In Colorado, No Playbook for New Marijuana Law NOV. 29, 2012 DENVER — Anthony Orozco, 19, a community college student and soccer player in southeastern Colorado , is facing criminal charges for something that will soon be legal across this state: the possession of a few nuggets of marijuana and a…

City Is Amassing Trove of Cellphone Logs NOV. 26, 2012 When a cellphone is reported stolen in New York, the Police Department routinely subpoenas the phone’s call records, from the day of the theft onward. The logic is simple: If a thief uses the phone, a list of incoming and outgoing calls could…

NOV. 26, 2012 An Antarctic fur seal trying to mate with a king penguin. Tristan Scott One day during field observations last year at Marion Island, a remote nature preserve in the southern Indian Ocean, something bizarre caught Tristan Scott’s eye: on a rocky beach, a sleek young male Antarctic fur…

Excited for Return to Brooklyn, Anthony Gets the Ending Wrong NOV. 26, 2012 Brooklyn has been on Carmelo Anthony ’s mind for a month. And why not? It was where he was born and where he first played the game, a tall, skinny kid dribbling around on the Red Hook blacktops, before he moved to Baltimore…

Audit Says Kabul Bank Began as ‘Ponzi Scheme’ NOV. 26, 2012 The chief judge in the Kabul Bank case, Shams Rahman Shams, at center behind desk, listened to a defense lawyer during a hearing this month. The United States has pressed for prosecutions. Bryan Denton for The New York Times KABUL,…

Enclaves, Long Gated, Seek to Let In Storm Aid NOV. 26, 2012 Benjamin Eisenstein, walking over debris in Sea Gate, Brooklyn, grew up in the community and came by to help a friend who still lives there. Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times Sea Gate looks the same as many storm-scattered waterfront…

The coming Congressional debate over fiscal policy is sure to feature a wide array of proposals, some of which would hit certain taxpayers harder than others. But one idea being floated by Congressional negotiators, as described in an article by The New York Times’s Jonathan Weisman on Thursday, is…

Jailed and Jailers Pitched In Help After Storm NOV. 21, 2012 Inmates at Rikers Island load clothes and linens into a giant industrial washing and drying machine, which was installed in July. Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times There are plenty of unsung heroes in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, but…

Tyler Hicks has spent the last 10 days covering the fighting in Gaza City, and its aftermath. Mr. Hicks, a New York Times staff photographer, spoke with James Estrin by phone on Friday night from Gaza City. The conversation has been edited and condensed. Q. How are you? A. I’m mostly relieved. The…

Last Thursday night, Le Poisson Rouge, a concert venue in lower Manhattan, hosted “The People’s Bailout,” a night of music and comedy performances to benefit an initiative called the Rolling Jubilee. The Rolling Jubilee, a project of Strike Debt, itself an arm of Occupy Wall Street, has been raising…

Senators from both parties warned Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday that he will be putting millions of dollars of U.S. aid at risk if he goes forward with his planned statehood bid at the United Nations next week. Sens. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), co-authors of a…

Photo: Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos/New York Magazine Late on the night of December 15, 2010, Trevell Coleman stepped out of the subway station at East 116th Street. The evening was bitterly cold, down to almost 20 degrees. He wore a North Face parka and a scarf wrapped around his head like a…

It would be a tough sell for any estate agent - great transport links, but the view is admittedly a little uninspiring. A new motorway in China has been built around a half-demolished building in the city of Wenling, in Zhejiang province, after a family that lives in the building refused to move.…

NOV. 21, 2012 Outside the Supreme store, above, Timothy Lajara, left, 16, and his cousin Zachariah Vasquez, 21. They go there often to shop, hang out and practice moves. Elizabeth Lippman for The New York Times “PUT your hands up, let’s go!” barked the gangly young man in the red varsity jacket, his…

THE MEDIA EQUATION NOV. 25, 2012 The setting at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel on Tuesday represented the height of refinement, but Alan Rusbridger, editor in chief of The Guardian, reminded the black-tie crowd at the annual dinner for the Committee to Protect Journalists of something it knew all too…

Clearing the Record About Benghazi OCT. 17, 2012 The dispute over how the Obama administration has characterized the lethal attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, last month boiled over once again in the debate on Tuesday night between President Obama and Mitt Romney . But…

Bloomberg Starts ‘Super PAC,’ Seeking National Influence OCT. 17, 2012 Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg at a news conference Wednesday. He expects to spend up to $15 million in highly competitive races. Michael Appleton for The New York Times Seeking to reshape a national political debate he finds…

Oct. 17 (Bloomberg) -- In the context of affirmativeaction, some of the nation’s most important and distinguishedconservative legal thinkers, including Justices Antonin Scaliaand Clarence Thomas, appear to have abandoned their own deepestbeliefs about how to interpret the Constitution.…

