Purdue Pharma’s marketing materials say OxyContin works for 12 hours. It doesn’t. And this problem, long-denied by the drugmaker, is what makes it highly addictive.

What is it about terminating half a twin pregnancy that seems more controversial than reducing triplets to twins or aborting a single fetus? After all, the math’s the same either way: one fewer fetus. Perhaps it’s because twin reduction (unlike abortion) involves selecting one fetus over another, when either one is equally wanted. Perhaps it’s our culture’s idealized notion of twins as lifelong soul mates, two halves of one whole. Or perhaps it’s because the desire for more choices conflicts with our discomfort about meddling with ever more aspects of reproduction.

One morning in mid-December, a group of soldiers banged on the door of a house in eastern Aleppo. A male voice responded from inside: “Who are you?” A soldier answered: “We’re the Syrian Arab Army. It’s O.K., you can come out. They’re all gone.” The door opened. A middle-aged man appeared. He had a gaunt, distinguished face, but his clothes were threadbare and his teeth looked brown and rotted. At the soldiers’ encouragement, he stepped hesitantly forward into the street. He explained to them, a little apologetically, that he had not crossed his threshold in four and a half years.

Not education. Not income. Not even being an expert on racial disparities in health care.

In Virginia, paramilitarism gets a rebrand.

When Carmen Segarra was hired to examine Goldman Sachs for the New York Fed, she bought a small recorder and began taping her meetings. Here is what she found before she was fired.

Last fall, a team of American Special Forces arrived in Nerkh, a district just west of Kabul. Six months later, amid allegations of torturing and murdering locals, the team was gone. Shortly after they left, the remains of 10 missing villagers were found outside their vacated base. An investigation into a possible war crime.

“On paper, [DJ Khaled] doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. He’s released eight full-length albums but doesn’t actually rap on any of them. He’s perhaps the most quoted figure in hip-hop, able to create viral catch phrases with an ease that marketing executives dream about. He’s played a serious role in the hip-hop industry throughout his career, yet he’s perceived almost exclusively as a meme by fans across the nation.”

On infertility.

I imagine my breath filling every part of my body: My little toe. My ankle. My calf. My knees. My thighs. My pelvis. When I get to my belly, I picture my breath filling the cavities in which my organs float, planets in space. I think about the planet of my uterus, which no longer carries an embryo. Tears slide into my ears as my teacher bends over me to press oil that smells like almonds into my third eye.

In 2008, a federally owned power plant spewed coal sludge over 300 acres in Tennessee. Now, 40 people who helped clean up the mess are dead and 300 ill.

A pair of undercover cops infiltrate a dogfighting ring in Houston.

An oral history.

A behind-the-scenes look at a U.S. attack against civilians near Khod: “the high-tech wizardry would fail in its most elemental purpose: to tell the difference between friend and foe.”

Amid the brutal civil war, a town fought off the regime and the fundamentalists—and dared to hold an election. Can its experiment in democracy survive?

How child molesters get away with it.

A healthcare nightmare.

An essay on insomnia.

Shared parenting is usually better for children—but the model fails for many women forced to co-parent with their abusers.

“I’m not the kind of guy who hears voices. But that night, as I passed the station, I heard a little voice coming from the back of my head…‘If you do it that way, if you use that algorithm, there will be a flaw. The game will be flawed. You will be able to crack the ticket. You will be able to plunder the lottery.’”

Twenty-one-year-old Briton Lucie Blackman came to Tokyo and found work in the Roppongi district hostess bars, where businessmen come to flirt with paid companions, and Western women draw a premium fee. Two months later, she disappeared. She would be found underneath a bathtub in a beachside cave.

Fact-checking David Brooks.

just three months, we have seen Charlie and Tessy through a lifetime of crises — temporary sobriety, meth binges, two stints in jail, three moves, one eviction, several religious, end-of-the-world texts on our phones, a dozen different phones and phone numbers (meth addicts go through “Obama Phones” like packs of cigarettes), and a stay in a psychiatric hospital. Every day brings some kind of cruel surprise, some hardship that would pummel me, but is just business as usual for them.

Creating an identity that’s no longer tied to the past.

Monsters occasionally assume a completely unexpected appearance. All of a sudden, Adolf Hitler is standing onstage wearing an Adidas tracksuit and flip-flops, and his name isn't Hitler; it's Oliver Polak. And the monster isn't really Adolf Hitler, either; it's the audience's laughter. It starts with a sputter, like something trying to break free from its restraints. But then it bursts out as if suddenly liberated.

"Los Angeles is a weird, complicated town for him. It's where all the record labels are, for one thing. And Chancelor Bennett, as he was born, is unsigned. Won't sign. It's maybe the most interesting, improbable music-industry story going right now—a young, obviously gifted rapper, universally hailed as the heir to Kanye and leader of a new generation of Internet-savvy kids who think of Jay Z as a failed tech entrepreneur, now on his fourth year of refusing to sign with a label."

Scientist George Price discovered an equation for altruism. First he let go of his possessions. Then he took his own life.