A Long Beach hospital charged Jo Ann Snyder $6,707 for a CT scan of her abdomen and pelvis after colon surgery. But because she had health insurance with Blue Shield of California, her share was much less: $2,336. Then Snyder tripped across one of the little-known secrets of healthcare: If she…

MAY 29, 2012 PARIS — Its membership in the euro currency union hanging in the balance, Greece continues to receive billions of euros in emergency assistance from a so-called troika of lenders overseeing its bailout. But almost none of the money is going to the Greek government to pay for vital…

Isaac Gagnon stepped off the school bus sobbing last October and opened his mouth to show his mother where it hurt. She saw steel crowns on two of the 4-year-old’s back teeth. A dentist’s statement in his backpack showed he had received two pulpotomies, or baby root canals, along with the crowns and…

Millions of men and their doctors are trying to understand a federal task force's recommendation against routine use of a prostate cancer test called the PSA. The guidance , which came out last week, raises basic questions about how to interpret medical evidence. And what role expert panels should…

Illustration by Christoph Niemann With Europe’s economic woes dominating the headlines once more, it’s hard not to think of Yogi Berra’s dictum “It’s déjà vu all over again.” As usual, the turmoil centers on Greece, which is in its fifth year of recession and struggling beneath a colossal debt load.…

After Guantánamo, Starting Anew, in Quiet Anger Nice, France IT was James, a thickset American interrogator nicknamed “the Elephant,” who first told Lakhdar Boumediene that investigators were certain of his innocence, that two years of questioning had shown he was no terrorist, but that it did not…

Bank Regulators Under Scrutiny in JPMorgan Loss MAY 25, 2012 Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase. Andrew Gombert/European Pressphoto Agency Scores of federal regulators are stationed inside JPMorgan Chase ’s Manhattan headquarters, but none of them were assigned to the powerful unit that…

BREAKOUT STAR Houston at 22, photographed by Steven Meisel in 1986, between her first two albums, which would sell nearly 50 million copies., FROM ART & COMMERCE. Scheduled to appear at the pre-Grammy Awards party given annually by her mentor, the music impresario Clive Davis, on February 11,…

all by May 14, 2014 Archive Highlights The City Stranger in Harlem, Part One: Where the Prisoners Come From “When I actually made myself look at Harlem, what I saw was so bizarre that, even with the help of those homicide detectives, I found it bewildering — another country, another planet.” Ad…

The fastest man on earth is lying motionless on the spongy blue running track at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. He appears to be asleep. The elongated limbs of his 6ft 5in body stretch across the track like felled branches. Protruding from beneath his hitched-up T-shirt, a…

Had Narrative Science – a company that trains computers to write news stories—created this piece, it probably would not mention that the company's Chicago headquarters lie only a long baseball toss from the Tribune newspaper building. Nor would it dwell on the fact that this potentially job-killing…

View From Europe Dispatches on the economic landscape. Hannelore Foerster/Bloomberg The European Central Bank‘s headquarters in Frankfurt. FRANKFURT — With the daily drumbeat of alarming news from the euro zone, it’s often hard to hear above the din. Here’s a quick chance to catch up before the…

Photo: Danny Kim/New York Magazine You could say that the end of the moderate-Republican Establishment—the days when the smoke-filled rooms started to empty of father figures, and the casual country-club banter was replaced by something angrier—began at the party’s 1964 convention, at the Cow…

The massive weight gain didn't make Michael "D'Angelo" Archer see the darkness that was looming. Neither did the hermit-like isolation, the shattered friendships, the years wasted without a new record in sight, or even the car accident that nearly killed him. By the time he careened off a lonely…

From left, Nancy, Van, and Michael Wolff in 1958. On the way to visit my mother one recent rainy afternoon, I stopped in, after quite some constant prodding, to see my insurance salesman. He was pressing his efforts to sell me a long-term-care policy with a pitch about how much I’d save if I bought…

HASTINGS — LeRoy Smith thought he had hit rock bottom when he found himself trolling Atlanta's gay district, looking to exchange sex acts for a hot hit off a crack pipe. Then he wound up on a Florida farm near the small town of Hastings, being bilked blind, he says, by a man with a fifth-grade…

Steve Kornacki tries to do the math on Obama's unpopularity throughout Appalachia : A majority of Kentucky's 120 counties voted against Obama in the state's Democratic presidential primary, opting instead for "uncommitted." Big margins in Louisville and Lexington saved the president from the supreme…

Last Wednesday, with relatively little fanfare, Google introduced a new technology called Google Knowledge Graph. Type in “François Hollande,” and you are offered a capsule history (with links) to his children, partner, birthday, education, and so forth. In the short-term, Knowledge Graph will not…

New York Taxi Drivers Unsure They Will See Benefits of a Fare Increase MAY 22, 2012 As he ended his shift on Tuesday at a gas station in Midtown Manhattan, Alderete Faustino, a New York City cabby for 25 years, squinted warily at the receipt that laid out his earnings for the day. He had made $141…

