The love story behind the battle over gay marriage in Texas.

“Brace Belden can’t remember exactly when he decided to give up his life as a punk-rocker turned florist turned boxing-gym manager in San Francisco, buy a plane ticket to Iraq, sneak across the border into Syria, and take up arms against the Islamic State. But as with many major life decisions, Belden, who is 27 — “a true idiot’s age,” in his estimation — says it happened gradually and then all at once.”

Two brothers attempt to bond on a trek in the Cascades

On former Knicks savior Stephon Marbury and his post-NBA life playing in China.

The ridiculousness of trying to rank the best restaurants in the world.

The whole thing began over a puddle in the driveway. Eight years later, Peter Nygard and his neighbor Louis Bacon, who own houses next to each other in paradise, have spent tens of millions in a constantly escalating legal war. Neither man spends much time on the island anymore.

The Tiwonge Chimbalanga, a transgender woman who was imprisoned four years ago in Malawi for getting engaged to a man. Pardoned and freed, she now scrapes by living in exile in South Africa.

An argument for ordering in, among other things.

The events that led the writer to spend 60 days in jail.

“Choice is a great burden. The call to invent one’s life, and to do it continuously, can sound unendurable. Totalitarian regimes aim to stamp out the possibility of choice, but what aspiring autocrats do is promise to relieve one of the need to choose. This is the promise of “Make America Great Again”—it conjures the allure of an imaginary past in which one was free not to choose.”

How a Canadian used a Mohawk reservation’s lakes to smuggle tons of marijuana to stash houses in Brooklyn and Staten Island, resulting in nearly a billion in profits, which he laundered through the Sinaloa Cartel.

Women’s recruitment into elite commandos, formed in response to post-9/11 terrorism, was not driven by a desire for diversity in the workplace, but by the need to conduct raids and arrest militants without alienating local communities.

When an 11-year-old Black girl in Jim Crow America discovers a seemingly worthless plot of land she has inherited is worth millions, everything in her life changes—and the walls begin to close in.

On the legal and practical details of the drone strikes that killed New Mexico-born Anwar al-Awlaki and later, accidentally, his sixteen-year-old Colorado-born son.

On Ray Dalio, who built the world’s biggest hedge fund by running it like a cult.

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

L’Wren Scott went from bullied Mormon teen to international model to Hollywood stylist to fashion designer, becoming Mick Jagger’s girlfriend in the process. In March, she took her own life.

In New Orleans, hospitals sent patients infected with the coronavirus into hospice facilities or back to their families to die at home, in some cases discontinuing treatment even as relatives begged them to keep trying.

As jobs and food disappear, formerly middle class Venezuelans are descending on gaping illegal mining pits, some as deep as fifteen stories, searching for gold but often finding armed gangs and malaria.

“I don’t think [the news media] has ever had a good handle on a political moment. It’s not designed for that. It’s designed for engagement.”

They were the first black boys to integrate the South’s elite prep schools. They drove themselves to excel in an unfamiliar environment. But at what cost?

Tech investors gave Seth Bannon, co-founder of the seemingly surging startup Amicus, over four million dollars, despite knowing almost nothing about him.

A story of bird and human patterns.

As the country’s population ages and shrinks, there’s increasing demand for services that clean out and dispose of the property of the dead.