The question for researchers isn’t “How smart are dolphins?” It’s “How are dolphins smart?”

In the bayou south of New Orleans, a program called the Nurse-Family Partnership tries to reverse the life chances for babies born into extreme poverty. Sometimes, it actually succeeds.

North Idaho has become one of the most desirable places in the West for conservatives to relocate. So why is the local Republican party tearing itself apart?

For the nurses in the Appalachian highlands who risked their lives during the pandemic, it is as if they fought in a war no one acknowledges.

“If the pandemic so terrified us that billions of us retreated into panicked cocoons for months, what can explain or justify our blindness and indifference towards the ten million lives ended each year by the repeated inhalation of smog?”

Melissa Cook is carrying triplets for a man she has never met, conceived with an egg that isn't hers. He only wants two of them, but won't let her keep the third. So she is suing, in the hopes that the court will arrive at a new meaning of parenthood.

Sasha Shulgin, a former DOW chemist who now lives a quiet life as a pensioner outside the Bay Area, is responsible for the discovery of the majority of psychedelic compounds currently known.

Two years ago, the climbing photographer known as Nathan Smith saw no way out, after struggling for years with gender-identity issues in the male-dominated outdoor industry. Then—slowly, bravely—Nikki introduced herself to the world.

Fidel Castro, the fiery apostle of revolution who brought the Cold War to the Western Hemisphere in 1959 and then defied the United States for nearly half a century as Cuba’s maximum leader, bedeviling 11 American presidents and briefly pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war, died on Friday. He was 90.

Last April, the District built a secret disaster morgue, assembled an army of volunteers to staff it, and trained people who had never previously seen a dead body to care for the dead. This is the story of the morgue—and the quiet force of civil servants tending to everyone we’ve lost to Covid.

Steve Jobs, age 29.

On the Google conundrum:

It’s clearly wrong for all the information in all the world’s books to be in the sole possession of a single company. It’s clearly not ideal that only one company in the world can, with increasing accuracy, translate text between 506 different pairs of languages. On the other hand, if Google doesn’t do these things, who will?

“In fact, in private conversations, Obama rarely mentions Trump at all. Those who’ve visited the office he’s leased from the World Wildlife Fund in Washington’s West End say he’s eager to talk for hours about the world’s ills. When informed about the latest presidential tweetstorms aimed at him, he chuckles and changes the subject. One friend of Obama’s recalled that after a 45-minute meeting that avoided the subject of Trump entirely, the pair ducked into an aide’s office and saw on television that the president was claiming to have been absolved in the Russia inquiry. Obama’s eyes flicked toward the chyron and his face took on a decidedly bemused aspect for a beat before he turned back to their conversation as if nothing had happened.”

“If you take the chance, sometimes you’ll find something so magnificent that it was worth dying for, and sometimes you’ll find nothing and have a horrible night. To go deeper with it, that’s the most interesting challenge.”

On Leon Botstein and the future of Bard College, which he has run for four decades.

A profile of Max Wade, a Marin County teenager on trial for stealing Guy Fieri’s Lamborghini and using it in the first drive-by in the history of Mill Valley, California.

The case of Richard Glossip, whose failed Supreme Court challenge of execution methods now leaves him waiting for death. But he still insists he’s innocent.

In 1935, a nine-year-old living in Switzerland became the King of Thailand. He would return to his homeland a decade later, and within six months he would be found shot to death in his bed. Though three servants were executed for the crime, a mystery endures.

The Tiwonge Chimbalanga, a transgender woman who was imprisoned four years ago in Malawi for getting engaged to a man. Pardoned and freed, she now scrapes by living in exile in South Africa.

How the Taliban reestablished itself as both a “quasi government” and a military force, and what that success means for the Pentagon’s plan to pass responsibility to Afghan forces by 2014.

Jay Miscovich spent his life wanting to hunt for treasure. In 2010, after just a few months of trying, he found half a billion dollars worth of emeralds at the bottom of the Atlantic. A few years later he killed himself.

The creators of This is Spinal Tap, the most influential mockumentary ever made, have been paid almost nothing. Now they are suing for $400 million.