A profile of the Poo-Pourri creator.

The origins of a misplaced panic.

On Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist movement.

Confronting a body excluded from beauty amid Italy’s natural splendor.

How far can abused women go to protect themselves?

On Kara Walker.

Three nights with 311 in the waning moments of free American life.

A preview from Georgia about how America might reemerge from the coronavirus.

Cryptomining in Europe’s most disputed state.

She wanted to escape her marriage. He wanted to escape his life sentence.

Did an affair with a Russian agent push Overstock’s Patrick Byrne too far?

How toxic fumes seep into the air you breathe on planes.

She was once the “world’s most exclusive madam.”

On the death of a major league pitcher and its aftermath.

How a self-taught linguist came to own an indigenous language.

Finding meaning in the climate fight.

A trip to the “Olympics of hairdressing” with Team USA.

On the chef Sean Sherman.

How India disenfranchises Muslims.

The elegant science of turning cadavers into compost.

Inside an international smuggling operation.

Inside the safe houses where Syrian youth protesters have retreated since the uprising:

Around his neck he wore a tiny toy penguin that was actually a thumb drive, which he treated like a talisman, occasionally squeezing it to make sure it was still there. I sat next to him on the mattress and watched as he traded messages with other activists on Skype, then updated a Facebook page that serves as an underground newspaper, then marked a Google Earth map of Homs with the spots of the latest unrest. “If there’s no Internet,” Abdullah said, “there’s no life.”

How a Chinese national, with the help of a suspected spy, disappeared with laptops and hard drives that may have contained sensitive information from the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center.

On learning a new language, a new culture, and why “it must never be concluded that an urge toward the cosmopolitan, toward true education, will make people stop hitting you.”