On the dying city of Port Arthur, Texas, and one man’s fight to save it.

Inside the five-year (so far) production of the Ilya Khrzhanovsky film Dau:

Khrzhanovsky came up with the idea of the Institute not long after preproduction on Dau began in 2006. He wanted a space where he could elicit the needed emotions from his cast in controlled conditions, twenty-four hours a day. The set would be a panopticon. Microphones would hide in lighting fixtures (as they would in many a lamp in Stalin's USSR), allowing Khrzhanovsky to shoot with multiple film cameras from practically anywhere — through windows, skylights, and two-way mirrors. The Institute's ostensible goal was to re-create '50s and '60s Moscow, home to Dau's subject, Lev Landau. A Nobel Prize–winning physicist, Landau significantly advanced quantum mechanics with his theories of diamagnetism, superfluidity, and superconductivity. He also tapped epic amounts of ass.

The low-key swingers of sleepy Amarillo, Texas find themselves relentlessly harassed by a militant Christian group.

An oral history of The Right Stuff.

An army of Western luxury-lifestyle purveyors flock to China to teach the country’s new billionaires how to act rich.

The story of Olympic boxing hopeful Quanitta Underwood, who was sexually abused by her father as a child.

On the complex nature of a presidential second term and what Obama would do if he wins one.

A history of The New Yorker and its editors, from founder Harold Ross through Tina Brown.

A profile of the late artist and author Norris Church Mailer, who stayed with her husband Norman despite his notorious philandering.

When (temporary) cities swell; a short history of the Burning Man festival.

He used to weigh 1,000 pounds. Now he has to figure out what to do with the rest of his life.

DNA evidence exonerated six convicted killers. So why do some of them recall the crime so clearly?

The town welcomed hundreds of Somali refugees. Then a private militia decided to go “ISIS hunting.”

“Watching the cells populate, it rapidly became clear that many of us had weathered more than we had been willing to admit to one another.”

An interview with Cobain a few months after the release of In Utero.

Last summer, Arthur Medici went surfing off the coast of Cape Cod. He never made it back.

Home-funeral guides believe that families can benefit from tending to—and spending time with—the bodies of their deceased.

Observers have long warned of rising forced labor in Xinjiang. Satellite images show factories built just steps away from cell blocks.

How did a lorry carrying 273 dead bodies end up stranded on the outskirts of Guadalajara?

In the West, organized extremists are driving community health officials out of their jobs.

Biden has a plan to make day care more affordable for parents—if the providers don’t go out of business first.

On a decade-long war:

Hackers from many countries have been exfiltrating—that is, stealing—intellectual property from American corporations and the U.S. government on a massive scale, and Chinese hackers are among the main culprits.

The Berkeley Pit is a gorgeous, toxic former mining site in Montana that’s beloved by tourists. But unless it’s cleaned up soon, it could become the worst environmental disaster in American history.

An ode to the Bee Gees' strange, successful career.

Sixteen-year-old Kalief Browder was accused of taking a backpack. He spent the next three years on Rikers Island, without trial.