Today, artificial intelligence and information technologies have absorbed many of the questions that were once taken up by theologians and philosophers: the mind’s relationship to the body, the question of free will, the possibility of immortality.

The dissolution of Brooklyn softcore skin-mag Jacques and the marriage of the couple that created it.

The night when Terry Thompson let his zoo-worthy collection of big animals, including lions and a bear, into the wilds of Zanesville, Ohio before shooting himself in the head.

On Huck Finn, the book Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, and the evolution of language and race in America.

Chipotle once fed the equivalent of the population of Philadelphia every day. Then the E. coli outbreak happened.

For eight hours last fall, Paradise, Calif., became a zone at the limits of the American imagination — and a preview of the American future.

An examination of the Minutemen movement and death on the border.

The ridiculousness of trying to rank the best restaurants in the world.

The stories of the eleven men who died on the Deepwater Horizon.

On the rise and fall of the professional sports bettor.

The epic battle to save the islands that inspired the theory of evolution.

The pandemic of violence against women, the threats online, and the harassment on the streets are ongoing. But women’s voices assumed an unprecedented power in 2014.

The writer (Aaron Sorkin), director (David Fincher), and actors (Jesse Eisenberg & Justin Timberlake) of The Social Network on dramatizing the real story of a 20 year old into “the Citizen Kane of John Hughes movies.”

A behind-the-scenes account of the tense negotiations, involving Gorbachev, Kohl, Bush, and Thatcher, that led from the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall to a reunified Germany. (Translated from German.)

The surreal afterlife of the once-ascendant Dubai, where “the legacy of oil has made everything worthless.”

The birth of the Beastie Boys—an oral history on the 25th anniversary of Licensed to Ill.

The physical rigors of pregnancy tangle with the personal ambitions of a war photojournalist, without limiting her in the least.

Frank Rich on The Promise, Jonathan Alter’s book about the first year of the Obama administration.

Scenario-based forecasts on the future of America, in the style of the C.I.A’s National Intelligence Estimate.

On water in the West, climate change, and how the birth of modern environmentalism lies at the bottom of Lake Powell.

On the trail of a group of thieves stealing the fanciest wine out of San Francisco’s fanciest restaurants.

In 1966, Anton LaVey introduced the world to the Church of Satan. The 1980s saw a “Satanic Panic” in the form of abuse charges brought against child-care workers and suburban parents. Today, the author joins a group of Satanists for afternoon tea at the church’s global headquarters in a “bland New York college town.”

Dillie Nerios’s job is to convince people food is a right, not a luxury.

New research on children’s behavior.

The idea that a young child could have psychopathic tendencies remains controversial among psychologists. Laurence Steinberg, a psychologist at Temple University, has argued that psychopathy, like other personality disorders, is almost impossible to diagnose accurately in children, or even in teenagers — both because their brains are still developing and because normal behavior at these ages can be misinterpreted as psychopathic.