.

Death on America’s racetracks:

At 2:11 p.m., as two ambulances waited with motors running, 10 horses burst from the starting gate at Ruidoso Downs Race Track 6,900 feet up in New Mexico’s Sacramento Mountains.

Nineteen seconds later, under a brilliant blue sky, a national champion jockey named Jacky Martin lay sprawled in the furrowed dirt just past the finish line, paralyzed, his neck broken in three places. On the ground next to him, his frightened horse, leg broken and chest heaving, was minutes away from being euthanized on the track. For finishing fourth on this early September day last year, Jacky Martin got about $60 and possibly a lifetime tethered to a respirator.

Shamir is 15, bored and broke and balancing right on the edge.

On Billy Joel’s sardonic gloom.

A survivor of conversion therapy gets the wedding of her dreams.