“The dirty secret of American higher education is that student-loan interest rates are almost irrelevant. It’s not the cost of the loan that’s the problem, it’s the principal—the appallingly high tuition costs that have been soaring at two to three times the rate of inflation, an irrational upward trajectory eerily reminiscent of skyrocketing housing prices in the years before 2008.”

LGBTQI groups found rare freedoms online, but this year, many were shut by censors. It feels like slowly being sanded down, said one member.

Ashima Shiraishi is the most talented rock climber in the world. She’s also 14.

The California coast is disappearing under the rising sea. Our choices are grim.

Tucker Carlson: The bow-tie is gone, but the moxie remains.

The Department of Energy is in chaos and it is putting the world at risk.

The organization’s leadership is focused on external threats, but the real crisis is of its own making.

Space is only getting weirder.

With Osama dead, U.S. intelligence is zeroing in on the remaining most dangerous terrorists alive, and one man is at the top of the list. Of the eighteen terror attacks attempted in the United States over the past two years, Anwar al-Awlaki’s fingerprints are on eight of them. The moderate turned radical is eloquent, he is popular— and he’s American.

What is the defining achievement of Barack Obama?

How dangerous is the media company that Steve Bannon called “the platform for the alt-right”?

The W.N.B.A. is putting on some of the best pro basketball in America.

Smell is often dismissed as the least important sense. But it’s the funk that draws us together.

Cases of COVID-19 are rising fast. Vaccine uptake has plateaued. The pandemic will be over one day—but the way there is different now.

The musician, producer and archivist is driven by one thing: a mission to spread the joy of Black music.

Putin's daughter Katerina has been attending college under the surname Tikhonova and is one of the top "acrobatic rock'n'roll dance" competitors in the world.

She is the also the rumored spouse of the son of one of Russia's richest bankers. While Putin reported only $119,000 on last year's tax return, his daughter's fortune could now stretch into the billions.

Perhaps you didn’t know that in addition to being a very funny writer, Kafka’s life yields a lot of comedy too.

A false confession to bad cops put a man in prison for rape and murder. But even conclusive DNA evidence hasn’t gotten him out.

Ellen Pao recounts her own lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

A history of a small Texas town deep in the Chihuahuan desert:

The isolation is such that if you laid out the islands of the Hawaiian archipelago, and the deep ocean channels that separate them, on the road between Marfa and the East Texas of strip shopping and George Bush Jr., you’d still have 100 miles of blank highway stretching away in front of you.

“Too much is being asked of the Delta.”

The breathable outerwear industry is at war with Bob Gore—the inventor of Gore-Tex.

“He is, as of this writing, the most mocked man in the world.”

Why everything is getting louder.

The British and Irish have coined some fabulous terms to describe nature and landscrape. “Doofers” is the Scots’ term for horse-shit; “clinkerbell” means icicle in Hampshire.