Articulated subway trains have been part of the mass transit system in Toronto for two years. Credit... Ryan Enn Hughes for The New York Times For decades, the New York City subway car has been a predictable space. Some have seats; some have benches. Graspable pole options vary only slightly.…

LONDON — In his 2008 biography of an antislavery campaigner, Britain’s foreign secretary, William Hague, described the trade in human beings as an indefensible barbarity, “brutal, mercenary and inhumane from its beginning to its end.” Fourteen Caribbean countries that once sustained that slave…

José Bustani, front, before a special session in 2002 that called for his removal as head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Credit... Serge Ligtenberg/Associated Press PARIS — More than a decade before the international agency that monitors chemical weapons won the Nobel…

Skin Deep Follow these easy steps to recreate a popular runway look. Credit... Elizabeth Lippman for The New York Times Rihanna with a cascading fishtail side braid. Eva Chen, the editor in chief of Lucky magazine, on Instagram with her purple locks woven into a slightly tousled crown braid .…

Time for solutions: you said it, John. Photograph: Susan Walsh/AP I know what you’re going to tell me. “Default, debt ceiling, default, blah blah blah.” When is Scandal on? Hello to you, too. Fine. What’s going on? I keep hearing about a default. What is that, even? A default occurs when a country…

“Few things are as important to your quality of life as your choices about how to spend the precious resource of your free time,” writes Winifred Gallagher, author of the book Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life . That your experience largely depends on the material objects and mental subjects that…

Syria’s government placed many survivors of a reported rebel attack in Latakia and other villages in this schoolhouse. Investigators say 190 were killed. Credit... Andrea Bruce for The New York Times LATAKIA, Syria — Before dawn on Aug. 4, Raed Shakouhi, an olive and walnut farmer in a…

Nearly two years since releasing their debut album, “Purple Naked Ladies,” Odd Future affiliates, The Internet, return to the music scene with their latest offering, “Feel Good.” Roughly a year in the making, the 13-track opus finds the duo, consisting of singer-producer Syd tha Kyd and producer…

“We the rock stars, and I’m the biggest of all of them.” Still from Kanye West’s interview with BBC Radio 1 Update: Now you can listen to and read highlights from the complete interview . Say what you will about Kanye West, but the man knows how to give a quote. Part 1 of his latest interview, with…

Daniel Radcliffe and his bodyguard, Sam, move through a crowd at the Venice Film Festival. Credit... Luca Locatelli for The New York Times Before Daniel Radcliffe became the most famous child actor in history, he was just a child: an only child, a poor sleeper, a nonstop talker, a picky eater. He…

TEHRAN — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel tried to take his campaign against the Iranian leadership to Iran’s young population last week, saying that if they were truly free, they would be able to wear jeans, listen to Western music and participate in free elections. The problem is that…

“Deliver us from the hypocrisy of attempting to sound reasonable while being unreasonable.”

1 / 3 Credit... Illustration by Matt Dorfman 1 / 3 Credit... Illustration by Matt Dorfman 2 / 3 Credit... Illustration by Matt Dorfman 3 / 3 Credit... Illustration by Matt Dorfman The 55 miles from Campbell to San Francisco make for one of the nicest commutes anywhere. The journey mostly zips along…

Sidebar WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court has what lawyers call a hot bench, and temperatures are rising. “The hot bench is a bench that asks a lot of questions,” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III explained at a judicial conference in June. “The Supreme Court bench seems to me to get hotter and hotter and…

Here are some of my favorite places in Paris. The list is frequently updated as I discover new places and revisit others. You’ll find classic French bistros, cafés, places offering up contemporary French cooking, as well as some places that are good spots of enjoying the cuisine of other cultures,…

Anyone who remembers the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. little more than five years ago knows what a global financial disaster is. A U.S. government default, just weeks away if Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling as it now threatens to do, will be an economic calamity like none the…

The Golden Dawn lawmakers stormed past journalists — one a hitting a video camera and another shouting at them — after their unexpected release on pending criminal charges. Credit... European Pressphoto Agency NIKAIA, Greece — For over a year, 30 Kaisareias Street bustled with activity. Burly,…

Leaving services in 1995 for Shamone Johnson, age 4, who was killed by a stray bullet in a cross-fire in Brooklyn. Credit... Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times A sweeping investigation into cases handled years ago by a retired Brooklyn homicide detective has turned up a witness to a 1995 murder…

Millions of Poor Are Left Uncovered by Health Law

Highlights from the Senate majority leader’s frequent comments about the government shutdown illustrate his acerbic side. Credit... Stephen Crowley/The New York Times WASHINGTON — It was not enough for Senator Harry Reid to just dismiss Republican offers as “vexatious” or “kid’s stuff” or “one…

