A climate scientist spent years trying to get people to pay attention to the disaster ahead. His wife is exhausted. His older son thinks there’s no future. And nobody but him will use the outdoor toilet he built to shrink his carbon footprint.

Last April, the District built a secret disaster morgue, assembled an army of volunteers to staff it, and trained people who had never previously seen a dead body to care for the dead. This is the story of the morgue—and the quiet force of civil servants tending to everyone we’ve lost to Covid.

What happens when we talk to animals?

How to lose weight while barely moving.

“It’s insanity to kill your father with a kitchen knife. It’s also insanity to close hospitals, fire therapists, and leave families to face mental illness on their own.”

Justin Vivian Bond found downtown fame as Kiki DuRane, decrepit drag chanteuse and comedic prophet of gay rage born out of the AIDS era. Then he killed Kiki to try to become the woman (and man) he always wanted to be.

From a childhood in the Kremlin to a trip to New Delhi carrying the ashes of her Indian Communist lover, defection at the U.S. Embassy… “finally to decades of obscurity, wandering and poverty.”

He is a cheerful old farmer who jokes as he serves rice cakes made by his wife, and then he switches easily to explaining what it is like to cut open a 30-year-old man who is tied naked to a bed and dissect him alive, without anesthetic.

How a bid to unseat Senator Thad Cochran led to an illegal photo in a nursing home, a flurry of arrests, and the death of the man who brought the Tea Party to Mississippi.

A nonconformist pastor sent a colony of Welsh people to Argentina to try to preserve the language in 1865. 150 years later, the traces are still there.

An oral history of the disaster:

Someone said to me, or maybe I read it, that the problem of Chernobyl presents itself first of all as a problem of self understanding. That seemed right. I keep waiting for someone intelligent to explain it to me.

The women would walk 10 miles from the village to the meat packing plants. Their pay supported drunk husbands and hungry children. When they were told to stop, they broke with tradition and went to the law.

They were an ordinary pair of small-time criminals in the UK. Then they figured out how to blow up an ATM.

In 1965, Wheat was sentenced to death for armed robbery and murder. When his sentence was commuted, he decided to devote the rest of his life to helping people.

In March of 1991, Vanilla Ice had the #1 album in the country (To the Extreme), a movie about to be released (TMNT II: The Secret of the Ooze), and a dogged belief that his 15 minutes weren’t about to end.

There is someone whose job it is to try to extract royalty money from anyone who plays music in a place of business. Most people do not react well to this request.

An early attempt to explain the world-changing power of computer software—and the minds of young programmers like Bill Gates—to a mass audience. “Software,” the article begins, “is the magic carpet to the future.”

“The writer/speaker has certain political convictions or affiliations, and proceeds to filter all reality and spin all assertion according to those convictions and loyalties. Everybody’s pissed off and exasperated and impervious to argument from any other side.”

Kate del Castillo, the actress who brought Sean Penn to Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, tells her side of the story.

“The tragedy of Dorothy Parker, it seems to me, isn’t that she succumbed to alcoholism or died essentially alone. It was that she was too intelligent to believe that she had made the most of herself.”

In bleak farmlands of East Anglia, the first wave of Eastern European migrants learned exploitation and extortion from their own experiences with day labor. Then they began to prey on fellow immigrants, luring in them into debt and then forcing them to commit crimes to pay it off.

The Darién Gap is a lawless wilderness on the border of Colombia and Panama teeming with everything from deadly snakes to antigovernment guerrillas. For many migrants, crossing it is their only way to get to America.

After two months in the hospital, a mother finally got to take her premature baby home. Then she spent five years trying to convince him to eat.

Camille Billops abandoned her four-year-old to become the artist she knew she was meant to be. Twenty years later, her daughter wanted to know: why did you leave me?

Evidence of the failure to love is everywhere around us. To contemplate what it is to love today brings us up against reefs of darkness and walls of despair.