For 40 years, the city’s lifeguard corps has been mired in controversy, and for 40 years it’s been run by one man: Peter Stein.

Few Americans are as affected by climate change as Alaska’s Inupiat, or as dependent on the fossil-fuel economy.

Inside the N.S.A.’s mission to spy on just about everyone.

 The writer speaks with his father for the first and last time.

My father moved back to Nigeria one month after I was born. Neither I nor my sister Ijeoma, who is a year and a half my elder, have any recollection of him. Over the course of the next 16 years, we did not receive so much as a phone call from him, until one day in the spring of 1999, when a crinkled envelope bearing unfamiliar postage stamps showed up in the mailbox of Ijeoma's first apartment. Enclosed was a brief letter from our father in which he explained the strange coincidence that had led to him "finding" us.* It was a convoluted story involving his niece marrying the brother of one of our mother's close friends from years ago. As a postscript to the letter, he expressed his desire to speak to us and included his telephone number.

ShyShy Pate has been missing for 19 years, but you’ve probably never heard of her.

In the past dozen years, state and local judges have repeatedly escaped public accountability for misdeeds that have victimized thousands. Nine of 10 kept their jobs, a Reuters investigation found – including an Alabama judge who unlawfully jailed hundreds of poor people, many of them Black, over traffic fines.

Almost 40 percent of the world’s population lives in countries with limits on abortion. Activists like Rebecca Gompert imagine a future where those limits are meaningless because most abortions happen at home.

How an L.A. high school dropout became an enforcer for Mexican cartels and ended up on the F.B.I. Most Wanted List.

“There’s no blueprint for remediating a radioactive town and then moving people back into it.”

A boy whose skin blisters at the smallest touch is fighting for his life.

An American mercenary, who did security for Trump rallies, attempts a amphibious coup along the Venezuelan border.

If the memory of the Twin Towers now belongs to the world, the story of how they have been replaced is entirely of New York: a tale of power, capital, shifting allegiances, and hallowed ground.

We are disgusted by butchery, even as we eat more meat than ever.

A report from the KKK’s 2012 Faith and Freedom conference in Arkansas:

It's quite disconcerting in this modern age to be in a room full of white people who are all spouting the most vile racist slurs that one can imagine, openly, while everyone else laughs and applauds it. There is a Twilight Zone feeling to it, as if you'd stumbled into a secret clubhouse where white people can say those forbidden things—the Valhalla of dumb racist jokes.

For years, the clients of a Colorado funeral home kept their loved ones’ cremated remains. Then the FBI called.

Dutch astronomer, mathematician, and inventor Christiaan Huygens’ early work on probability paved the way for his very modern evaluation of what alien life might look like.

A cave in Russia, a long-lost tip of a pinkie bone, and the discovery of a new kind of human being.

What would drive a man to stand outside the Vatican embassy nearly every day for 14 years?

What is the sickness that leads inhabitants to sleep for days?

How a celebrated American artist was forced to trade his multimillion-dollar collection for a job selling donuts.

For years, Mormon Mommy blogger Natalie Lovin curated a picture-perfect life. Then she left the church—and her husband.

After his untimely death at age 50, prior to the publication of any of his novels, Larsson is posthumously at the center of a publishing empire built on the international success of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

“This is a story about an entertainer named R. Kelly. It is a story about the remarkable, but also very strange, pop talent he has. It is a story about the difficult places he came from and the ways they may, or may not, have shaped who he has become. It is also the story of a man who has been publicly accused of multiple sexual offenses with underage women, and who stood trial for making child pornography. He was eventually acquitted of that charge, and his career has continued uninterrupted, but for the most part he has evaded even the most basic questions that might help people understand what is true about him. For this story, R. Kelly agreed to speak about his whole life without restrictions.”

The country’s cyber forces have raked in billions of dollars for the regime by pulling off schemes ranging from A.T.M. heists to cryptocurrency thefts. Can they be stopped?

It was one of the most arresting viral photos of the year: a horde of climbers clogged atop Mount Everest. But it only begins to capture the deadly realities of what transpired that day at 29,000 feet.