The Chinese team heads to the home of elite running.

On “the Negro’s ambivalent relation to the Jew.”

From Norwegian waters to European plates.

The debate surrounding Truvada, the first drug approved by the FDA to prevent HIV.

When a child has a condition that’s new to science.

When adults like Billy Smolinski go missing, it’s hard to get the authorities involved.

The author attempts to interview Grigori Perelman, a reclusive mathematical genius.

Trying to fix the Atlantic Ocean’s food chain.

Ashlyn Blocker, 13, has a “congenital insensitivity to pain.”

How Republicans came to be the party of white people.

How to photograph Los Angeles from a helicopter.

Why some innovations spread quick while others take decades to catch hold.

Ego, hubris, and the failure to adapt.

A technical explanation of the real program to sabotage Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The wild competition to be “worshipped” by Alaska’s most eligible bachelors.

A young mother transplants her family to Bahia.

A profile of Rupert Murdoch, written before his empire began to crumble.

An orgy of free song-sharing seems to be exactly the kind of thing that the horrified labels would quickly clamp down on. But they appear to be starting to accept that their fortunes rest with the geeks. Or at least they’re trying to talk a good game. “I’m not part of the past—I’m part of the future,” says Lucian Grainge, chair and CEO of the world’s biggest label, Universal Music Group. “There’s a new philosophy, a new way of thinking.”

As the critic Lewis Mumford wrote half a century ago, “The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is the right to destroy the city.” Yet we continue to produce parking lots, in cities as well as in suburbs, in the same way we consume all those billions of plastic bottles of water and disposable diapers.

A trip to a modern African megacity.

The 1900 death of Fritz and the battle to define his legacy.

He decided to bury a box of treasure in the desert. Why?

A casino failed to save Tunica, Mississippi.

The plot to erode the key legislative gains of the civil rights era.