Inside the split of the Hoefler/Frere-Jones typography team.

How divisions between Nigeria’s Muslim North and Christian South resulted in the birth of terror’s most ruthless movement.

A tenth of Kannapolis, North Carolina, residents were laid off after the local textile mill closed. A billionaire bought the mill and turned it into a mecca for biotechnology and life sciences research. Now many residents are human research subjects.

A profile of the Rookie editor-in-chief, who makes her Broadway debut next week.

Inside the dark, lucrative world of consumer debt collection.

While war raged across Afghanistan, expats lived in a bubble of good times and easy money. But as the U.S. withdraws, life has taken a deadly turn.

The bumpy rise of Saturday Night Live’s first star.

“I did a few days on Franco’s As I Lay Dying, and the vibe on the set was very heavy and serious. The only thing I can equate it to is tripping with a bunch of your friends.”

Jamie Smith said he was a co-founder of Blackwater and a former CIA officer. He appeared on cable news as a counterterrorism expert and he received millions in goverment contracts to train personnel. The money was real. The resume wasn’t.

Memories of life as a freshman cheerleader.

Javier Flores had hopes of a last-minute change in policy that would allow him to stay in Ohio with his wife and four kids, where he had a good job, a house, paid taxes. It didn’t come.

“In an industry in which millions of people are invested in his success – in which he’s constantly being advised, praised and berated, often by total strangers – Revis’ tranquillity might be his greatest asset. He isn’t just an island. He’s a fortress.”

The Four Seasons restaurant rose to fame as a place to cut deals and be seen. Then its chauvinistic ways – and, specifically, those of its owner – caught up with it.

How a Guatemalan cook ended up the master of okonomiyaki.

Her 4th day of college was a mass shooting. Here is what life is like afterward.

If you wanted a divorce in the late 1800s, you had to move to South Dakota. Even if you were the niece of John Jacob Astor III.

On Dec. 18, 2007, the school board in Pinellas Country, Florida, voted to abandon integration. They justified the decision with bold promises: Schools in poor, black neighborhoods would get more money, more staff, more resources. They delivered none of that. A 5-part investigation.

A profile of Tyler Perry.

Corey Arthur made headlines after being arrested and convicted in connection with the 1997 murder of his high school teacher. But the story is much more complicated than that.

The ripple effect of a single MTA mechanical failure.

The post-newsroom lives of veteran newspaper reporters who have lost their jobs.

On the battle over solar farms in the Mojave desert. An excerpt from Madrigal’s new book, Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology.

In June, 1942, a German submarine dropped four young Nazi agents off on a Florida beach. Their mission was to blow up bridges, factories, and Jewish-owned department stores. Among them was Herbert Haupt, the 22-year-old son of a German-American family in Chicago.

The author comments on the medium of the graduation cliché while still advancing it:

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about "teaching you how to think". If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think.

On Forever 21 and the rise of “fast fashion”:

They have changed fashion from a garment making to an information business, optimizing their supply chains to implement design tweaks on the fly.