At several recent junctures, the U.S. government has publicly sought to expand its power and control over the electronic privacy of its citizens. At each point, the government was roundly foiled by the public and the majority of the political class, which rebuked it. But that has evidently never…

Victor Willis, the former lead singer of the Village People and the writer of some of the group’s most popular songs, in downtown San Diego. Credit... Robert Benson for The New York Times In the lucrative world of music copyright, it may be something of a watershed moment: on Friday, after six years…

Every child dreads this day: sooner or later, your parents will come to you, innocently wide-eyed, to ask you about twerking. How you handle this difficult…

Jason Wu, spring 2014. Elizabeth Lippman for The New York Times Jason Wu, spring 2014. Bethann Hardison, the former modeling agent who has been an outspoken…

LOS ANGELES — Arsenio Hall is on his feet, juking his hips back and forth in a steady rhythm. Arts Twitter Logo. “You ever seen little black girls doing double…

Contributor picture Person typing on a computer keyboard 'The deliberate sabotage of computers is an act of depraved indifference to the physical security and…

Newly released documents reveal how the government uses border crossings to seize and examine travelers’ electronic devices instead of obtaining a search…

ROME — Pope Francis already has distinguished himself from his predecessor with a more down-to-earth style. Now he is both unnerving the Vatican and delighting…

Syria’s reported use of chemical weapons is threatening to turn the civil war there into a wider conflict. But the Bashar al-Assad government may not be the…

TORONTO — John Ridley stepped onto the red carpet at the Toronto International Film Festival here with the future of a beloved movie genre — much of it, anyway…

The Syrian rebels posed casually, standing over their prisoners with firearms pointed down at the shirtless and terrified men. World Twitter Logo. The…

Not long after she had stormed past another hopelessly overmatched victim on Tuesday night at the United States Open, Serena Williams was asked if she felt…

The New York shows are as dominated by white models as they have been since the late 1990s, roughly at the end of the era of supermodels. Credit... Photo illustration by the New York Times; Photography by Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times; Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters Five years ago, the fashion…

It’s 2 a.m. and Dennis Crowley is wired. We’ve just left Foursquare’s South by Southwest party at the Hype Hotel, a warehouse-size space in downtown Austin where nearly 1,000 revelers were drowning in deafening club music and Tito’s Handmade Vodka. Crowley, 36 at the time in March, played host,…

Nate Silver was down on Anthony Weiner’s chances long before the selfie-snapping former congressman’s campaign to become New York’s mayor had to contend with the publication of a second wave of X-rated messages and priapic self-portraits. “I think his favourables were low enough that he had a cap on…

Bill Pugliano/Getty Images Many in Detroit were alarmed recently when, seemingly out of nowhere, a $3.5 billion hole appeared in the city’s pension system. Until mid-June, there was one ray of hope in Detroit’s gathering storm: For all the city’s problems, its pension fund was in pretty good shape.…

As a bioethicist, Peggy Battin fought for the right of people to end their own lives. After her husband’s cycling accident, her field of study turned unbearably personal. Credit... Photograph by Christaan Felber for The New York Times. Video by Margaret Cheatham Williams. If Margaret Pabst Battin…

'What the hell is quinoa?' police asked when Catalano's husband told them what pressure cookers were used for in their household A New York woman says her family's interest in the purchase of pressure cookers and backpacks led to a home visit by six police investigators demanding information about…

Part 1: Inside the asylum Sture Bergwall woke up at 5:30 a.m. this morning, as he does every morning, and at 6 a.m. he walked for an hour in the interior yard of the secure psychiatric unit at Säter hospital, his home for the past twenty-three years. He likes to do this every day, pacing a figure…

La Défense can feel like a ghost town after 5 p.m. and on weekends, once the district’s office workers have left. Credit... Agnes Dherbeys for The International Herald Tribune PARIS — On Bastille Day 1989, when President François Mitterrand inaugurated the Grande Arche, a 40-story postmodern bookend…

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times Tiffany Murrell, who had a $40 overdraft in 2010, was rejected repeatedly for an account. Mistakes like a bounced check or a small overdraft have effectively blacklisted more than a million low-income Americans from the mainstream financial system for as long as seven…

S ometimes what’s wrong with a movie suddenly no longer matters. The rickety construction of a story, the awkward shift in dramatic tone, the acutely earnest attempt to find the right wattage for a martyr’s halo: They’re beside the point. Sometimes a movie just needs to show us the light. Sometimes…

