Alicia Lutes contemplates her family’s history of addiction, her mother’s failing liver, and the effect it’s all had on her generation.

On biodiversity, wild plants, and the legacy of Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov.

Turkish journalist Ahmet Altan has been jailed since 2016, as part of a media purge following the failed coup d’état. Life in prison has four loci: the bed, the chair, and yard, and the imagination.

Lisa Miller exposes Mount Sinai Hospital’s culture of sexism and bullying, which enabled emergency room doctor David Newman to sexually abuse female patients before one of them, Aja Newman (no relation) brought him down.

Over 17 years ago, Houston Texans wide receiver DeAndre Hopkins’ mom Sabrina Greenlee went blind after her boyfriend’s jealous girlfriend tossed acid in her face. After the assault, Greenlee avoided attending her son’s games, fearing people staring at her disfigurement. Today, she never misses a Texans home game from her spot in the end zone, where Hopkins’ sisters whisper game color commentary into her ear.

A family heirloom the author’s mother left her tells a story about death, how we mourn, and building a monument from her grief.

Why secure actual signatures from partners on multi-million dollar contracts to install fiber-optic cable at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean when you can just forge them?

The judge has no legal background. The lawyer gets a cut of any collections. And the people of Coffeyville end up buried in debt or in jail or both, just for trying to go to the doctor.

When Ge Gao’s right arm suddenly became painful and her hand numb — inexplicably, and seemingly untreatably — the loss taught her just how intimately the hand and the self are connected.

When Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive breast cancer, she was confronted with a cure so poisonous that her body’s fluids became toxic to other people and corrosive to her body’s own tissues.

Talented, troubled ─ unlike Willie Morris and Marshall Frady’s legacies, the life and work of Southern writer Johnny Greene has largely been forgotten, until another writer tried to piece it together. It wasn’t easy. It still isn’t entirely clear.

The death of his life-long skateboarding friend prompts Aaron Gilbreath to get back on his board — at 44, with his toddler daughter in tow.

From algorithms that set work schedules to the whims of the gig economy, too many workers are deprived of free time that overlaps with friends’ and family’s, and America’s social fabric is fraying. “A calendar is more than the organization of days and months,” Judith Shulevitz writes. “It’s the blueprint for a shared life.”

The FBI’s counterterrorism unit recruited Billy Reilly to infiltrate terror and criminal networks as a part-time confidential source. Part of a wave of workers recruited post-9/11, Billy did not receive the training, protections, or compensation of a full-time agent. After he went missing during an operation in Russia in 2015, no one inside the FBI would take responsibility.

Organ procurement companies can harvest body parts before medical examiners have a chance to examine a dead body and rule on a cause of death. Does that seem problematic? Yes, yes it does.

Society of Martha Washington Colonial Pageant in Laredo, Texas, is a debutante ball featuring teenagers in multi-thousand-dollar Martha Washington cosplay. Mostly Mexican teenagers. But it wasn’t always that way — towns shift, and so do identities.

Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell recalls learning about life’s cycles of hope and disappointment from The Peanuts.

Rebecca Traister reads Ronan Farrow’s new book, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators, and realizes that those at NBC who colluded to obstruct Farrow’s ground-breaking reporting on Harvey Weinstein remain in charge.

A cheese snack shaped like a bald eagle perched on a branch? That will cost you $849.99.

Elisabet Velasquez reckons with a lifetime of disharmony with her religious, mentally ill mother.