The Sunday Read

How the Criterion Collection became the film world’s arbiter of taste.

NASA is conducting tests on what might be the greatest challenge of a Mars mission: the trauma of isolation.

He turned last year’s season of ‘Vanderpump Rules’ into the best in reality TV’s history — and ruined his life in the process.

The explosion of the e-commerce economy has created an opportunity for thieves — and a conundrum for the railways.

Over six terrible months, professors and administrators at Worcester Polytechnic Institute took on the unofficial role of counselors during a spate of campus suicides.

Hvaldimir escaped captivity and became a global celebrity. Now, no one can agree about what to do with him.

Months of preparation, hundreds of staff, convoys of cutting-edge gear: inside the machine that crafts prime time’s most popular entertainment.

The race is on to put hotels in space and neighborhoods on the moon. Here’s some of what we know about how Earthlings fare beyond the safety of our home world.

If childhood obesity is an ‘epidemic,’ how far should doctors go to treat it?

For 13 years, police failed to scrutinize the man now accused of the infamous murders. Why did it take so long?

How Jack Fisk, the master production designer behind ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ and many other films, brings the past to life.

In one small Mexican city, journalists who tried to expose cartel violence and government corruption became swept up in the murders devouring the country.

For a group of men in a Texas prison, the fantasy game became a lifeline — to their imaginations, and to one another.

How a widow’s legal fight against the Wildenstein family of France has threatened their storied collection — and revealed the underbelly of the global art market.

Many writers are looking for ways to capture the everyday realities that the government keeps hidden — sometimes at their own peril.

At age 3, Shane McCrae was taken from his Black father by his white grandparents — a rupture he explores in a new memoir.

A group of English activists want to legally enshrine the “right to roam” — and spread the idea that nature is a common good.

We still don’t know how the pandemic started. Here's what we do know — and why it matters.

They all have a 50-50 chance of inheriting a cruel genetic mutation — which means disappearing into dementia in middle age. This is the story of what it’s like to live with those odds.

Can the online encyclopedia help teach A.I. chatbots to get their facts right — without destroying itself in the process?

The Biden administration thinks it can preserve America’s technological primacy by cutting China off from advanced computer chips. Could the plan backfire?

As tensions with China mount, the U.S. military continues to build up Guam and other Pacific territories — placing the burdens of imperial power on the nation’s most ignored and underrepresented citizens.

One superstorm could send walls of water sweeping through populated areas. There’s not much time to act.

The corporatization of health care has changed the practice of medicine, causing many physicians to feel alienated from their work.

For years, Spanish society has been rocked by revelations from the secret tapes of José Manuel Villarejo Pérez, a former intelligence agent now facing prison. He told me his story.

As the nation’s schools ‘return to normal,’ teachers in an L.A. neighborhood hit hard by Covid are left to manage their students’ grief — and their own.

One of the most powerful public health measures is simply recording every birth and death. In rural Colombia, as in much of the world, it’s a lot harder than it sounds.

Randi Schofield is the sole provider for an ailing father and, at the same time, for her own children — a situation now common among Americans in their 30s and 40s.

Every winter, Ivrea erupts into a ferocious three-day festival where its citizens pelt one another with 900 tons of oranges. (Yes, oranges.)

As homelessness overwhelms downtown Phoenix, a small business wonders how long it can hang on.

How the downfall of one intelligence agent revealed the astonishing depth of Chinese industrial espionage.

What happens when the surreal imagination of the world’s greatest living animator, Hayao Miyazaki, is turned into a theme park?

Hot flashes, sleeplessness, pain during sex: For some of menopause’s worst symptoms, there’s an established treatment. Why aren’t more women offered it?

Leery of Russian aggression, Europe’s economic giant is making a historic attempt to revitalize its armed forces. It has a long way to go.

A wave of lawsuits argue that Tesla’s self-driving software is dangerously overhyped. What can its blind spots teach us about the company’s erratic C.E.O.?

What’s the best way for a not-particularly-athletic barista-slash-wrestling geek to go pro? Act really weird.

Some Brazilian scientists fear that the Amazon may become a grassy savanna — with profound effects on the climate worldwide.

Inside the mind of Juan Tamariz, the godfather of close-up card magic.

Legends tell of an echoless chamber in an old Minneapolis recording studio that drives visitors insane. I figured I’d give it a whirl.

When the world shut down in 2020, the filmmaker found solace in Don DeLillo’s supposedly unadaptable novel — and turned it into a film that speaks to our deepest fears.

How the country’s vast rail system has helped it withstand an invasion.

No greater challenge faces humanity than reducing emissions without backsliding into preindustrial poverty. One tiny country is leading the way.

Doctors and midwives in blue states are working to get abortion pills into red states — setting the stage for a historic legal clash.

Most social services come through the schools — but it can be impossible to get to them.

Thousands of Spanish children were taken from hospitals and sold to wealthy Catholic families. This is Ana Belén Pintado’s story.

There are an estimated 100 billion galaxies in the universe, home to an unimaginable abundance of planets. And now there are new ways to spot signs of life on them.

The novelist Yiyun Li, known for her powerful distillations of personal grief, makes art from subverted expectations.

An argument at Arizona State’s multicultural center spiraled into a disaster for everyone involved. Who was to blame?

What happened when a superintendent in northern Michigan raised the issue of systemic racism?

In their first year at U.S. universities, women who escaped the Taliban are struggling to adjust — and to reckon with what they left behind.