“We need to develop political heroism.”

Following the fraudsters who use gods and myth to steal from the elderly.

On attempting to quit people and stay home.

Inside Eva Moskowitz’s quest to combine rigid discipline with a progressive curriculum.

When a call center gig turns out to be something else.

A trip to Malheur Refuge.

Can a college course teach us how to be happy?

Inside the effort to prevent migrant deaths at the US-Mexico border.

A trip to the Iditarod.

“I know that, as a white man, I have to hold my fellow white men accountable.”

A grandmother’s tale of the night her first love had to leave town.

Inside the battle between Ivanka and Don Jr. to be next in line.

How far can abused women go to protect themselves?

Ari Emanuel’s failure to launch.

A trip to Carbohydrate Camelot.

Inside the tech industry’s decades-long failure to reckon with risk.

A trip to Batumi, Georgia.

How a self-taught linguist came to own an indigenous language.

Two ordinary Americans, inspired by right-wing extremism, plan to kidnap a cop.

Trying to make sense of a fragmented, disparate musical tradition.

A trip to the “Olympics of hairdressing” with Team USA.

Daniel Hale exposed the machinery of America’s clandestine warfare. Why did no one seem to care?

But the more that I tried to remind myself of the various ways in which I did, in fact, seem to have a body that was moving, with a heart that pumped blood, the more agitated I became. Being dead butted up against the so-called evidence of being alive, and so I grew to avoid that evidence because proof was not a comfort; instead, it pointed to my insanity.

White sharks are hunting along Cape Cod’s beaches. What will it take to keep people safe?

James Wood on Saul Bellow:

One realizes, with a shock, that Bellow has taught one how to see and how to hear, has opened the senses. Until this moment one had not really thought of the looseness of a lightbulb filament, one had not heard the saliva bubbling in the harmonica, one had not seen well enough the nose pitted with black pores, and the demolition ball’s slow, heavy selection of its victims. A dozen good writers–Updike, DeLillo, others–can render you the window of a fish shop, and do it very well; but it is Bellow’s genius to see the lobsters “crowded to the glass” and their “feelers bent” by that glass–to see the riot of life in the dead peace of things.