Few men have acquired so scandalous a reputation as did Basil Zaharoff, alias Count Zacharoff, alias Prince Zacharias Basileus Zacharoff, known to his intimates as “Zedzed.” Born in Anatolia, then part of the Ottoman Empire, perhaps in 1849, Zaharoff was a brothel tout, bigamist and arsonist, a benefactor of great universities and an intimate of royalty who reached his peak of infamy as an international arms dealer -- a “merchant of death,” as his many enemies preferred it.

“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.

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?

With “The Apprentice,” the TV producer mythologized Trump—then a floundering D-lister—as the ultimate titan, paving his way to the Presidency.

Life inside Long Island’s largest cluster of sex offenders.

Profiles of people with genius-level IQs.

An oral history of Siskel and Ebert.

A tour of our greatest conspiracy theories.

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

Adapted from a new biography of Jane Fonda.

A profile of Elizabeth Warren.

A profile of Taylor Wilson, who achieved nuclear fusion at age 14.

Are video games capable of emotion?

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

A globe-trotting, pre-CCTV profile of architect Rem Koolhaas.

How Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian government has woven soccer into its grisly campaign of oppression.

How a perfect vision of mother hood hurts moms.

A profile of Joss Sackler.

A study of resilience in does and other female creatures.

A secret hope of mine, which I now find hilarious: I imagined that once I had a child, I would become a faster writer. Faster, and also better. It’s hard for me to reconstruct the optimistic logic that led me to this hypothesis. I think I honestly believed that if I did not have the option to write badly, I would simply evolve, like that Lamarckian giraffe, into a more efficient creature.

The Libyan Investment Authority was brand new, staffed by people who barely understood finance and had billions to invest. Goldman Sachs saw a whale. Now the Libyans want their money back.

For years, the candidate for Kansas governor has defended towns that passed anti-immigration ordinances. The towns have lost big — but Kobach has fared considerably better.