The case for why a cup of joe is about to become a luxury item.

“My name is Jackie and I am addicted to waitressing.” An essay on waiting tables.

The dilemma of providing quality health care for undocumented immigrants, and how one city is attempting to solve it.

“When constant revisionism and re-invention is under way, what does it profit a biographer to drag the weary ‘facts’ before us?”

A trip to Râmnicu Vâlcea, a town of 120,000 where the primary (and lucrative) industry is Internet scams.

In Utah, an unlikely leader is looking to end the state’s land-use wars.

A profile of NASCAR Dale Earnhardt Jr., who is returning to racing after a series of concussions.

Junior’s personal life is in shambles, Robert Mueller looms large, and it’s never been trickier to be the president’s son.

A lifelong runner is hit with a mysterious physical breakdown and forced to begin contemplating the end.

Is the genetically engineered chestnut tree an act of ecological restoration or a threat to wild forests?

They’re supposed to safeguard pretrial detainees. But America’s oldest law enforcement agency is suffering from a massive dereliction of duty.

Makeda Davis emerged from more than seven years in prison to a life that is complicated, unfamiliar, and, sometimes, soul crushing.

How an HIV specialist in Germany is using media law to erase reporting of sexual abuse allegations against him.

Covid allowed Raquel Esquivel and 4,500 others to be released from overcrowded federal prisons. So why is she back behind bars?

The musician, producer and archivist is driven by one thing: a mission to spread the joy of Black music.

Courtroom testimony about dogs detecting dead bodies keeps sending people to prison—even without physical evidence. Critics say the science is lacking.

In the age of citizen journalism, smartphones and streaming video, bearing witness to human rights violations is getting easier. Is it also making justice more complicated?

Susie Mc­Kinnon cannot hold a grudge. She is unfamiliar with the feeling of regret and oblivious to aging. She has no core memories. And yet she knows who she is.

Although femicide is a recognised crime in Mexico, when a woman disappears, the authorities are notoriously slow to act. But there is someone who will take on their case.

Meet Mel Bernstein. He goes by the name Dragonman, and he’s one of the largest independent purveyors of firearms in the western United States, and the self-proclaimed most armed man in America. At Dragonland—his home, shop, shooting range, and military museum outside Colorado Springs—no gun sells quicker than the weapon used in the most recent mass shooting. Amidst a new gun conversation, it’s business as usual. But even here, it turns out there’s a price to pay.

A young woman’s attempt to flee from the most religiously conservative community in America, and to take her daughter with her:

The critical battleground in the War Between the Grunwalds would prove to be niddah, or “separation,” i.e., when the menstruating female is considered “impure” and kept apart from her husband. “It isn’t just your period,” Gitty says. After a woman stops bleeding, she has to wear white underwear for seven days, checking constantly to see if there’s any discharge. Should spotting occur, the woman takes her underwear to a special rabbi who examines the color, shape, and density of the stain. It is he who divines when it is safe for the woman to immerse herself in the mikvah (ritual bath) and be reunited with her husband.

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?

Joan Didion versus the boys on the bus:

American reporters “like” covering a presidential campaign (it gets them out on the road, it has balloons, it has music, it is viewed as a big story, one that leads to the respect of one’s peers, to the Sunday shows, to lecture fees and often to Washington), which is one reason why there has developed among those who do it so arresting an enthusiasm for overlooking the contradictions inherent in reporting that which occurs only in order to be reported.

On the 1988 presidential election and the boys on the bus.

An early attempt to explain the world-changing power of computer software—and the minds of young programmers like Bill Gates—to a mass audience. “Software,” the article begins, “is the magic carpet to the future.”