The Libyan Investment Authority was brand new, staffed by people who barely understood finance and had billions to invest. Goldman Sachs saw a whale. Now the Libyans want their money back.

“Those who were born in the U.S.S.R. and those born after its collapse do not share a common experience,” wrote Svetlana Alexievich, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2015. “It’s like they’re from different planets.”

When a husband and wife killed 14 at an office Christmas party in San Bernardino, they also orphaned their 6-month-old daughter. This is her life — and the life of the aunt and uncle who want to adopt her — a year later.

In January, the body of a 17-year-old athlete was found in his high school’s gym. The authorities ruled it an accident. His friends and family aren’t convinced.

In 1916, a pair of 29-year-old women, bored with their lives in Upstate New York, took teaching jobs in a remote area of the Rocky Mountains. This is the story of what they found.

Lunch with recycling tycoon Chen Guangbiao, the self-described “Most Influential Person of China,” to discuss his interest in buying The New York Times.

“Indeed the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric—something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques.”

A profile of the filmmaker Errol Morris as he prepared to release The Thin Blue Line after a decade of limited distribution, semi-poverty, and a side career as a private detective.

"I have the sensation, as do my friends, that to function as a proficient human, you must both 'keep up' with the internet and pursue more serious, analog interests."

An essay on technology’s reach into daily life.

From the Tower of Babel to the birthplace of Abraham, from Saddam’s ruined palaces to fortified blast-proof checkpoints, a diary from a nine-day, eight-night tour of Mespotamia/Iraq.

In pre-modern poetry, Shakespeare, who mentioned everything, would probably have name checked products if he could, but there were few goods with the maker’s name on them: though he would specify the street or town which had given origin to a certain cut of sleeve.

No one knew how Suzanne Jovin ended up in a wealthy neighborhood away from Yale’s campus in New Haven, or why she was brutally stabbed on the sidewalk, apparently by someone she knew. The only suspect that police named was her thesis advisor.

One student’s struggle, and the lawsuit that could put an end to a controversial “neutrality policy” in the Minnesota school district.

On being South Africa’s “public protector,” charged with watching over the people who once liberated it.

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.

An interview about Black Lives Matter and the last 18 months of activism in America.

A profile of the editor behind Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Jay Z’s Decoded, and more.

Sheikh Humarr Khan was a globally renowned expert in tropical diseases, and the hero who ran Sierra Leone’s worst Ebola ward. So why, when he finally fell ill, was he denied the extraordinary treatments that could have saved him?

The dramatic liberties a much-heralded film takes with historical fact show how hard it is to get complexity onto the big screen.

Kamel Daoud’s celebrated retelling of Albert Camus’s The Stranger came within two votes of winning the Prix Goncourt. It has also made him a target of radical Islamists.

On Michael Lewis and the global financial crisis.

Previously: The Michael Lewis World Tour of Economic Collapse

How the former U.N. weapon’s inspector and “loudest and most credible skeptic of the Bush administration’s contention that Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction” ended up embroiled in an Internet sex scandal involving underage girls.

How Cosmo, with 64 international editions and a readership that would make it the world’s 16th largest country, conquered the globe.

How two brothers, born of the same mother but adopted by different families, reunited and used a stolen $50k to fund a ride that started in New Jersey and ended with bullet-ridden cabins in the wilds of Alaska.

A Wisconsin basement gave birth to one of the most influential narratives of our times – Dungeons and Dragons – sending its creator, E. Gary Gygax, on a strange and perilous journey of his own.