An early profile of Sasha Grey.

An oral history of WFAN.

A profile of the Fox News commentator.

A profile of the film critic.

Could the pandemic teach us why our sense of smell matters?

The origin story of a now-ubiquitous celebration.

On the writer W.G. Sebald.

An orgy of free song-sharing seems to be exactly the kind of thing that the horrified labels would quickly clamp down on. But they appear to be starting to accept that their fortunes rest with the geeks. Or at least they’re trying to talk a good game. “I’m not part of the past—I’m part of the future,” says Lucian Grainge, chair and CEO of the world’s biggest label, Universal Music Group. “There’s a new philosophy, a new way of thinking.”

The autonomous car of the future is here:

I was briefly nervous when Urmson first took his hands off the wheel and a synthy woman’s voice announced coolly, “Autodrive.” But after a few minutes, the idea of a computer-driven car seemed much less terrifying than the panorama of indecision, BlackBerry-fumbling, rule-flouting, and other vagaries of the humans around us—including the weaving driver who struggles to film us as he passes.

A profile of driver A.J. Foyt on the eve of what was supposed to be his final Indy 500.

The N.S.A. claims it needs access to all our phone records. But is that the best way to catch a terrorist?

Inside the lives of Sri Lanka’s Tamils as they emerge from a multi-decade war that defined and nearly destroyed them.

An investigation into the myth of actress Frances Farmer’s lobotomy.

With The BFG, the filmmaker tackles childhood’s possibilities and terrors once again.

An excerpt from the best-selling true crime book of all time.

What happened to the group of bright college students who fell under the sway of a classmate’s father?

The moderators who keep Google and Youtube free of beheadings and child porn now have PTSD themselves.

It began with a series of anonymous sexual-harassment complaints that the writer knew were false. But the truth was far stranger.

They advertise murder for hire but work for the government. Inside the world of America’s fake hit men.

These Boston high school valedictorians set off to change the world. But good grades only got them so far. Is Boston failing its brightest students? A five-part series about the students left behind.

To some, Baltimore Jack’s choice to live off the grid was irresponsible. Others celebrated that he’d managed to break the shackles of convention. We look back on the life of an AT antihero.

How the Bounty, a busted-up replica built in 1960 for the film Mutiny on the Bounty, ended up 100 miles out to sea during the height of Hurricane Sandy.

On his anxiety as a teenager, the treatment he was given for it, and the way that the psychiatry of the day failed his family.

Throughout the ’50s and ’60s, media outlets including the New York Times and CBS News provided the CIA with information and cover for agents. Then everyone decided to pretend it had never happened.

Stylistically speaking, in terms of clothing, they arrived in shirts and pants and shoes (there’s really no other way to say it). They had haircuts, but it didn’t really look it. While other bands were mumbling or over-enunciating their dreary positions or penny-candy philosophies, Pavement kind of screamed for a generation. But they did it in a way that was so deeply American that it was almost Scandinavian.

Playwright Will Eno profiles the band and their cult as they grow up and prepare for a reunion.