On the perils and poisons of mining for gold in southeastern Peru.

On the language of hobos and the dictionaries it spawned.

An interview with Greil Marcus on the songs of Van Morrison and why people are afraid of imagined things.

The rise and fall of Quayside, a futuristic city concept that Google’s Sidewalk Labs planned to build in neglected part of Toronto.

“With the rise of factory farming, milk is now a most unnatural operation.”

A patient arrives in a therapist’s office complaining of writer’s block. He’s not in search of the talking cure, though.

Two decades after his last deadly act of ecoterrorism, the Unabomber has become an unlikely prophet to a new generation of acolytes.

On the dilemmas facing a (very famous) working mother in New York City. “It is less dangerous to draw a cartoon of Allah French-kissing Uncle Sam—which, let me make it very clear, I have not done—than it is to speak honestly about this topic.”

When your family is murdered, and the home you had made together is destroyed, and you yourself are beaten and left for dead — as happened to Bill Petit on the morning of July 23, 2007 — it may as well be the end of the world. It is hard to see how a man survives the end of the world. The basics of life — waking up, walking, talking — become alien tasks, and almost impossibly heavy, as you are more dead than alive. Just how does a man go about surviving such a thing? How does a man go on?

"Some in Nice knew the man as one of the many playboy predators the city seems to beget—black hair slicked back off a shining brow, dress shoes tapering to varnished points, a dark shirt unbuttoned low to reveal the pectorals into which he had obsessively, unblushingly, invested himself. He was 31 but preferred older women, both for their erotic openness and, it seems clear, for their money. Those who knew him best knew him to be a cold and brutal man, detached, amused by little save rough sex and gore."

Shai Agassi had nearly $1 billion in funding and a dream to replace gas guzzlers with electric cars. All he was missing was a plan.

Bruce Cawsey Waite has no home, no office, and wears a dead man’s suit.

The bribery scandal, involving tests given for coveted government jobs and medical school admissions, began implicating high-ranking officials. Then people started turning up dead.

The life that he has created almost from scratch over the last two years has been defined at least as much by what Tyson wants to avoid — old haunts, old habits, old temptations and old hangers-on — as by what he wants to embrace.

An American mystery writer and an Italian journalist join forces to identify a serial killer that targeted couples having sex in cars in the rolling hills above Florence.

Our debt, conscious or unconscious, to what has come before, and what it can tell us about copyright, the public domain, and the complicated relationship between creators and consumers.

He was a Baptist who became a Muslim, a Marine who became a bank robber, a criminal who became an informant, and a student who became an imam. But was Marcus Robertson connected to the deadliest mass shooting in American history?

For the Zulu club, a black social organization in New Orleans, Mardi Gras was a joy. The coronavirus made it a tragedy.

Scientists are studying the extreme weather in northern Argentina to see how it works—and what it can tell us about the monster storms in our future.

When his parents marriage imploded, the author’s mother said his father was worthless, a con man. A bad investment in their lives. But years later, a mysterious book about Wall Street showed up—a gift from his father—that began to change the story.

“When a man steps onto the road, his journey begins. When a woman steps onto that same road, hers ends.”

In the ’90s, a frustrated artist in Berlin went on a crime spree—building bombs, extorting high-end stores, and styling his persona after Scrooge McDuck. He soon became a German folk hero.

In the years before World War II, Zacharewicz shined at Cannes and was wooed by Samuel Goldwyn but when the Nazis occupied Poland, he was sent to Auschwitz for defending his Jewish countrymen: “For him, the choice was easy.”

Ahmed Naji’s novel was not overtly political, but the “protagonist performs cunnilingus, rolls hash joints and gulps from bottles of vodka” which led a lawyer to press charges against him for causing a fluctuation in his blood pressure when the novel was excerpted in a Cairo newspaper, even though it had been approved by censors.