A profile of the saxophone player at 82.

A profile of “the internet’s boyfriend.”

The many identities of Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace’s murderer.

Could a global icon of extinction still be alive?

The making of Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption 2.

The parallel lives of a KGB defector and his CIA handler.

The inside story of a Texas gun-smuggling ring.

During New York’s ’80s and ’90s crack epedemic, a flashy detective who “imagined himself a crusader who created his own rules” and his star witness, a crack addicted prostitute who seemed to constantly be at the scene of homicides, sent dozens of men to prison for life. Now, they are under investigation.

Sitting alone in his San Jose office, Michael Burry saw the bubble in the subprime-mortgage market before anyone else. So he convinced Wall Street to let him bet on it, even though few were betting on him. The article that became The Big Short.

Mince pie was once more American than the apple variety. It was also blamed for “bad health, murderous dreams, the downfall of Prohibition, and the decline of the white race,” among other things. Then it disappeared.

The symptoms are here: multiyear droughts, large-scale crop failures, a major city—Cape Town—on the verge of going dry, increasing outbreaks of violence, fears of full-scale water wars. The big question: How do we keep the water flowing?

An interesting side effect of reading the report is to feel that anyone who claims to have understood its arguments, purposes, and consequences within twenty-four or forty-eight hours of encountering it is likely untrustworthy.

On the biggest food fraud in U.S. history.

In which Eliot analyzes Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and D.H. Lawrence.

A series on the growing income inequality gap in America.

A primer on income inequality in America.

A helicopter pilot crash-lands in the Arctic.

On what happened in 2016 and what should happen next.

In the Southwest’s border region, historical reenactment meets today’s reality.

How a war over a domain name ended in a bloody shootout.

On Jared Kushner and his relationship with his father-in-law.

For generations, plantation owners strove to keep black laborers on the farm and competing businesses out of town. Today, the towns faring best are the ones whose white residents stayed to reckon with their own history.

Ten years ago, the tax agency formed a special team to unravel the complex tax-lowering strategies of the nation’s wealthiest people. It never had a chance.

The first five years of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s tenure have been marked by a dangerous consolidation of power.

According to political allies and Western diplomats who have worked with Maliki, he isn't so much power-hungry as deeply cynical and mistrusting. The Dawa Party, which Maliki joined as a young man, was hunted by Saddam's Baathist regime. Even those living in exile -- like Maliki, who lived in Syria and Iran for more than 20 years -- organized themselves into isolated cells to protect against the regime's spies and limit the information that any one member might divulge if he were captured or compromised. Maliki's early career was saturated in perpetual suspicion.

The story behind “the best brisket you’ll ever eat.”