“Ikea, it seems, is a genius at selling Ikea.”

The son of a Red Sox legend, his trail of violent attacks runs back to his teen years. So does the line of judges who somehow saw fit, time and again, to give him one more chance. Now he’s on trial for murder.

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.

Tomi Masters was a 23-year-old from Indiana who moved to California with dreams of making it big in the cannabis business. Then she met a hacker who introduced her to a dark new world of digital manipulation, suspicion, paranoia, and fear — one that swallowed her alive and left her floating in a river in the Philippines.

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.

W.H. Auden’s quiet, personal pursuit of kindness and honor.

A sketch artist and a grieving mother set out to solve a cold case. The more they dug, the more terrifying the truth became.

From a Tokyo smash-and-grab to driving a car through the window of a Dubai jewelry shop, how a ragtag band of Balkan thieves set a new bar for audacious heists.

A member of the Pink Panthers, Milan Poparic, escaped from prison yesterday.

George Trow’s Within the Context of No Context was a brilliant, scary vision of a cultural end-time. Then, having described it, he lived it, spiraling into madness.

A profile of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, prime minister of Turkey.

A profile of then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.

An eyewitness account of Robert Kennedy’s assassination.

How seven Italian scientists came to be convicted of manslaughter following a catastrophic quake.

Tracking cyberextortionists and their roving swarms of bots.

Squatters in Buffalo, NY enjoy a life of “decadent poverty” fixing up palatial mansions.

An anatomy of a failure.

A former pilot of miniature cocaine-smuggling submarines tells his story.

A profile of photographer Bill Cunningham.

A profile of former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara.

How a loathsome band makes gobs of money.

A profile of Jordan at 50.

A profile of a suburban New Jersey fifth-grader named Colin Duffy.