A profile of Benicio Del Toro.

LGBTQI groups found rare freedoms online, but this year, many were shut by censors. It feels like slowly being sanded down, said one member.

The story of a massacre in El Salvador.

Behind the doors of Centaurus, Rio’s most infamous brothel.

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.

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

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.

Part one of a planned nine-part serialized biography of Harrison Gray Otis, the “inventor of modern Los Angeles.”

Future installments will include Otis’s interlude as “emperor of the Pribilofs,” his military atrocities in the Philippines, his bitter legal battles with the Theosophists, the Otis-Chandler empire in the Mexicali Valley, the Times bombing in 1910, the notorious discovery of fellatio in Long Beach, and Otis’s quixotic plan for world government.

Chains, knives, fists, and, of course, those crude and unreliable homemade affairs called zip guns were the staples in the more vicious gang wars in the 1940s and 1950s. Today there is scarcely a gang in the Bronx that cannot muster a factory-made piece for every member—at the very least, a .22-caliber pistol, but quite often heavier stuff: .32s, .38s, and .45s, shotguns, rifles, and—I have seen them myself—even machine guns, grenades, and gelignite, an explosive. One gang, the Royal Javelins, has acquired some walkie-talkie radios.

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.

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.