Will Privacy Go to the Dogs? OCT. 16, 2012 New Haven THIS Halloween, the United States Supreme Court will devote its day to dogs. The court will hear two cases from Florida to test whether “police dog sniffs” violate our privacy rights under the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. These two cases…

“It’s an awful thing, solitary,” John McCain wrote of his time as a prisoner of war. “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.” The United States is a leading practitioner of this “awful thing,” with thousands of prisoners confined to…

Questions From a Bailout Eyewitness IT has become almost unpatriotic to question the many and munificent bank rescues of 2008 and beyond. If you have the temerity to do so, you’re likely to hear that the bailouts were the only thing standing between us and financial obliteration. You will also be…

Is modern media — the Internet, YouTube, Twitter, and all that other stuff — making realism obsolete? More specifically, if the essence of realism is the hard-headed pursuit of national interests, and especially the cool and dispassionate weighing of the costs and benefits of different policy…

Credit Illustration by Tom Bachtell In 2011, as the Presidential campaign got under way, Paul Ryan posed for Time , curling barbells during a P90X workout, with his baseball cap turned backward and his ear buds in, ready for some heavy metal. The magazine had considered naming him Person of the…

Counting the cost of the fighting between Israel and Gaza The Middle East Pomegranate Nov 19th 2012 WITH a hat-tip to Harper’s Magazine , which invented this kind of index, here are some enlightening numbers regarding the fighting in Gaza, as of 8.00am GMT on November 19th. Already signed up? Log in…

Nate Silver: 'It's numbers with their imperfections versus bullshit.' Photograph: Mike McGregor for the Observer N ate Silver is a new kind of political superstar. One who actually knows what he's talking about. In America, punditry has traditionally been about having the right kind of hair or teeth…

Easing of Restraints in Cuba Renews Debate on U.S. Embargo NOV. 19, 2012 A pre-embargo car in Havana. With some new leeway for capitalism, more Cubans are asking that the United States encourage it. The New York Times HAVANA — “If I could just get a lift,” said Francisco López, imagining the…

The following is an excerpt from The Laws of Subtraction by Matthew May (McGraw-Hill). My ten-year-old daughter points out the logo on a FedEx truck every time she sees one. She’s done that without fail ever since she learned to sound out letters. But she doesn’t do that with any other logo. What’s…

NOV. 16, 2012 On a clear morning in May, Ron Douglas left his home in exurban Denver , eased into his Toyota pickup truck and drove to a business meeting at a Starbucks . Douglas, a bearded bear of a man, ordered a venti double-chocolate-chip Frappuccino — “the girliest drink ever,” he called it —…

The New Algorithm of Web Marketing NOV. 15, 2012 Publishers and broadcasters have long tried to offer advertisers the right audience for their products. Want to sell pick-ups to people who like sports? Buy ads at halftime during a football game. Selling luggage or airline tickets? Buy ads in the…

Uprooted in Storm, Students Endure Trek to Class NOV. 14, 2012 A student from the Rockaway Park High School for Environmental Sustainability in Queens returning from his temporary campus with donated items in a bag. Robert Stolarik for The New York Times Nadia Brumell, 16, woke up at 6 a.m. in the…

Photo: Yuri Gripas/Reuters. Photo-illustration by Joe Darrow. Four years ago, in the fading light of a chilly December afternoon, Jesse Louis Jackson Jr. arrived at a Chicago office building for the most important meeting of his political life. As the eldest son of the Reverend Jesse L. Jackson,…

NOV. 14, 2012 DUBLIN — The death of a woman who was reportedly denied a potentially lifesaving abortion even while she was having a miscarriage has revived debate over Ireland ’s almost total ban on abortions. The woman, Savita Halappanavar, 31, a dentist who lived near Galway, was 17 weeks pregnant…

Israel's air offensive on the Gaza Strip today is a response to rocket fire from the coastal Palestinian enclave. Hamas, which governs the strip, has borne the brunt of the assault. The action began with a missile that targeted Hamas military leader Ahmed Jabari as he drove through Gaza City today…

The Hazards of Growing Up Painlessly NOV. 15, 2012 Ashlyn Blocker, who feels no pain, at home in Patterson, GA. Jeff Riedel for The New York Times The girl who feels no pain was in the kitchen, stirring ramen noodles, when the spoon slipped from her hand and dropped into the pot of boiling water. It…

Ethan Hill You have a secret that can ruin your life. It's not a well-kept secret, either. Just a simple string of characters—maybe six of them if you're careless, 16 if you're cautious—that can reveal everything about you. Also in this issue Kill the Password: Why a String of Characters Can’t…