Against all predictions, the Taliban took the Afghan capital in a matter of hours. This is the story of why and what came after, by a reporter and photographer who witnessed it all.

“At the gym, he’s not Garrett Holeve, the guy with Down syndrome. He’s G-Money, an up-and-coming fighter with big ambitions.”

More than 4 million Syrians have fled the war. 2,647 have made it to the United States.

Polarization. Conspiracy theories. Attacks on the free press. An obsession with loyalty. Recent events in the United States follow a pattern Europeans know all too well.

A Manson-contemporary cult group rises out of a jug band, builds a fortress in the Boston ghetto, bullies control of a community newspaper, swallows a successful actor, fractures, splits for California, and attempts to describe to the reporter the enigma that is Mel Lyman.

“For every other kid in the room, the science experiment probably amounts to just another classroom activity, but for the Nashes the project is a reminder of Molly’s own fight for life and the controversial cutting-edge medicine that saved her.”

Enlightened is probably the sharpest satire of modern white-collar work since the original British version of The Office, and its skewering of this world intertwines with its portrait of individual personalities so deftly that you can’t separate them. Creator Mike White captures the unsettling blandness of office protocol, politics and jargon, from the chill that workers feel when Human Resources calls them out of the blue to the impressive-sounding word salad labels that the company gives to its departments and projects. (The experimental department to which the newly demoted Amy is assigned is called “Cogentiva.”)

The night America elected Donald J. Trump president, 38-year-old Richard B. Spencer, who fancies himself the “Karl Marx of the alt-right” and envisions a “white homeland,” crowed, “we’re the establishment now.” If so, then the architect of the new establishment is Spencer’s former mentor, Paul Gottfried, a retired Jewish academic...

The author reflects on his mayoral run with Norman Mailer against John Lindsay.

At the bar one night a couple of weeks after the primary, I looked up from a drink and saw my face and Norman's face floating across the screen on the NBC First Tuesday show. It is a network thing, and they did a 20-minute look at our campaign. The show reinforced my opinion that Norman and I had some of the most terrific lows in the history of anything that ever took place in this city. And, perhaps, a couple of highs that could be recognized as time passes a bit. Like maybe colleges for years will be using the things Norman Mailer was saying out in the streets.

Ann Casey pulled herself out of poverty by becoming one of the most revered wrestlers in America. Then she was shot by a drug-running truck driver. This is the story of her comeback.

A profile of Costa Rica’s most famous bull, who is responsible for two riders’ deaths and a brand of craft beer.

The circus is gone. The presidency is ending. The mystery endures.

On the service’s multiple origin stories.

How the 9.9 percent became “the principal accomplices in a process that is slowly strangling the economy, destabilizing American politics, and eroding democracy.”

Getting arrested was the best thing to ever happen to Jeremy Meeks.

Tom Wicker was without a notebook on November 22, 1963. Instead, reported Gay Talese, he “scribbled his observations and facts across the back of a mimeographed itinerary of Kennedy’s two-day tour of Texas.”

Here’s the 3,700-word masterpiece he filed.

The case for why a cup of joe is about to become a luxury item.

A profile of the Oklahoma City point guard, who is averaging a triple-double in his first season without Kevin Durant.

In Northern Albania, vengeance is as likely a form of restitution as anything the criminal-justice system can offer.

A Bosnian social psychologist who studies guilt and responsibility in the collective memory (and denial) of Sreberbica, which is “among the most scientifically documented mass killings in history.”

On the London riot on 2011, which “tells us a great deal about our ideological-political predicament and about the kind of society we inhabit, a society which celebrates choice but in which the only available alternative to enforced democratic consensus is a blind acting out.”

Is Bryan Saunders a drug-inspired outsider genius, or just in need of intervention?

A profile of the goat-herding nationalist intellectual who is leading a movement.

“Football as we know it is done, because the lawyers are here.”

The anatomy of a scandal.