What the great romantic novels of history can tell us about “seduction theory” and the cult of the pickup artist.

India’s greatest terror threat may not be militants slipping across the Pakistani border, but rather the homegrown Maoist rebels who control the villages of the interior.

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s new movie, inspired by Gerhard Richter, blurs the line between fiction and biography. Richter says that it goes too far.

He was a Harvard Law professor who taught a class on judgment, which made him an unlikely target for an elaborate paternity scheme that nearly cost him his house and family.

A Covid diary: This is what I saw as the pandemic engulfed our hospitals.

Inside the court battle over trans employment discrimination.

Last year’s first-ever fatal shark attack jolted Mainers into acknowledging that great whites regularly swim off the state’s shores—and that there’s plenty about them we don’t know.

No one understands our new era of reality-TV populism better than the man who turned “The Real Housewives” into an empire.

How companies and large temp agencies benefit from—and tacitly collaborate with—an underworld of labor brokers, known as “raiteros,” who charge workers fees, pushing their pay below minimum wage.

How a Japanese company took over the American living room.

A tenth of Kannapolis, North Carolina, residents were laid off after the local textile mill closed. A billionaire bought the mill and turned it into a mecca for biotechnology and life sciences research. Now many residents are human research subjects.

A profile of Tyler Perry.

Embedded with an Afghan warlord:

This is a local insurgency, often with local causes: a corrupt district governor, predatory police, or abuses by the local militias, the arbakis.

On 21st-century prospectors:

Shawn Ryan is the king of a new Yukon gold rush, the biggest since the legendary Klondike stampede a century ago. Behind this stampede is the rising price of gold, and behind this price is fear.

A black 16-year-old lights a white, agender 18-year-old’s skirt on fire while riding the bus. Is it a hate crime? And what’s the appropriate punishment?

A profile of Judy Clarke, the publicity-shy anti-death-penalty attorney, who has defended the Unabomber, Susan Smith, and Jared Loughner.

The story of a small town just outside Pittsburgh that has suffered through a half-century of economic decline, racial tension, and endless crime. Despite that trajectory, or perhaps because of it, Aliquippa has also produced an astounding number of NFL players.

The many problems with a common forensic technique called “pattern-matching” — comparisons of bite marks, tool marks, hairs, shoe prints, tire tracks, or fingerprints.

More Americans rely on Puerto Rico’s grid than on any other public electric utility. How one renegade plant worker led them through the shadows.

How Adam Neumann turned WeWork into a $47 billion business.

How legends of the American music industry made millions off the work of Solomon Linda, a Zulu tribesman who wrote “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” and died a pauper.

Inside Give Kids the World Village, where the ice cream is unlimited, nightly tuck-ins from six-foot bunny rabbits are complimentary, and Santa Claus visits every Thursday.

More than a year into the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, some scientists say the possibility of a lab leak never got a fair look.

The fast rise and even faster fall of a trader who bet big with borrowed money.