One of the founders of Google discovered that he carried a gene that meant a 50% chance of developing Parkinson’s. In response, he is working to change and expedite the way that Parkinson’s research is conducted.

Katharine Hayhoe is one of the country’s most influential atmospheric scientists, spreading the word about the effects of climate change. She’s also an evangelical Christian.

How the Jesuit Church refused to stop pedophile priest:

"He truly is the Hannibal Lecter of the clerical world. He did more psychological and physical damage to children than anyone else. And what makes it worse is that the Jesuits knew about it, and did nothing."

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.”

Wih Alexey Navalny in prison, one of his closest aides is carrying on the lonely work of the opposition.

“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.”

Hundreds of pages of documents obtained by Motherboard show how Facebook is using the Menlo Park Police Department to reshape the city.

The latest frontier of statistical research in baseball—and the newest front in the Yanks/Red Sox arms race—is defense. And it’s yielding some surprising insights about who is actually worth his salary.

How a nation went bankrupt. “Ireland’s regress is especially unsettling because of the questions it raises about Ireland’s former progress: even now no one is quite sure why the Irish suddenly did so well for themselves in the first place.”

“I’ve increasingly become aware of how much of my reputation in Taiwan is built on the knowledge of my New York upbringing.”

Kevin is the only surviving Von Erich brother, born into a wrestling family that lived and died by the code of the ring.

The Philippines is one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a journalist, especially if you’re in talk radio.

The AIDS crisis as it unfolded in America is an object lesson in the danger, the potential violence, inherent in organized prejudice.

“The remains of a sunken village nearby make me realize that the process is inexorable. Of this seventy-five-house village, there is almost nothing left.”

A telekinetic teenager became a convicted killer. Can a group of strangers prove that Christina Boyer is really a victim of injustice?

China is neither a Marxist fundamentalist regime nor a universally-surveilled open-air prison, in which one is free to do nothing but worship the party and carry out its edicts. That is however the impression created by quite a bit of the media. I think that’s not the fault of individual journalists, instead more structural explanations are at work. News bureaus are highly concentrated in Beijing, due in part to natural corporate consolidation, but mostly because the government maintains a strict cap on foreign journalist visas. As a result, the bulk of journalists are based in the part of China that has the most politics and the least sense of growth. Everything here is doom and gloom, a fact well conveyed to the outside world.

On revisionist architecture.

Looking at the statues here, or anywhere, makes one wonder: Is abstraction simply the cardinal feature of any war where the loss is so much greater than whatever can be described as victory?

On the science of being fooled.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool.

The president is overseeing a sea change in the world of economic policy, and so much hangs in the balance.

The French influence in Africa is on the wane, and the Chinese are coming.

A central Massachusetts city enabled the author’s ancestors to move into the good life of the middle class. That move is more complicated today.

Why is Rick DeVos, the son of Betsy and the heir to the DeVos fortune, investing in a weirdly populous and highly lucrative art contest?

Over the next decade, the number of elderly homeless Americans is projected to triple.

A profile of NASCAR Dale Earnhardt Jr., who is returning to racing after a series of concussions.