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.

They made the intellectual case for Trump. Now they believe the country is in a cultural civil war.

Honolulu incarcerated the wrong man for more than two years — a miscarriage of justice that shows the cruel inadequacy of America’s approach to mental health.

To fight climate change, companies and nonprofits have been promoting worldwide planting campaigns. Getting to a trillion is easier said than done.

Tin Chin and Mo Lin were inseparable at the homeless shelter. But one of the men wasn’t who he seemed to be.

Charif Souki’s longshot bet on liquid natural gas, or L.N.G., paid off handsomely — and turned the United States into a leading fossil-fuel exporter.

Researchers are trying to figure out the right hour of the day to do everything. Can their studies sync us up with better health?

The author Cory Silverberg bucks decades of conventional wisdom on how to teach kids about intimacy.

For generations, America’s major publishers focused almost entirely on white readers. Now a new cadre of executives like Lisa Lucas is trying to open up the industry.

The nation’s fourth-largest city hasn’t solved homelessness, but its remarkable progress can suggest a way forward.

For a price, a new breed of fixer is teaching convicts how to reduce their sentence, get placed in a better facility — and make the most of their months behind bars.

This year, one of the last fugitives of the Earth Liberation Front pleaded guilty to arson — at a moment when climate activists are again flirting with radical ideas.

Clever marketers have figured out how easy it is to simulate online intimacy at scale, ventriloquizing alluring models with cheap, offshore labor.

A diet app helped me shed my extra Covid pounds — and reminded me that I’m still the same old me.

V.R. treatments may provide relief similar to intravenous opioids — a tantalizing prospect for the millions of Americans living with chronic pain.

The writer Caity Weaver’s pursuit of the manifest destiny of the millennial generation ended up looking better in the photos.

Amid the current crisis, Fiona Hill and other former advisers are connecting President Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine to Jan. 6. And they’re ready to talk.

It started as an act of graffiti at a playground in Minsk. It turned into a remarkable campaign of defiance against an increasingly totalitarian regime.

Set aside for an isolated Indigenous group, the Brazilian preserve Ituna-Itatá has now been heavily deforested — a grim illustration of the intractable forces destroying the Amazon.

She changed the Israeli-Palestinian debate in Congress by reminding her colleagues of the human stakes. It’s a burden she would rather not carry.

As the legal ordeal of two aid workers shows, anti-migrant attitudes in Greece and across Europe have hardened — to the point that the helpers have become political targets.

How 177 arrests led to no convictions — a tangled, seven-year tale of prosecutorial hubris and tenacious defense.

As the coronavirus spread, demand for nurses came from every corner. Some jobs for travelers paid more than $10,000 a week. Will the boom last?

A Times investigation reveals how Israel reaped diplomatic gains around the world from NSO’s Pegasus spyware — a tool America itself purchased but is now trying to ban.

Mink farms threaten to become a source of new coronavirus variants — and an object lesson in how ‘spillback’ can make deadly diseases even deadlier.

Good poker players have always known that they need to maintain a balance between bluffing and playing it straight. Now they can do so perfectly.

Sex can drop off in our final decades. But for those who keep going, it can be the best of their lives.

The honeymoon’s over for its residents now that wildfires are almost constant. Has living in this natural wonderland lost its magic?

For psychologists who study it, disgust is one of the primal emotions that define — and explain — humanity.

Many of us are taught that if we work hard enough we’ll be able to get over our losses. The social scientist Pauline Boss sees it differently.

Nine years after Hurricane Sandy, residents of Lower Manhattan are still vulnerable to rising seas. The fight over a plan to protect them reveals why progress on our most critical challenges is so hard.

While homeownership has been an engine of prosperity for white Americans, home values in places like Orange Mound in southeast Memphis have languished. What would it take to catch up?

With her new book, the model tries to escape the oppressions of the male gaze. So our writer is keeping some of her secrets.

All around the world, the pandemic provoked strange nocturnal visions. Can they help shed light on the age-old question of why we dream at all?

A New Yorker who started riding during the pandemic travels to the heart of biker culture.

For half a century, she has taken the things we know best— our bodies, our rituals, our nation — and shown us how strange they really are.

Art often draws inspiration from life — but what happens when it’s your life? Inside the curious case of Dawn Dorland v. Sonya Larson.

After 18 months of pandemic parenting isolation, the writer Jon Mooallem knew just where the cure might lie: a minor-league baseball game in eastern Washington.

Eric Coomer had an election-security job at Dominion Voting Systems. He also had posted anti-Trump messages on Facebook. What happened next ruined his life.

His death helped awaken the nation to a rise in anti-Asian violence. For his grieving family, the reckoning hasn’t gone far enough.

It seemed like an easy crime to stop: protected Indonesian rainforest, cut for coffee farms. But a globalized economy can undermine even the best-laid plans.