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 profile of a serial sex offender:

This is a story about how hard it is to be good—or, rather, how hard it is to be good once you’ve been bad; how hard it is to be fixed once you’ve been broken; how hard it is to be straight once you’ve been bent. It is about a scary man who is trying very hard not to be scary anymore and yet who still manages to scare not only the people who have good reason to be afraid of him but even occasionally himself. It is about sex, and how little we know about its mysteries; about the human heart, and how futilely we have responded—with silence, with therapy, with the law and even with the sacred Constitution—to its dark challenge. It is about what happens when we, as a society, no longer trust our futile responses and admit that we have no idea what to do with a guy like Mitchell Gaff.

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?

Trying to make sense our current age of disbelief.

In Florida, sinker cypress harvesters have to dodge the law while working their trade.

A last-minute trip to Sri Lanka.

A reporter returns to My Lai.

A profile of the favorite to become the next UK prime minister.

Central Park wasn’t always so bucolic.

Gangs of toughs—teenagers and the macho middle-aged, usually drunk, occasionally including a couple of off-duty cops—roam the Ramble at night, engaging in an old American pastime: fag bashing. You don't have to be gay. You don't have to be exposing yourself. You don't have to be doing anything except walking through the tangled darkness to be abused, shoved, threatened at knifepoint, kicked, and beaten.

A coffee shop owner finally gets to shut down his store.