The New Yorker

My best friend left her laptop to me in her will. Twenty years later, I turned it on and began my inquest.

Six hundred years of quarrying has left the great city with two hundred miles of subterranean tunnels and chambers. Curious, the author explores part of this damp, dark, claustrophobic network with a couple of anonymous urban explorers who belong to a subculture with its own codes of conduct.

“I can’t tell whether my inclination toward ecstasy is a sign that I still believe in God, or if it was only because of that ecstatic tendency that I ever believed at all.”

John Jeremiah Sullivan’s profile of American folk singer, composer, and MacArthur Fellow Rihannon Giddens includes a history of the influential, but little known black antebellum fiddler Frank Johnson, as well as the 1898 racial massacre in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Actor, writer and screenwriter Guinevere Turner recalls growing up in a cult called “The Lyman Family,” and reveals its lingering effects on her, many years after her departure from it.

Vinson Cunningham profiles Tracy Morgan as the comic films the second season of his Jordan Peele-produced TBS show “The Last O.G.” and explores the complex audience dynamics of black comedy.

The last person walked on the moon in 1972, but numerous countries and private interests have turned their attention back to the moon as a place to build bases, mine minerals and water, and launch explorers deeper into space.

A young unknown scientist may have found fossil remains dating from the day when an asteroid hit the earth and eventually wiped 99 percent of life from the planet. If it’s true, this is one of the most important scientific discoveries of the century. Other scientists have their doubts.

“Instead, he began to wonder whether what he was actually protecting at Guantánamo was one of the government’s darkest secrets: that its highest-value military detainee was being held essentially by mistake, and that his isolation in Echo Special was intended to cover up the hell that had been inflicted upon him.”

As she goes through treatment for breast cancer, Anne Boyer considers what being sick has cost her — physically, financially and emotionally — along with the societal and environmental costs of high-priced treatments.