On the business of Muzak.

On the decline of nature, and our wonder at it.

The story of freelance journalist Anna Therese Day.

Inside the world of bass fishing cheaters.

On the gentle art of pipe smoking.

On the scandal of our teeming prisons.

A profile of the director.

A profile of the filmmaker.

Black excellence in the land of tennis.

The timeless allure of looking through other peoples stuff.

A 2018 profile of the tennis star.

A profile of the actor, who died Monday.

The ride-share company has 250 lobbyists and 29 lobbying firms registered in capitols around the nation, a third more than Wal-Mart Stores. Among other things.

How a traveling medical technician managed to steal narcotics from hospitals, infecting at least 45 people with hepatitis C in the process.

How the contradiction-rich “country the size of Connecticut” that birthed Al-Jazeera has played an integral and surprising role in the revolutions of the Arab Spring.

Adventures at a gathering of furries.

A profile of Erykah Badu.

A profile of MF Doom.

As surely as 2008 was made possible by black people’s long fight to be publicly American, it was also made possible by those same Americans’ long fight to be publicly black. That latter fight belongs especially to one man, as does the sight of a first family bearing an African name. Barack Obama is the president. But it’s Malcolm X’s America.

The hunt for rare 1933 Double Eagle coins:

The U.S. Secret Service, responsible for protecting the nation’s currency, has been pursuing them for nearly 70 years, through 13 Administrations and 12 different directors. The investigation has spanned three continents and involved some of the most famous coin collectors in the world, a confidential informant, a playboy king, and a sting operation at the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan. It has inspired two novels, two nonfiction books, and a television documentary. And much of it has centered around a coin dealer, dead since 1990, whose shop is still open in South Philadelphia, run by his 82-year-old daughter.

A profile of Benicio Del Toro.

The revolutionary and the silver screen.

The rise and dissolution of the magazine that nearly took down a president.

In Guyana after the Jonestown massacre, with the survivors and the dead.

The inside story of the first homicide in America’s most secure prison.