Yearning for conception.

“From the start, it was a bad case.

A battered 21-year-old woman with long blond curls was discovered facedown in the weeds, naked, at the western edge of Miami, where the neat grid of outer suburbia butts up against the high grass and black mud of the Everglades.”

An interview with Rachel Dolezal.

On Edgar Ray Killen.

Remembering Amy Winehouse.

On a transition and its aftermath.

The case for paying college athletes.

Educating the TikTok generation.

Enlightened is probably the sharpest satire of modern white-collar work since the original British version of The Office, and its skewering of this world intertwines with its portrait of individual personalities so deftly that you can’t separate them. Creator Mike White captures the unsettling blandness of office protocol, politics and jargon, from the chill that workers feel when Human Resources calls them out of the blue to the impressive-sounding word salad labels that the company gives to its departments and projects. (The experimental department to which the newly demoted Amy is assigned is called “Cogentiva.”)

The absurd scale of McDonald’s’ economics suggests a company more like a commodity trader than a chain of restaurants.

At this volume, and with the impermanence of the sandwich, it only makes sense for McDonald’s to treat the sandwich as a sort of arbitrage strategy: at both ends of the product pipeline, you have a good being traded at such large volume that we might as well forget that one end of the pipeline is hogs and corn and the other end is a sandwich. McDonald’s likely doesn’t think in these terms, and neither should you.

On the transformation of travel:

[I]t is astounding how quickly these technologies have changed one of the most basic aspects of our existence: the way we move through the world. When driving down the highway, you can now expect to see, in a sizable portion of the cars around you, GPS screens glowing on dashboards and windshields. What these devices promise, like the opening of the Western frontier, and like the automobile and the open road, is a greater freedom — although the freedom promised by GPS is of a very strange new sort.

What it’s like to work for, compete against, and find out you’re the biological father of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. An excerpt from The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.

“‘When I heard the facts,” says Matt Kull, one of DiPaolo’s former climbing partners, “I thought, That’s what Dave is capable of.’”

In Brooklyn’s Brownsville, being in a gang can mean as little as being born on a specific block. Ackquille Pollard spent his final free days as a viral rap sensation, before being jailed as the leader of a sect of Crips.

In the city of Rosario, some fans have evolved into a mafia with an illicit cash flow and a stable of hit men. A look inside their homicidal turf war.

For decades, “trimmigrants” have flooded California’s Emerald Triangle during harvest season in search of highly paid seasonal work. In the isolation of the dense forest, sexual assault is commonplace and rarely investigated.

The dangerous corporate ethos of former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship, who is on trial after an explosion at one of his mines killed 29.

When cops kill civilians, their union is on hand to defend them. In many cases this has come at the expense of the truth.

Memories of the author’s teenage years, when his father pulled up stakes on a comfortable life in Baltimore to reinvent himself as the head of a S&L bank in Los Angeles.

Just after midnight, Rye police arrived to bust a house full of partying teenagers. The kids refused to unlock the door, and parents and cops flooded the street. A minute-by-minute account of the standoff.

Perhaps you didn’t know that in addition to being a very funny writer, Kafka’s life yields a lot of comedy too.

He was a fixture in the kitchen of one of Seattle’s most celebrated restaurants, with plans to move to New York City to further his career. Then he robbed a bank.

The melancholy comedy of the silent screen star.