A culture war is raging between the people diversifying science fiction and the men who’d like to roll that back.

The adventures and controversies of the avant-garde poet Kenneth Goldsmith, who believes plagiarism is an art form.

At three NYC comedy theater/schools, students and students-turned-instructors (a “benign pyramid scheme”) pursue the elusive simulacrum of human interaction that is longform improvisation.

The Ugandan rebel Lord’s Resistance Army, drawn mostly from kidnapped children, has proved as elusive as it is barbaric.

Nearly all the world’s fake products come from China. America’s oldest private detective agency is on the case.

The financial industry’s pursuit of profits from mobile-home communities is undermining one of the country’s largest sources of affordable housing.

“Love purifies. Suffering never purified anybody; suffering merely intensifies the self-directed drives within us. Any act of love, however--no matter how small--lessens anxiety's grip, gives us a taste of tomorrow, and eases the yoke of our fears. Love, unlike virtue, is not its own reward. The reward of love is peace of mind, and peace of mind is the end of man's desiring.”

The author's first published article.

“Choice is a great burden. The call to invent one’s life, and to do it continuously, can sound unendurable. Totalitarian regimes aim to stamp out the possibility of choice, but what aspiring autocrats do is promise to relieve one of the need to choose. This is the promise of “Make America Great Again”—it conjures the allure of an imaginary past in which one was free not to choose.”

A brutal story from the Times’ cub Metro reporter:

''We're dying,'' he said. ''Why is this happening? Is it because we loved each other too much or not enough?"

It’s legal to buy poppy seeds in America and it’s legal to plant them—unless you’re familiar with the simple process of turning them into opium, that is. Then having poppies in your garden is a felony.

The main thing that attracts me to Buddhism is probably what attracts every artist to being an artist—that it’s a godlike thing. You are the ultimate authority. There is no other ultimate authority. Now, for some artists that’s difficult, because they want to have the art police. They want to have the critic who hands out tickets and says, “That’s too loose.”

No house is private. It may be purchased, and thus legally private property, but it doesn’t stand alone. Through its extending wires, pipes, inputs and outputs, the house (with few off-grid exceptions) is tied up in the cyborg systems of the city and the supply chains and logistical inputs that extend around the globe.

A woman is killed. Her husband is accused. A famous/infamous medical examiner investigates.

What’s going on here isn’t just science. It’s something deeper, something stranger, something at the same time both terrifying and fascinating.

An estimated 70,000 transgender youth lack secure housing. This is what life on the streets is like for six of them.

Russia is dead set on being a global power. But what looks like grand strategy is often improvisation—amid America’s retreat.

Gabrielle Williams is nine years old. She weighs just 12 pounds. The mystery of “syndrome x” and the girls who never age.

Can we be convinced that healthy food is delicious? On the new science of neurogastronomy and why we eat what we eat.

There are more than 22,000 homeless children in New York, the highest number since the Great Depression. This is one of their stories.

John Walker Lindh’s father on why his son is an innocent victim of the War on Terror.

The “zone of sacrifice” that is Oxnard, California, where low-income workers are paying the price for pesticide use and chemical dumping.

“The reason women-only billiards tournaments exist is not because the players can’t beat men. It’s because they can.”

A profile of then-First Lady Barbara Bush, published just before the 1992 presidential election. The lede: “Even Barbara Bush’s stepmother is afraid of her.”

The platform’s entertainment for children is weirder—and more globalized—than adults could have expected.