Mommy Wars: The Prequel MAY 23, 2012 Gaskin assisting a woman at the Farm, Jane Montanaro, during a delivery. Elinor Carucci/Redux, for The New York Times One Monday morning last spring, Ina May Gaskin got into her golf cart and drove it down the dirt road away from her home on the Farm, a community…

When Micah True went missing on a run, the search for him eventually turned to a section of Little Creek in the Gila Wilderness, near Silver City, N.M. Rick Scibelli Jr. for The New York Times GILA HOT SPRINGS, N.M. — Micah True went off alone on a Tuesday morning to run through the rugged trails of…

A New Orleans police sergeant in 2010 admitted to the FBI that she was told shortly after Hurricane Katrina that an officer under her command had fatally shot 31-year-old Henry Glover and that other cops were covering up the burning of his body. But Sgt. Lesia Mims, a 23-year NOPD veteran,…

Public Money Finds Back Door to Private Schools MAY 21, 2012 THE MONEY FINDS A HOME Hadyn Packer, 8, at a check presentation at St. John Neumann Regional, a Catholic school in Williamsport, Pa. Niko J. Kallianiotis for The New York Times When the Georgia legislature passed a private school…

Myra Greene grew up in New York, where she was used to being around people of different races. But as she embarked on her photographic career, her work and travels took her to places where she was the only African-American. And she knew it. “I’m always thinking about race,” she said. “I recognize it…

Propaganda that was supposed to target foreigners could now be aimed at Americans, reversing a longstanding policy. "Disconcerting and dangerous," says Shank. buzzfeed.com Amy Sly for BuzzFeed An amendment that would legalize the use of propaganda on American audiences is being inserted into the…

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times The police patrolled Rockaway Avenue in Brooklyn in 2010. A federal judge on Wednesday granted class-action status to a lawsuit challenging the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk tactics, saying she was disturbed by the city’s “deeply troubling apathy…

More Men Enter Fields Dominated by Women MAY 20, 2012 HOUSTON — Wearing brick-red scrubs and chatting in Spanish, Miguel Alquicira settled a tiny girl into an adult-size dental chair and soothed her through a set of X-rays. Then he ushered the dentist, a woman, into the room and stayed on to serve…

When Javier Ortiz collapsed in his backyard in Echo Park, rescuers were stationed in a firehouse just a half-mile away. But the Los Angeles Fire Department dispatcher who answered the 911 call from Ortiz’s daughter took more than 2 1/2 minutes to send the firefighters -- nearly three times longer…

'Los tocayos Carlos' – Hernandez and DeLuna looked so alike that they were sometimes mistaken for twins. Photographs: Corpus Christi police department/DeLuna family/Hernandez family/Texas dept of criminal justice/Corpus Christi Caller Times A few years ago, Antonin Scalia, one of the nine justices…

In Choosing a Sperm Donor, a Roll of the Genetic Dice MAY 14, 2012 Jaxon Kretchmar, 2, who was conceived with donated sperm, has cystic fibrosis. Sarah Phipps for The New York Times Sharine and Brian Kretchmar of Yukon, Okla., tried a number of medical treatments to conceive a second child. After a…

Officers Testify Before Grand Jury in Shooting of Bronx Teenager MAY 13, 2012 At least three police officers have testified before a Bronx grand jury that is investigating the death of a black teenager shot in his bathroom by the police in February, several people briefed on the investigation said.…

Not too long ago, I was sitting backstage at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco and drinking beer with my doppelgänger, a 39-year-old singer-songwriter named Kyle Field. Or rather, I was drinking beer by myself while he entertained his fans, most of whom seemed to be half his age.…

Geoengineering holds out the promise of artificially reversing recent climate trends, but it entails enormous risks. Credit Illustration by Nishant Choksi Late in the afternoon on April 2, 1991, Mt. Pinatubo, a volcano on the Philippine island of Luzon, began to rumble with a series of the powerful…

"A major victory has been scored by the good guys against the baddest of the bad guys.” —Geraldo Rivera on Fox News, announcing Osama bin Laden’s death In the wake of 9/11, the phrase “bad guys” infiltrated our national conversation, and its continued prevalence serves as a testament to the ways the…

Are you concerned about growing income inequality in America? Are you resentful of all that wealth concentrated in the 1 percent? I’ve got the perfect solution, a modest proposal that involves just a small adjustment in the Federal Reserve’s easy monetary policy. Best of all, it will mean that none…

MAY 11, 2012 Michael, a 9-year-old whose periodic rages alternate with moments of chilly detachment, with his mother, Anne. Elinor Carucci/Redux, for The New York Times One day last summer, Anne and her husband, Miguel, took their 9-year-old son, Michael, to a Florida elementary school for the first…