How the compulsion to explore is coded in the human genome.

How war-crimes investigators captured top-secret documents tying the Syrian regime to mass murder.

Money is an idea that we all agree to believe in.

She was the Southern Californian PTA mom everyone knew. Who would want to harm her?

He was white nationalism’s heir apparent. Then he went to college.

In El Salvador, pregnant women have more to fear than Zika.

On Alaska’s North Slope, village schools aim to blend book learning with the Arctic reality.

Chris, a 25-year-old black man, tries to get a good job.

A voting rights march, from Selma to the statehouse in Montgomery, Alabama.

A family’s journey from Armenia to Syria and back again.

James Reston’s problematic proximity to the powerful.

An ode to the fastball and the pitchers who throw it best.

A former ambassador to China and potential 2012 GOP candidate on the power of optimism:

Remember others. The greatest exercise for the human heart isn't jogging or aerobics or weight lifting – it's reaching down and lifting another up. Find a cause larger than yourself, then speak out and take action. Never let it be said that you were too timid or too weak to stand by your cause. Learn what it feels like to give 100 percent to others. It’ll change your life.

Alan Beaty’s Tennessee farm serves an unofficial halfway house for Marines struggling with their return to civilian life.

On the history and study of pica:

Indeed, we have long defined ourselves and others by what we do and do not eat, from kashrut dietary restrictions described in Leviticus to the naming of Comanche bands (Kotsoteka—buffalo eaters, Penateka—honey eaters, Tekapwai—no meat) to insults—French frogs, English limeys, German krauts. But poya seemed to beg a different question: what was one to make of people who ate food that wasn’t food at all?

A mother writes about her daughter, lost to drugs at 22.

Tracing Europe’s migrant crisis to organized crime.

On the modern era’s answer to James Baldwin.

The three men vying to be the next publisher of the New York Times.

A tale of British gangsters who were determined to be famous.

A moment of racism at Harvard leads the writer to consider Huckleberry Finn.

On the response to the Paris attacks.

Searching for meaning at Baldwin’s soon-to-be-demolished home in France.

To whom does San Francisco’s oldest neighborhood belong?