Morcellation was supposed to make gynecological surgeries easier on women. Instead, is it killing them.

“As the world’s best-known oceanographer—Sylvia is to our era what Jacques Cousteau was to an earlier one—she feels a heavy responsibility. In her lifetime, she has seen the ocean damaged in ways humans never thought it could be. The ongoing disaster leaves her mournful, desolate, and sometimes scary to talk to. Since her first dive, in a sponge-diver’s helmet in a Florida river when she was 16, she has spent 7,000 hours, or the better part of a year, underwater.”

On applying to work as an undercover agent.

What one learns about Jose Canseco while trying, unsuccessfully, to interview Jose Canseco.

What happened to Air France Flight 447?

The surreal existence of an AOL content writer:

I was given eight to ten article assignments a night, writing about television shows that I had never seen before. AOL would send me short video clips, ranging from one-to-two minutes in length — clips from “Law & Order,” “Family Guy,” “Dancing With the Stars,” the Grammys, and so on and so forth… My job was then to write about them. But really, my job was to lie.

A visit to the new Havana.

Living on your parents’ farm while pregnant changes your relationship to time.

The East India Company was once “too big to fail.”

On the stupid things people say to the elderly.

On playing chess and waiting to get arrested.

In which the author’s wife attempts to break the world record in Tetris.

Joining the water company’s “flushermen” to tour London’s sewers.

One man’s dream to turn America into a post-prohibition wine utopia.

Horowitz went from the New Left to the far right. Now neither side wants him.

As Playboy magazine moves to Los Angeles, the writer considers its place in the Midwest.

No other general interest magazine tried to reach readers in the wide swathe of land between New York and California. “It was a Midwestern magazine, designed for people there. If you wanted it to be hip, edgy, go toe-to-toe with GQ, you were making a mistake,” said Chris Napolitano, a former executive editor who began at Playboy in 1988.

An ode to the MSNBC anchor.

The search for the genetic distinction that allows certain animals, humans included, to be domesticated.

" I really think that for us, who all grew up listening primarily to recorded music, we tend to forget that until about 120 years ago ephemeral experience was the only one people had. I remember reading about a huge fan of Beethoven who lived to the age of 86 [in the era before recordings], and the great triumph of his life was that he’d managed to hear the Fifth Symphony six times. That’s pretty amazing. They would have been spread over many years, so there would have been no way of reliably comparing those performances."

A journey to the wildest edge of the spa industry.

How a cabbie came to assist a jail break.

How Mike Enoch went from progressive to fascist.

A visit to a Trump rally in Ohio.

How New York City responds to terrorism.