“We must be grateful for the smallest of blessings. Last week I saw and heard some things that provided a measure of hope and nuance in these grim and hysterical times.”

On Long Island, unaccompanied minors are caught between the violence of MS-13 and the fear of deportation.

An interview on craft.

The world’s richest prisoner interviewed from the Siberian prison colony he calls home.

A review/interview/profile:

Let's settle on the bald facts: Eminem has secured his place in the rap pantheon.

Who gets out alive when disaster strikes? The people who can afford it.

“It’s odd, the older I get, the more I remember.”

The profile that led to the Massey Energy CEO’s resignation.

Amid an historic glut the cheese market, a secretive, government-sponsored entity is putting the stuff anywhere it can.

Jeremy Wilson spent years crisscrossing the country and inventing new identities as a war hero, an MIT grad, a Hollywood journalist, and more.

Prenatal testing is changing who gets born and who doesn’t. This is just the beginning.

Before a disastrous blight, the American chestnut was a keystone species in eastern forests. Could genetic engineering help bring it back?

A novel interrogation technique is transforming the art of detective work: Shut up and let the suspect do the talking.

How what was once one of the most popular websites on Earth—with ambitions to redefine music, dating, and pop culture—became a graveyard of terrible design and failed corporate initiatives:

In retrospect, DeWolfe says, the imperative to monetize the site stunted its evolution: "When we did the Google deal, we basically doubled the ads on our site," making it more cluttered. The size, quality, and placement of ads became another source of tension with News Corp., according to DeWolfe and another executive. "Remember the rotten teeth ad?" DeWolfe says. "And the weight-loss ads that would show a stomach bulging over a pair of pants?"

On literary tourism:

Dickens World, in other words, sounded less like a viable business than it did a mockumentary, or a George Saunders short story, or the thought experiment of a radical Marxist seeking to expose the terminal bankruptcy at the heart of consumerism. And yet it was real.

President Trump hailed him as a catalyst of the summit with Kim Jong-Un. But what happened to Warmbier—the American college student who was sent home brain-damaged from North Korea—is even more shocking than anyone knew.

In many countries, journalists are being targeted because of the role they play in ensuring a free and informed society.

Cases of COVID-19 are rising fast. Vaccine uptake has plateaued. The pandemic will be over one day—but the way there is different now.

How the illegitimate son of Liberian ex-President (and accused cannibal) Charles Taylor went from being a small time Florida hoodlum to one of Africa’s most notorious killers.

Hucksters claim that drinking a few drops of hydrogen peroxide diluted in a glass of water will cure almost anything.

The Cleveland police are still adamant that they did nothing wrong in the killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice.

A reporter encounters the echoes of family and the struggle for civil rights in Mississippi.

On the insurer’s insurer and calculating the risk of modern catastrophe:

Reinsurers are ultimately responsible for every new thing that God can come up with. As losses grew this decade, year by year, reinsurers have been working to figure out what they can do to make the God clause smaller, to reduce their exposure. They have billions of dollars at stake. They are very good at thinking about the world to come.

A visit to Albania to watch Henry Marsh perform his pioneering surgery where the patient is kept awake during the removal of a tumor and the “brain is stimulated with an electric probe, so that the surgeon can see if and how the patient reacts.”

Looking for the ghosts of the Allman Brothers Band in Macon.