A profile of Scooter Braun.

A profile of Rei Kawakubo, an artist of few words who changed women’s fashion.

A profile of Spears at her nadir.

What is it about terminating half a twin pregnancy that seems more controversial than reducing triplets to twins or aborting a single fetus? After all, the math’s the same either way: one fewer fetus. Perhaps it’s because twin reduction (unlike abortion) involves selecting one fetus over another, when either one is equally wanted. Perhaps it’s our culture’s idealized notion of twins as lifelong soul mates, two halves of one whole. Or perhaps it’s because the desire for more choices conflicts with our discomfort about meddling with ever more aspects of reproduction.

Before the market crashed and home prices tumbled, before federal investigators showed up and hauled away the community records, before her property managers pled guilty for conspiring to rig neighborhood elections, and before her real estate lawyer allegedly tried to commit suicide by overdosing on drugs and setting fire to her home, Wanda Murray thought that buying a condominium in Las Vegas was a pretty good idea.

The first living ex-pope in 600 years watches as the successor he enabled dismantles his legacy.

How the bulk of the cocaine entering the U.S. ends up cut with a cattle dewormer.

When Carmen Segarra was hired to examine Goldman Sachs for the New York Fed, she bought a small recorder and began taping her meetings. Here is what she found before she was fired.

"Los Angeles is a weird, complicated town for him. It's where all the record labels are, for one thing. And Chancelor Bennett, as he was born, is unsigned. Won't sign. It's maybe the most interesting, improbable music-industry story going right now—a young, obviously gifted rapper, universally hailed as the heir to Kanye and leader of a new generation of Internet-savvy kids who think of Jay Z as a failed tech entrepreneur, now on his fourth year of refusing to sign with a label."

As the city is transformed by gentrification and inequality, comedies have begun depicting it as a place of magical connection.

The disappearance of the mysterious “Pakistani asset” that helped the CIA zero in on Bin Laden.

The demise of America’s favorite mega-bookstore and the factors beyond the e-book boom that fueled the book retail meltdown.

The story of how federal authorities blew the biggest anti-terror investigation of the past decade—the post-9/11 anthrax attacks—and nearly destroyed an innocent man.

The first article in a two-part history of the Educational Testing Service, the institution behind the SAT.

A sketch artist and a grieving mother set out to solve a cold case. The more they dug, the more terrifying the truth became.

An examination of the funeral industry.

The heroes of the Boston Marathon bombing.

Resurrecting a legendary typeface.

The schism at the heart of cosmology.

On a pair of Israeli psychologists who between 1971 and 1984 “published a series of quirky papers exploring the ways human judgment may be distorted when we are making decisions in conditions of uncertainty.”

But the web is not just some kind of magic all-absorbing meta-medium. It's its own thing. And like other media it has a question that it answers better than any other. That question is: Why wasn't I consulted?