WASHINGTON — The recent leaks about government spying programs have focused attention on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and its role in deciding how intrusive the government can be in the name of national security. Less mentioned has been the person who has been quietly reshaping the…

Series: The Drone War In a major national security speech this spring, President Obama said again and again that the U.S. is at war with “Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associated forces.” So who exactly are those associated forces? It’s a secret. At a hearing in May, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich.,…

Havana Journal HAVANA — There was a time, Alexi remembers, when life in Cuba was simpler. People dressed properly. Children respected their elders. Stealing was stealing. “My father brought me up with a strict set of values,” said Alexi, 46, an unemployed chauffeur from a gritty quarter of the…

Series: Dragnets Tracking Censorship and Surveillance The NSA is a " supercomputing powerhouse " with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second. The agency turns its giant machine brains to the task of sifting through unimaginably large troves of…

In an age where social media seems to drive every aspect of marketing, likes and retweets seem to have become a currency of their own. But being the popular musical artist on a social network doesn’t necessarily translate to being the highest seller. New research shows that oft-forgotten Last.fm…

Detroit has long been a watchword for urban decay, with vacant lots, high crime rates, and serious financial problems defining the city’s image. But Thursday’s bankruptcy filing raises many questions, beginning with its legitimacy. Many people in the Democratic city, where more than eighty per cent…

Op-Ed Contributor The Drone That Killed My Grandson SANA, Yemen — I LEARNED that my 16-year-old grandson, Abdulrahman — a United States citizen — had been killed by an American drone strike from news reports the morning after he died. The missile killed him, his teenage cousin and at least five…

As far as Shahidul Alam is concerned, he does not live in the third world or the developing world. While the photographer’s home is in Bangladesh, a decidedly poor country, he thinks of himself as residing in “the majority world.” Most people today do not live in Europe or North America, or have…

Carol Miller, 61, has never been diagnosed with memory problems but is often forgetting things. She participated in a new Alzheimer's study that found that people who notice these memory deficits may be more likely to get Alzheimer's disease. Credit... Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times See how…

Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Jacob Lew, the Treasury secretary, has told Wall Street to accept the rules in the Dodd-Frank financial law or face tougher ones. The nation’s six largest banks reported $23 billion in profits in the second quarter, but they could end up victims of their…

Staking out new ground in the noisy debate about technology and privacy in law enforcement, the New Jersey Supreme Court on Thursday ordered that the police will now have to get a search warrant before obtaining tracking information from cellphone providers. The ruling puts the state at the…

In 2013, a surge in heroin use in Maine contributed to a rash of fatal overdoses. Credit... Cheryl Senter for The New York Times PORTLAND, Me. — Heroin, which has long flourished in the nation’s big urban centers, has been making an alarming comeback in the smaller cities and towns of New England.…

Scott Milam with his girlfriend Molly Caldwell in “Rain Room” at the Museum of Modern Art, the destination for visitors who line up for hours. Credit... Karsten Moran for The New York Times Alexander Guo had been waiting in the baking sun since 6:45 a.m. — nearly five and a half hours. Finally,…

A Florida medical examiner’s office said Tuesday that the FBI has ordered the office not to release its autopsy report of a Chechen man fatally shot by a Boston FBI agent in May because of the federal agency’s active internal investigation into his death. The medical examiner’s office said it…

SANFORD, Fla. — Police Chief Cecil Smith drew a mix of high-fives and heckles as he walked down the main thoroughfare of Goldsboro, a historic black neighborhood at the heart of this Florida town. Passersby honked as he strode passed shuttered storefronts and dive bars. Eyes rolled as he made his…

From left: Eddie Goldblatt, Lele Saveri and Jamie Falkowski man the Newsstand at the Metropolitan Avenue stop in Brooklyn. Credit... Robert Wright for The New York Times The rumble of trains and the beeps of swiping fare cards don’t seem to distract shoppers huddled inside a tiny newsstand at the…

Yesterday was the first day of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting, and at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, in Cuba, more than a hundred prisoners (approximately a hundred and six of the hundred and sixty-six held there) continued an ongoing hunger strike against the conditions of their…

The Hövding air bag/helmet looks like something out of the future or, perhaps, a runway show. Unlike motorcycle helmets, bicycle helmets have historically had zero cool factor on city streets. But that may be changing, with designers evolving out from traditional vented racing-style helmets to…