The New York Times

“After struggling with cancer for years, Sam Anthony was running out of time. Before he died, he found the courage to mail a letter that he had long been afraid to send.”

“When my daughter’s delivery went off the script I had imagined, it made me wonder about what we ask from our birth stories.”

“It is an open secret in chess that many players cut side deals with tournament organizers and other top competitors that help them achieve norms they might have struggled to get legitimately.”

“At 17, biologist Juliane Diller was the sole survivor of a plane crash in the Amazon. Fifty years later she still runs Panguana, a research station founded by her parents in Peru.”

“Each year, hundreds of thousands of workers churn through a vast mechanism that hires and monitors, disciplines and fires. Amid the pandemic, the already strained system lurched.”

“The mainstream narrative is that a pop star ripped up a photo of the pope on ‘Saturday Night Live’ and derailed her life. What if the opposite were true?”

“Yearning for the Before Times as a mythic era risks obscuring the ways in which the Before was really many different kinds of before. Longing for freedom and safety risks forgetting that neither mobility nor vulnerability has ever been democratically distributed.”

“For the millions of Americans living with dementia, every day during this pandemic can bring a fresh horror.”

It was a smash Broadway hit, then 25 company members got sick and the shutdown put everybody out of work. An oral history of a tumultuous year.

“A German officer is facing trial on terrorism charges. At a volatile time for Western democracy, his story mirrors the story of Germany itself.”