Nearly everything about Silk Road was shrouded in secrecy. It began in 2011 as an underground online marketplace for drug users, a site where endless varieties of marijuana — as well as LSD, ecstasy and prescription pills — could be bought from sellers across the world. It branched out to other…

Share Reddit Email A huge Pew Charitable Truest telephone poll of American Jews confirms many of the things learned by previous religious polls conducted by Barry Kosmin and colleagues under the rubric of the American Religious Identification Survey. What is striking is how dissimilar the mainstream…

State Senator Wendy Davis, whose filibuster made her a Democratic star, said she would run for Texas governor. Credit... Larry W. Smith/European Pressphoto Agency HALTOM CITY, Tex. — Exactly 100 days after the legislative filibuster that defied the Republican establishment and turned her into a…

It’s the Economy Tim and Jenni Earll didn’t have a lot of money saved up, but they’d seen enough of their friends buy homes to feel like fools for burning their cash on rent. So they took out a 30-year mortgage and bought a fixer-upper on a quiet street in Seattle’s Roxhill neighborhood for…

DALLAS — One day last May, Ladar Levison returned home to find an F.B.I. agent’s business card on his Dallas doorstep. So began a four-month tangle with law enforcement officials that would end with Mr. Levison’s shutting the business he had spent a decade building and becoming an unlikely hero of…

The U.S. markets had been closed for several hours when Congress, at midnight, let the government shut down, but, even so, they already reflected how things were going in Washington. Stocks were down, continuing a slow-motion slide that’s seen the S. & P. 500 drop on eight of the past nine days.…

Robert Costa is the National Review's Washington editor and one of the best-sourced reporters among House Republicans. Like many others, I've relied on his reporting in recent days about how House Republicans are strategizing around the government shutdown. But it left me with some questions,…

Table for Three ‘My mother did not speak to me for two years. Refused to see me, refused to speak to me.’ Cicely Tyson (right) ‘Race is a very big part of who Olivia Pope is, but it’s not dealt with in an obvious way.’ Kerry Washington (left) Credit... Robert Caplin for The New York Times It was the…

The Agriculture Department might be sending millions of dollars in subsidies to dead farmers, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) said Monday. The agency looked at crop insurance data from 2008 to 2012 and “found that $22 million in subsidies and allowances may have been provided…

The National Security Agency says that the telephone metadata it collects on every American is essential for finding terrorists. And that’s debatable . But this we know for sure: Metadata is very useful for tracking journalists and discovering their sources. On Monday, a former FBI agent and bomb…

Subscribe When Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov announced their deal to rid Syria of chemical weapons, Bashar Al Assad knew exactly what the deal meant—a lifeline—and whom to thank for it. “It’s a victory for Syria achieved thanks to our Russian friends,” said…

Illustration by Tom Bachtell Ours can be an unforgiving country. Paul Sullivan was in his fifties, college-educated, and ran a successful small business in the Houston area. He owned a house and three cars. Then the local economy fell apart. Business dried up. He had savings, but, like more than a…

Darren Braun Every year, thousands of teenagers move to the United States from all over the world, for all kinds of reasons. They observe everything in their new country with fresh eyes, including basic features of American life that most of us never stop to consider. One element of our education…

Part I A t Sunset Hill Cemetery, dawn breaks with headlights. It’s just after 6 a.m. on a muggy June morning in Valdosta, Georgia, when two Altimas and an F-150 roll up the hill and past the headstones. Other cars follow, heading west and then north, past Nicholas George (1904-1938) and Nancy V.…

When fighting mosquitoes, standing water is a battleground. Credit... Angel Valentin for The New York Times MARATHON, Fla. — Much has changed since 1929 when newcomers to Florida, fed up with swarms of mosquitoes, erected a bat tower in Sugarloaf Key , hoping the bats would succeed where they had…

A former C.I.A. officer calls Suleimani, the head of Iran’s Quds Force, the “most powerful operative in the Middle East today.” Illustration by Krzysztof Domaradzki Last February, some of Iran’s most influential leaders gathered at the Amir al-Momenin Mosque, in northeast Tehran, inside a gated…

You look like you could use a check from Uncle Sam! House Republicans are fighting to impose a $40 billion cut to the food-stamp program while also fighting to lock farm subsidies in place at a higher level than Democrats want. The combination of positions strikes me as indefensible. After all,…

Bloomberg Need help? Contact us We've detected unusual activity from your computer network To continue, please click the box below to let us know you're not a robot. Why did this happen? Please make sure your browser supports JavaScript and cookies and that you are not blocking them from loading.…