As medical researchers scramble to find the source of a fatal lung disease and officials seek to ban the sale of vape pens, our correspondent set out to separate reality from hysteria.

The chef/writer behind New York City’s Prune revises her original dreams for the restaurant in the wake of closing because of COVID.

Everything I had going against me he had going for him. Us young Black dudes who were slanging were hated, hunted and haunted for our role in the drug war. He was praised and honored and rewarded with overtime.

Vince Ramos wanted Phantom Secure to be the Uber of privacy-focused, luxury-branded phones—flood the market with devices, and sort out the law later. Then the FBI investigated him.

After 17 years, the author of the trilogy “His Dark Materials” carries on the story of one of literature’s most indelible heroines.

When people ask what I like so much about being from the Midwest, I get to tell them: I know the architecture of the wind. I know the violence it blows in and out. I like to keep my survival as simple as I can.

The vans, operated by for-profit companies, carry tens of thousands of people every year. They lack beds, toilets, and medical services. More than a dozen women have alleged they were sexually assaulted by guards while being transported; since 2012, at least four people have died.

“Stupid kids doing something stupid, simple as that. This is how many people in Baraboo remembered the whole ordeal to me four months later. What almost no one in town seemed interested in asking was, ‘Why were our kids stupid in this particular way?’”

Georgia and Patterson Inman, 15-year-old twins, are the only living heirs to the $1 billion Duke tobacco fortune. They are also emotional wrecks, tortured by a hellacious childhood in which they were raised by drug addicts and left to fend for themselves in mansions across the country.

Li Dao, a young Minnesota nurse, appeared in suicide chat rooms, contacted the most desperate, and made pacts to die with them via webcam. After some in the forum caught on, Dao disappeared; or rather, Dao had never existed at all. She was a middle-aged man. And he may have encouraged and witnessed dozens of live suicides.

After Moneyball became a best-seller, Michael Lewis learned that many of the ideas it presented to the general public had actually been introduced decades earlier by a pair of Israeli psychologists.

Adapted from The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds.

‘‘Just imagine what it was like to be him,’’ Walton added. ‘‘It was 50 years of him being 18 inches taller than everyone and having the brain that he had. Imagine being this jazz head coming up during black power. This is just a dude who has a different head.’’

Few men have acquired so scandalous a reputation as did Basil Zaharoff, alias Count Zacharoff, alias Prince Zacharias Basileus Zacharoff, known to his intimates as “Zedzed.” Born in Anatolia, then part of the Ottoman Empire, perhaps in 1849, Zaharoff was a brothel tout, bigamist and arsonist, a benefactor of great universities and an intimate of royalty who reached his peak of infamy as an international arms dealer -- a “merchant of death,” as his many enemies preferred it.

While on a string of tour dates opening for Radiohead, interaction between Mark Linkous’ antidepressants and the Rohypnol he took to sleep caused him to pass out. A hotel maid found him the next morning bent into a position where his legs had been cut off from circulation. When they untangled, built-up potassium shot from his lower body upward, triggering a harmful chain reaction that caused a heart attack and kidney failure.

But despite all that has been promised, almost nothing has been built back in Haiti, better or otherwise. Within Port-au-Prince, some 3 million people languish in permanent misery, subject to myriad experiments at "fixing" a nation that, to those who are attempting it, stubbornly refuses to be fixed. Mountains of rubble remain in the streets, hundreds of thousands of people continue to live in weather-beaten tents, and cholera, a disease that hadn't been seen in Haiti for 60 years, has swept over the land, infecting more than a quarter million people.

A profile of Andrej Pejic, a model who walks the runway in both men and women’s clothing.

For even a moderately vain female, spending time with Pejic is like losing a race to someone who’s not even running: If he were not a man, he would be the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in the flesh—which, in his case, is flawless and poreless and has an English-rose luster.

Throughout 2015 and 2016, amid a series of conversations I had socially with gay and bisexual men about chemsex, new, darker elements to this scene began to emerge; details from unconnected participants that mirrored each other – the same incidents, the same crimes, sometimes even the same culprits. Together they formed a picture: that beneath the surface reports about chemsex – the endless hedonism, the irresistibly intense sex – there is a much blacker sea, unmapped.

Speaking to a group that started their college lives in September, 2001, the host of The Daily Show embraces how difficult the real world is:

I want to address is the idea that somehow this new generation is not as prepared for the sacrifice and the tenacity that will be needed in the difficult times ahead. I have not found this generation to be cynical or apathetic or selfish. They are as strong and as decent as any people that I have met. And I will say this, on my way down here I stopped at Bethesda Naval, and when you talk to the young kids that are there that have just been back from Iraq and Afghanistan, you don’t have the worry about the future that you hear from so many that are not a part of this generation but judging it from above.

Pinch-hitting for an ailing Ted Kennedy, the then-candidate honors the Kennedy’s life of service and implores graduates to wed their lives to others:

Ted Kennedy often tells a story about the fifth anniversary celebration of the Peace Corps. He was there, and he asked one of the young Americans why he had chosen to volunteer. And the man replied, ‘Because it was the first time someone asked me to do something for my country.’ I don’t know how many of you have been asked that question, but after today, you have no excuses.

The rebirth of the World Trade Center.

Terrorists boarded two planes in Boston and flew them into the World Trade Center. Massachusetts zeroed in on its top airport official, who has never quite recovered.

A visit to America’s leading trade show for state violence.

While political leaders trade threats, the pandemic has made Americans even more reliant on China’s manufacturers.

When a spring breaker goes missing, a seasoned investigator uncovers devil worship and a sinister cult at the heart of the drug trade.