How Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder, with a little help from the Bush Administration, got 140 trees chopped down in a national park to improve his view and ruined the life of a park ranger in the process.

Fifty years after Joseph Mitchell published “Joe Gould’s Secret” in The New Yorker, one last question about Gould—the identity of his anonymous benefactor—is answered.

Walter Pitts, who helped develop the “first mechanistic theory of the mind,” was so brilliant he was once been invited to study with Bertrand Russell. He was also homeless.

On Brent White, the joke whisperer who edits the largely improvisational comedies of Paul Feig, Judd Apatow and Adam McKay.

The writer returns to his remote North Dakota hometown’s high school, then isolated with a graduating class of only 28, now even smaller but connected by the internet.

Thinking about the right thing to do, now and in the imaginable future.

In 1865, a failed stockbroker tries to pull off one of the boldest financial schemes in American history: the original big short.

Perpetual outsiders, Mormons spent 200 years assimilating to a certain national ideal—only to find their country in an identity crisis. What will the third century of the faith look like?

We’ve barely explored the darkest realm of the ocean. With rare-metal mining on the rise, we’re already destroying it.

Selections from the leaked documents about the war in Afghanistan portray a military effort that is ineffective and frequently absurd. (Part of the NYT War Logs series.)

How New York Times is clawing its way into the future:

The main goal is... to transform the Times’ digital subscriptions into the main engine of a billion-dollar business, one that could pay to put reporters on the ground in 174 countries even if (OK, when) the printing presses stop forever. To hit that mark, the Times is embarking on an ambitious plan inspired by the strategies of Netflix, Spotify, and HBO: invest heavily in a core offering... while continuously adding new online services and features... so that a subscription becomes indispensable to the lives of its existing subscribers and more attractive to future ones.

“I faced death and all that shit. It’s my responsibility to come back and come back strong. It’s going to take more than a Walmart truck to take that gift away. I can’t wait to make you all laugh. Especially you, Mike. And I already did that today. So all is good.”

An interview with Chase Strangio, who has won a series of landmark court cases in his role as ACLU deputy director for transgender justice.

The last thing child-welfare supervisor Chereece Bell wanted to see was what happened to 4-year-old Marchella Pierce. The last thing she expected was to go to jail for it.

On animal cremation and burial in New York:

Riding around Manhattan on a delivery run with a car full of pet cremains, it's hard not to look at the world differently. The omnipresence of pets becomes glaringly obvious, and their inevitable fate is never far from the mind. It's easy to imagine the whippet being jaywalked across Eighth Avenue getting hit by a car. The cocker spaniel on 23rd Street? A bucket of cocker bones in the making.

In the ’90s, a gynecologist named Gao Yaojie exposed an AIDS epidemic in rural China and the ensuing government cover-up. Forced to leave, she’s now 85 and living alone in New York.

The angel saving jumpers on an infamous bridge in China.

“I was in the visiting clubhouse waiting to interview one of the Oakland A’s this year when one of the players called, ‘Here, pussy’—as though he were calling a cat. But of course, he hadn’t lost Fluffy; he’d found a woman in his locker room.”

Veterans are taking their own lives on VA hospital campuses, a desperate form of protest against a system that they feel hasn’t helped them.

An attempt to understand why, after 50 years of decline, more and more young women are suddenly embracing religious life.

An argument for outing a notorious message board member: “Under Reddit logic, outing Violentacrez is worse than anonymously posting creepshots of innocent women, because doing so would undermine Reddit’s role as a safe place for people to anonymously post creepshots of innocent women. I am OK with that.”

How one billionaire owner outflanked two others and brought the NFL back to Los Angeles, doubling the value of his franchise.

A profile of former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, who is running for office four years after his affair with an Argentine journalist became national news.

An oral history of Wikipedia.