The New York Times Magazine

“The Pentagon’s failed campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan left a generation of soldiers with little to fight for but one another.”

We’ve long known we’re headed for climate change disaster. And in the 1980s, a small group of scientists, activists, and politicians almost got us to do something about it. Almost.

“Inside the growth of Goop — the most controversial brand in the wellness industry.”

Destructively lax water policies and capitalistic opportunism made desert Arizona ripe for agricultural exploitation. As the ancient aquifer drops in southern Arizona’s Sulphur Springs Valley, corporate farmers and local residents battle to reach what’s left, but when will the water run out?

Thomas Chatterton Williams profiles the conceptual artist and philosopher Adrian Piper.

“Most of the people who have complaints with me aren’t reading me,” says Jonathan Franzen, but he’s a process guy. He doesn’t read anything by his readers. They could write the book on reading him, but he wouldn’t read it and neither would they.

How did a former television star and a self-help guru convince women to join an organization named Nxivm that’s now being accused of running a “sex-slave cult”? It turns out that “humans are highly programmable.”

How some inmates serving life sentences in prison work 10-15 hours a day, seven days a week so that terminally ill fellow prisoners do not have to die alone.

It’s pricey, it’s portable, its users need it constantly, and retailers love to buy it at a discount. All of which makes it a perfect product to steal.

The story of Elwood Higginbothom, a sharecropper and possible labor activist lynched in Oxford, Mississippi in 1935, is told to his descendants for the first time.