Inside the battle for how America snacks.

Searching for a mysterious whirpool on an obscure map.

On the quarterback everyone loves to hate.

Fast-food workers, the minimum wage, and a future served by robot labor.

Moe Tucker narrates her time drumming in the Velvet Underground.

The Russian president has crushed all dissent, but he’s more vulnerable than ever.

On goalies, and in particular, really good Finnish ones.

Revisiting the street corner where Franz Ferdinand was shot.

A pre-recession essay on becoming extremely wealthy.

How the game gets made.

A chess prodigy vanishes.

A beaten man tries to come back from purgatory.

How the writer works.

A jailhouse interview.

Flying straight from the future.

Can artistry trump athleticism in figure skating?

The hit on Sergei Skripal.

The woman who moved to a ghost town.

“You just stay with the moment.”

What happens when an adoption fails?

A Bad Boy coaches in the WNBA.

The macabre, ultra-violent plays put on at the Grand Guignol defined an era in Paris, attracting foreign tourists, aristocrats, and celebrities. Goering and Patton saw plays there in the same year. But the carnage of WWII ultimately undermined the shock of Guignol’s brutality, and audiences disappeared.

In 1913, a ship carrying 31 explorers got stuck in the Arctic ice, hundreds of miles from civilization. The leader left to carry on the expedition. Others stuck with the boat. Help wouldn’t come for a year.

Two white security contractors set off into the remote interior. Within a week, a seemingly innocent man who crossed their path lay dead on the side of the road. The manhunt began.

On coming to see your home country the way the rest of the world does.