The New York Times Magazine

Science is still trying to understand the sheer mass and variety of insects on earth. What’s clear is that both are declining at an alarming rate, and for that, the whole planet will suffer.

Using email correspondence and notes from the HBO adaptation of “My Brilliant Friend,” Merve Emre profiles the elusive novelist Elena Ferrante.

Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood is the East Coast’s largest open-air drug market whose strong, inexpensive heroin attracts drug users from all over the country. Some locals commute there to score. Some work as guides, helping visitors shop and procure clean needles. The overdose rate is high. Rape, murder, and violence are common. Dead bodies end up in the bushes. As one user put it: “People think we are having fun down here. Are you insane? I live under a bridge.” The city doesn’t know what to do about it.

Novelist Angela Flournoy profiles Barry Jenkins, Academy Award-winning director of “Moonlight,” as he prepares to release his newest feature — an adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel, “If Beale Street Could Talk.”

Wesley Morris on culture, art, and criticism is essential reading: “Groups who have been previously marginalized can now see that they don’t have to remain marginal. Spending time with work that insults or alienates them has never felt acceptable. Now they can do something about it. They’ve demanded to be taken seriously, and now that they kind of are, they can’t not act…But as urgent as these correctives, cancellations, pre-emptions and proscriptions may be, they do start to take a toll. It can be hard to tell when we’re consuming art and when we’re conducting H.R.”

Rachel Syme profiles Lady Gaga upon the release of her new film, “A Star is Born.”

Gary Cohen, Keith Hernandez, and Ron Darling — the broadcast trio for “baseball’s unwanted stepchildren,” the Mets — salvage yet another hopeless season in the booth by improvising around the part where “the Mets haven’t played a meaningful game in months.”

Caity Weaver profiles actress and comedian Maya Rudolph upon the debut of her new series, “Forever.”

“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.