The theft of a deeply personal painting by René Magritte from a Belgian museum was a national tragedy. Now, an investigation points to a tragedy greater still.

Harmony smiles, blinks and frowns. She can hold a conversation, tell jokes and quote Shakespeare. She’ll remember your birthday, McMullen told me, what you like to eat, and the names of your brothers and sisters. She can hold a conversation about music, movies and books. And of course, Harmony will have sex with you whenever you want.

In October, Iraqi forces set out to retake Mosul, one of Iraq’s largest cities and ISIS’s biggest stronghold in the country. It would take them nine months and cost thousands of lives.

Hanging out in Moscow with Russia’s yuppie, 20-something journalist revolutionaries:

In other words, the protest was being brought to you by the same people you would have relied on, weeks earlier, for restaurant picks.

The young Woody Allen writes jokes for supper club comedians, decides he will never make it as a performer and then does, idolizes and is snubbed by Mort Sahl, and develops the comic persona which will make him a star.

Feminism brought the opposition together for the Women’s March on Washington. But how long will that last, and how many converts can it win?

The llamas, the dress, and the day the internet broke.

It’s highly unlikely that a gigantic space rock will crash through our atmosphere and destroy civilization as we know it. But it’s not impossible either. Which is why a small but growing community of scientists and astronomers are scrambling to spot and destroy dangerous asteroids long before they hit us.

The discombobulated existence of polar bears and the people trying to save them.

An excerpt from Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America.

There the man in the shorts—later identified as a Russian agent using the alias Richard Murphy of New Jersey—handed Michael Zottoli from Seattle two items: a flash memory card and a bag that held $150,000 in cash.

Within nine months they’d both be behind bars.

A profile of Merle Haggard.

A profile of Henry Hook, crossword puzzle master.

An examination of Mitt Romney’s record on abortion.

An oral history of a family in Mexico City, in transition from poverty to the lower-middle class, as they scramble to organize the burial of a slum-dwelling aunt.

The Cosmo editor and author of Sex and the Single Girl’s rocky real-life relationships.

“In all his life, this was the moment of his greatest defeat.” On the death of George McGovern’s daughter on a cold winter night in Madison, Wisconsin.

Barbara Williamson co-founded Sandstone, one of the most famous radical experiments in group sex and communal living of the 1970s. Then she got wild.

The author on why he belives in God (“It makes things better”), the perils of writing high (“Annie Wilkes is cocaine, she was my number-one fan”) and what he thinks of other writers (“Hemingway sucks, basically”).

An Alabama woman took the equivalent of one Valium during her pregnancy. A few weeks after she gave birth, she became one of more than 1,800 new and expecting mothers arrested under the state’s chemical endangerment law.

Houston detectives investigate a series of brutal assaults on prostitutes in the Acres Homes section of the city. They thought they were after one man; it turns out they were wrong.

Having fallen on hard times, a former football star and the pride of his small town decides to rob the local bank. His weapons of choice: Craigslist, bear mace, and an inner tube.

A profile of the climber and thief Vjeran Tomic, dubbed Spider-Man by the French press, who describes robbery as an act of imagination.

Dozens of military contractors, most of them Black, have been jailed in the emirate — some on trumped-up drug charges. Why has the American government failed to help them?

Franklin Leonard’s anonymous survey has launched careers, recognized four of the past eight Best Picture winners, and pushed movie studios to think beyond sequels and action flicks.

In the not-so-distant future, all of our objects will talk to each other. They’ll make our coffee, find our keys, save our lives. The roadmap to a fully networked existence.