Duncan Campbell spent 30 years — and risked his freedom — uncovering the secrets of U.S. and British eavesdropping, including the existence of ECHELON, one of the biggest spy scandals of the Cold War. Now, thanks to Edward Snowden, he has proof of ECHELON's existence.

Is the growing market for male escorts a sign of female sexual liberation or just a re-run of the same old stereotypes? By Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore. (November 2014)

Owen barely communicated with my wife and me. But he opened up to the parrot from “Aladdin.” By Ron Suskind. (March 2014)

‘If pain is what makes others real to us, there was not another human being more real to me than my mother.’ By Darcey Steinke.

The white women known in the 1950s as “Miss Color TV” reinforced longstanding hierarchies of gender and race that were built into generations of technologies. By Benjamin Gross.

To the cops, Jabbar Gibson was just a low-level drug pusher. But to the residents of a New Orleans public housing complex, he’s the man who rescued them from Hurricane Katrina when no one else would. By Joel Anderson.

A gorgeous meditation on the longing for home, set at the South African Million Dollar Pigeon Race. By David Samuels.

A journey into one of the most remote and dangerous countries in the world. By Matthieu Aikins.

It's all around us and allows us to see the world. But most of us would struggle to explain what light actually is

Have you ever observed that time seems to be going by faster as you get older? There's a reason that one summer seems to stretch out forever when you're a kid, but zips by before you know it when you're 30. That reason is perspective, as a gorgeous interactive visualization, by Austrian designer Maximilian Kiener, demonstrates. When you're one year old, a year is literally forever to you -- it's all the time that you've ever known.

Lithuania wants to erase its ugly history of Nazi collaboration—by accusing Jewish partisans who fought the Germans of war crimes. By Daniel Brook.

Screeners spend hours looking for anything suspicious to pass to crafts’ missile controllers, yet one in 10 are employed not by the Pentagon but by private firms. By Abigail Fielding-Smith and Crofton Black.

It's Hollywood's ugliest casting problem: Jon Ronson talks to seven Muslim-American actors, a group earning virtually their entire livings pretending to hijack planes and slaughter infidels.

Inside the 50-year campaign to roll back the Voting Rights Act. By Jim Rutenberg.

A new paper by Jackie Calmes, Joan Shorenstein Fellow (Spring 2015) and national correspondent for The New York Times, examines the increasing influence of conservative media on the Republican Party’s agenda.

Personalized medicine—or, as President Obama calls it, precision medicine—may indeed one day deliver routine medical miracles. But for Stephanie Lee, the only miracles were the human and ancient kind. By Tom Junod.

Alain de Botton wants the sages to help us feel good. But when Nietzsche gives you a rush, beware. By Tom Stern.

How a little known agency mishandled several billion dollars of stimulus money trying to expand broadband coverage to rural communities. By Tony Romm.

Joseph Mitchell and his subjects were “all freaks together.” By Robert S. Boynton.

The Obama library will displace the black working class on Chicago’s South Side, completing the work the University of Chicago started sixty years ago. By Rick Perlstein.