“Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.”

Finding personal stories buried deep in the YouTube comments.

Life in Mosul.

On what’s in a name.

Life as a halal butcher in New York.

Why the boom in scientific progress stalled.

A rookie competes in the World Elephant Polo Championships.

On prospecting for space rocks in Kansas.

A fiction writer buys and loses a house in Oakland.

Crime, drugs, and politics in Guadalajara.

How to kick heroin in 24 hours.

To be mentally ill in Ghana.

A new-society vision in Jackson, Mississippi.

“Stupid kids doing something stupid, simple as that. This is how many people in Baraboo remembered the whole ordeal to me four months later. What almost no one in town seemed interested in asking was, ‘Why were our kids stupid in this particular way?’”

In defense of fiction.

Nine days in Wuhan.

How morality and geography crystalize in Arkansas.

In a nondescript office park in suburban Florida, a company you’ve never heard of is making a product that few people have ever seen. And it has $1.4 billion in funding.

The developer responsible for the tallest residential building in New York—the penthouse just sold for $90 million—lives in a two-story house in Queens.

They were raised Hasidic in Brooklyn. Now Abe Zeines and Meir Hurwitz live a decadent, booze-filled life in Puerto Rico. They are in their early 30s and rich enough to retire, while Wall Street is busy adopting the shady loan scheme they pioneered.

Mark Karpelès ran the largest Bitcoin exchange in the world until a heist made it insolvent, ultimately landing him in solitary confinement in Japanese prison.

Hamid Abd-Al-Jabbar and David Thompson bonded in juvenile detention in the 1980s, then spent most of the next 40 years in prison. When they emerged from one of the country’s most unforgiving state penal systems, their friendship proved crucial.

As the critic Lewis Mumford wrote half a century ago, “The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is the right to destroy the city.” Yet we continue to produce parking lots, in cities as well as in suburbs, in the same way we consume all those billions of plastic bottles of water and disposable diapers.

Hartwick College didn’t really mean to annihilate the U.S. economy. A small liberal-arts school in the Catskills, Hartwick is the kind of sleepy institution that local worthies were in the habit of founding back in the 1790s; it counts a former ambassador to Belize among its more prominent alumni, and placidly reclines in its berth as the number-174-ranked liberal-arts college in the country. But along with charming buildings and a spring-fed lake, the college once possessed a rather more unusual feature: a slumbering giant of compound interest.

But despite all that has been promised, almost nothing has been built back in Haiti, better or otherwise. Within Port-au-Prince, some 3 million people languish in permanent misery, subject to myriad experiments at "fixing" a nation that, to those who are attempting it, stubbornly refuses to be fixed. Mountains of rubble remain in the streets, hundreds of thousands of people continue to live in weather-beaten tents, and cholera, a disease that hadn't been seen in Haiti for 60 years, has swept over the land, infecting more than a quarter million people.