The F.B.I. tried to recruit an Iranian scientist as an informant. When he balked, the payback was brutal.

While Covid-19 deaths in the United States skyrocket, Germans have managed to largely contain the damage. What do we need to learn?

Our climate models could be missing something big.

Why did so many Americans receive strange packages they didn’t think they’d ordered?

A last-gasp FEMA camp for wildfire survivors tests the government’s obligations to the displaced.

Utah says the White Mesa Mill isn’t contaminating groundwater, but its neighbor, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, disagrees.

JPMorgan Chase’s $6 billion mistake and the woman who took the fall.

On Juliana Buhring, a former cult member who became the first woman to bike around the world.

On keeping the place where ethically raised animals are killed open.

There’s a growing gap between the gun lobby’s leadership and its rank-and-file.

The Obama administration was supposed to fight corporate concentration. In the airline industry, at least, it didn’t work out that way.

William Regnery II spent almost 20 years funding the racist right. It finally paid off.

In many homicides, police believe they know the killer’s identity but can’t get a witness to cooperate.

On space rocks and the people who chase them.

Joe Ford, car detective, searches the world for stolen rare automobiles on the black market.

Knowing she had the legal right to die helped Paralympic gold medalist Marieke Vervoort live her life.

On the owner’s 20-year evolution from disruptive force to formidable constant.

John Beale was an exemplary employee at the Environmental Protection Agency. He also led a double life, though not the rumored one at the CIA his colleagues whispered about.

Seattle’s Aurora Bridge has been the most notorious suicide site in the Northwest for 80 years. On one man’s fight to erect a fence and the race to save one last jumper.

Throughout 2020, the notion that the novel coronavirus leaked from a lab was off-limits. Those who dared to push for transparency say toxic politics and hidden agendas kept us in the dark.

A financier and his wife build a mansion in the jungles of Costa Rica, set up a wildlife preserve, and appear to slowly, steadily lose their minds. A spiral of handguns, angry locals, armed guards, uncut diamonds, abduction plots, and a bedroom blazing with 550 Tiffany lamps ends with a body and a mystery: Did John Felix Bender die by his own hand? Or did Ann Bender kill him to escape their crumbling dream?

Tracking a rumored gerbil infestation through China’s bureaucracy.

What Gregg Popovich, 5-time NBA champion coach, looks for in players.

Living on your parents’ farm while pregnant changes your relationship to time.