Minizaitunya Ibyatullina, 102, at her home in Borovka, a village in Tatarstan. The picture is of her husband, who died in the war in 1943.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times Feature In the land of Tolstoy, Turgenev and now Putin, what are the stories Russians are telling themselves?…

Stories of the Underground Railroad provide the possibility of moral comfort in a profoundly uncomfortable past. Credit Illustration by Leigh Guldig The crate arrived, via overland express, one spring evening in 1849. Three feet long, two feet wide, and two and a half feet deep, it had been packed…

It’s been four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an…

Clockwise from left: James Morrow, Javier Flores, Jennifer Boatright and her son Jacob, Dale Agostini, and Nelly Moreira. Many police budgets depend on money from forfeiture. Credit Photographs by Ashley Gilbertson / VII On a bright Thursday afternoon in 2007, Jennifer Boatright, a waitress at a…

‘Fuck Earth!’ Elon Musk said to me, laughing. ‘Who cares about Earth?’ We were sitting in his cubicle, in the front corner of a large open-plan office at SpaceX headquarters in Los Angeles. It was a sunny afternoon, a Thursday, one of three designated weekdays Musk spends at SpaceX. Musk was…

I f two statisticians were to lose each other in an infinite forest, the first thing they would do is get drunk. That way, they would walk more or less randomly, which would give them the best chance of finding each other. However, the statisticians should stay sober if they want to pick mushrooms.…

F ew are chosen. Fewer succeed. Journey now to an island world surrealistically tinged with mystery … where every vibrant rock, scrap of paper, and sound may hold vital clues to your unraveling a chilling tale of intrigue and injustice that defies all boundaries of time and space. Only your wits and…

Game of Thrones a television series created by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, based on A Song of Ice and Fire and George R.R. Martin Dreamsongs, Volume 1 by George R.R. Martin A Song of Ice and Fire a fantasy series by George R.R. Martin: A Game of Thrones A Clash of Kings A Storm of Swords A Feast…

DIG WE MUST From the Second Avenue Subway, above, to City Water Tunnel Number Three, the largest construction projects in New York City are the ones you can’t see. When Hurricane Sandy hit New York City, on the night of Monday, October 29, 2012, the first man to realize that the underground was…

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