The Rapid Prompting Method of communicating with patients is unproven, controversial and, in Alex’s family, a haven.

Or so everyone thought when I went to Bora Bora with my dad.

Can you solve a Rubik’s cube in four seconds? Can you do it blindfolded? They can.

You cannot save everything when the fires come to Northern California.

My year and a half with the Healer of Los Reyes

In the course of her travels the author came across a woman who could not throw anything away. Ever. “You never know a real story,” she writes, “until after it’s done, and this is a good one.”

Turkey is slipping away from my family, collapsing into the arms of a tyrant. We thought she was ours. Maybe we were wrong.

It is the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, but they call it “Pick-You.” And you wonder over and over why you’ve been picked.

For twenty-five years, Leonard Knight poured mud over hay bales, tossed in the odd tire or windowpane, and painted the words God Is Love over and over on the adobe-like structure that resulted. His Salvation Mountain is essentially a massive pile of sculpted dirt in a weird part of the scorching Mojave. And yet it draws people.

In West Africa, a Surgeon Navigates the Moral Mathematics of Second-String Medicine.

A sportswriter seeks the heart of the World Cup. Instead, he finds Brazil.

How the Iron Curtain’s great wasteland became Europe’s ribbon of life.

Ten years after fleeing in terror, an American expat revisits Somaliland to consider who she has become.

When I was younger, someone took a knife to my clitoris and cut out a small but significant part of me. I blamed my mother. I despised her. I loved her.

Forty percent of Jewish millennials are unaffiliated. That doesn’t mean they’re not creating a new kind of Jewish world.

Why does new technology always seem to serve the rich and powerful? Meet the MIT visionary who kept asking that question, as long as he could get away with it.

Are rabbits for cuddling? For showing? For eating? Inside the war over the fate of rabbits and the people who love them.

Maybe the hard road to self-acceptance is a road to God. A gay Mormon’s complicated journey.

You drink your beer; you toss the container. Do you know it comes back? How economics and design, laws and lobbying, craft and ingenuity, recycling theory and recycling myth, the nature of aluminum and the nature of capitalism, and grueling, endless, human labor all shape the can’s strange and eternal circle of life.

Jana Van Voorhis, a troubled Arizona woman, sought relief from terrible maladies that did not exist. And when she crossed paths with a right-to-die group, her fate was sealed.

Some time after his father’s suicide, a writer finds himself in Nicaragua on a journey among signs and wonders.

The biggest slum in struggling Ghana is bounded by a burning dump and a sewage channel. Meet the hustlers, builders, prostitutes, entrepreneurs, bad boys, and dreamers who live there, illegally but cheaply, gambling that they’ll come out better than when they went in.

This — Crimea and all that has followed, and may still follow — was never just about contemporary politics. It was Vladimir Putin beginning to articulate his answer to the vexed eternal question: ‘What does it mean to be Russian?’

A tale of race, law enforcement, and murder in 1957 America, not so long ago.

A mother goes to war with the Lords of Education on behalf of her legally blind five year old.

My Great Uncle Abe was a liberal icon and a target of vicious McCarthyites in the 1950s. But is that what drove him to suicide?

An addict heads for the shelter of home. But she’s not ready.

Four decades ago at the University of Georgia, some brave students wanted to hold a dance to change the world. And they did.

A low point, a bottle, a cat, a gun.

In 1982 I was 16 and destroying my life.

If her father were alive, Christina Martinez knew, he would not approve of her riding in this car, through these unfamiliar neighborhoods, with these three men.

For Alice, Creedmoor Psychiatric Center is both the latest stop and the last resort on a five-year-long involuntary journey into the depths of her illness.

When I was six years old my best friend’s father killed himself. I was terrified that my dad would kill himself, too.

A crew of inmate firefighters help extinguish fires in Arizona

Six years after a fatal car crash, a family remembers their son’s death

A look inside the world of Neo-Nazis.

Disco is walking the streets of New York City again

Habib Hussain sold his field in India for passage to Saudi Arabia and dreams of money and status. He came home as a stowaway.

Up against a wall, waiting to die on a late afternoon in August 1982, a journalist’s life stops and then starts over.

Eric LeGrand ran downfield and hit an opponent. Then he started a new life.

A father considers a marriage and how it changed, before and after the appointment at the abortion clinic

The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of Gerry Cooney

A Mysterious Visitor. A Horrific Crime. A Victim Who Refuses To Be a Victim.

Civic leaders want to fix East New York. Do they know what they’re up against?

She warmed some chicken for her nieces, took out the trash, and everything changed. Who is responsible?

We all know there’s a last time for everything but so often in life we don’t recognize one as such until long after the moment has passed. This one, I do.

My family once enslaved people. What do I do about that?

Where a 400-year-old dreamer inspires modern undocumented children

The biggest lie about OCD is that it’s funny

Fifteen years ago in this African kingdom, two serial killers were hard at work. Just one of them was human.