A profile of the Russian spy-turned-Maxim covergirl.

On life in Los Angeles, and the specter of a second riot.

How a blind, destitute man became a world-class composer while living on the streets of New York.

What happened to one of the most hated basketball players in NCAA history after playing a single season at Georgetown.

Doug Dodd was a drug kingpin in high school. And now, like the narrator of a Scorcese film, he wants to tell his own story.

On a Duke student’s now infamous Powerpoint presentation of her sexual history; binge-drinking, post-feminism, and Mario Kart.

How a group of Queens high schoolers changed music forever while barely managing to remain on speaking terms.

The story of a home invasion, a torture session, and one lawyer who nearly killed another.

A profile of the Oklahoma City point guard, who is averaging a triple-double in his first season without Kevin Durant.

The residents of Colorado Springs undertook a radical experiment in government. Here’s what they got.

In Northern Albania, vengeance is as likely a form of restitution as anything the criminal-justice system can offer.

Seth Herter’s life was full of delusions. But the murder was all too real.

Lessons from the death of a venture-backed, Facebook-dependent, millennial-focused news site.

A growing body of research suggests that trees can communicate and cooperate in the wild.

The Aziz Ansari controversy was just the beginning of the trouble for the website.

When your family is murdered, and the home you had made together is destroyed, and you yourself are beaten and left for dead — as happened to Bill Petit on the morning of July 23, 2007 — it may as well be the end of the world. It is hard to see how a man survives the end of the world. The basics of life — waking up, walking, talking — become alien tasks, and almost impossibly heavy, as you are more dead than alive. Just how does a man go about surviving such a thing? How does a man go on?

“Miles Davis was a deeply competitive artist, and the idea that he was losing audiences to white rock musicians with inferior skills—and, worse, had to open for them at concerts—inspired him to beat them at their own game. But he did so very much on his own terms.”

His health failing and his business in tatters, the head of Death Row Records faces murder charges that could put him away for life.

For the first time, the giants of the tech industry are spending more on creating, buying, and fighting patents than they are on R&D.

Part of New York Times’ ongoing iEconomy series.

Why Berhanu Nega traded a tenured position in Pennsylvania for the chance to move to a rustic Eritrean bungalow and lead a revolutionary force against an oppressive regime.

Mary Bacon took a bullet while pilfering fruit as a child. Mary Bacon dropped out of school in the sixth grade and was pregnant by age 16. Mary Bacon had a romantic relationship with Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke. Mary Bacon was kidnapped by a stalker. That same stalker later tried to shoot her with a gun. Not all of those sentences are complete horseshit.

Is Bryan Saunders a drug-inspired outsider genius, or just in need of intervention?

A profile of the deadliest sniper in American history, who was murdered last month by a fellow soldier.

The outing of a failed writer who spent years anonymously grinding axes on Wikipedia.

On H.H. Holmes “an old hand at corpse manipulation and insurance fraud,” who built a house of death in 1890s Chicago.