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The Omicron variant of the coronavirus is incredibly contagious — it is able to infect people with even greater frequency than the Delta variant, and it is skilled at evading the immune system’s defenses. Much is still unknown about the new variant, and scientists are racing...
Anti-abortion activists across the country are optimistic that they might be on the cusp of achieving a long-held goal of the movement: overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that extended federal protections for abortion.
But many abortion rights activists...
The economic situation in Afghanistan is perilous. Banks have run out of cash. In some areas, Afghans are selling their belongings in ad hoc flea markets. Parents wait around hospitals and clinics in the hopes of getting treatment for severely malnourished children.
We hear ...
In July, a group of men stormed the presidential compound in Haiti and assassinated the country’s president, Jovenel Moïse. Months later, the case remains unresolved.
Investigating the killing, the Times journalist Maria Abi-Habib found that Mr. Moïse had begun compiling a l...
This episode contains strong language.
The Steele Dossier — compiled by Christopher Steele, a British former spy — was born out of opposition research on Donald J. Trump, then a presidential candidate, and his supposed links to Russia.
The document, full of salacious a...
In Memphis, as in America, the benefits of homeownership have not accrued equally across race.
Housing policy in the United States has leaned heavily on homeownership as a driver of household wealth since the middle of the last century, and, for many white Americans, propert...
In November, Peng Shuai — one of China’s most popular tennis stars — took to Chinese social media to accuse Zhang Gaoli, who was a member of China’s seven-member ruling committee, of sexually assaulting her.
Within minutes, Chinese censors had taken down Ms. Peng’s post, and...
This episode contains details about suicide deaths and strong language.
A few years ago, a website about suicide appeared. On it, not only do people talk about wanting to die, but they share, at great length, how they are going to do it.
Times reporters were able to id...
The Russian military is on the move toward the border with Ukraine, with American intelligence suggesting that Moscow is preparing for an offensive involving some 175,000 troops.
Could the moves herald a full-scale invasion? And if so, what is driving President Vladimir V. P...
Last week, after a shooting at Oxford High School in the suburbs of Detroit that left four teenagers dead, local prosecutors decided on a novel legal strategy that would extend criminal culpability beyond the 15-year-old accused of carrying out the attack. But could that str...
This episode contains descriptions of self-harm and alleged sexual abuse.
When Jeffrey Epstein died by suicide in a federal jail, dozens of his alleged victims lost their chance to bring him to justice.
But the trial of his associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, on charges that she r...
In her book, “My Body,” Emily Ratajkowski reflects on her fraught relationship with the huge number of photographs of her body that have come to define her life and career.
Some essays recount the author’s hustle as a young model who often found herself in troubling situatio...
Stephen Sondheim died last week at his home in Roxbury, Conn. He was 91.
For six decades, Mr. Sondheim, a composer-lyricist whose works include “Sweeney Todd” and “Into the Woods,” transformed musical theater into an art form as rich, complex and contradictory as life itself...
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard a case that was a frontal challenge to Roe v. Wade, the nearly 50-year-old decision that established a constitutional right to abortion.
The case in front of the justices was about a Mississippi law that bans abortions after 15 weeks of ...
Amazon is constantly hiring. Data has shown that the company has had a turnover rate of about 150 percent a year.
For the founder, Jeff Bezos, worker retention was not important, and the company built systems that didn’t require skilled workers or extensive training — it cou...
The story of the Omicron variant began a week ago, when researchers in southern Africa detected a version of the coronavirus that carried 50 mutations.
When scientists look at coronavirus mutations, they worry about three things: Is the new variant more contagious? Is ...
This episode contains strong language.
Heading into deliberations in the trial of the three white men in Georgia accused of chasing down and killing Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed Black man, it was not clear which way the jurors were leaning.
In the end, the mostly wh...
After a landslide re-election in 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s control over India seemed impossible to challenge.
But a yearlong farmers’ protest against agricultural overhauls has done just that, forcing the Indian prime minister to back down.
How did the protesters ...
In the 1950s and ’60s, the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans, one of the oldest African-American neighborhoods in the United States, was a vibrant community.
But the construction of the Claiborne Expressway in the 1960s gutted the area.
The Biden administration has said that...
This episode contains strong language.
On Aug. 25, 2020, Kyle Rittenhouse, a teenager, shot three men, two of them fatally, during street protests in Kenosha, Wis., over the shooting of a Black man by a white police officer.
Mr. Rittenhouse’s trial, which began on Nov. 1, re...
As the novel coronavirus spread and much of the world moved toward isolation, dream researchers began rushing to design studies and set up surveys that might allow them to access some of the most isolated places of all, the dreamscapes unfolding inside individual brains. The...
For three decades, President Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus, a former Soviet nation in Eastern Europe, ruled with an iron fist. But pressure has mounted on him in the past year and a half. After a contested election in 2020, the European Union enacted sanctions and refused ...
The U.S. economy is doing better than many had anticipated. Some 80 percent of jobs lost during the pandemic have been regained, and people are making, and spending, more.
But Americans seem to feel terrible about the financial outlook.
Why the gap between reality and percep...
This episode contains strong language.
In Bucks County, Pa., what started out as a group of frustrated parents pushing for schools to reopen devolved over the course of a year and half into partisan disputes about America’s most divisive cultural issues.
But those arguments ...
This episode contains strong language.
A new battleground has emerged in American politics: school boards. In these meetings, parents increasingly engage in heated — sometimes violent — fights over hot-button issues such as mask mandates and critical race theory.
Suddenly, t...
This episode contains strong language.
In March 2019, workers inside an Air Force combat operations center in Qatar watched as an American F-15 attack jet dropped a large bomb into a group of women and children in Syria.
Assessing the damage, the workers found that there had...
In 1980, when few Americans knew the meaning of toro and omakase, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the Unification Church, spoke to dozens of his followers in the Grand Ballroom of the New Yorker Hotel.
It was said Moon could see the future, visit you in dreams and sp...
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, described the current status of the pandemic in the United States as a “mixed bag” that is leaning more toward the positive than the negative.
But, he said, there is still more work to do.
In our conversation,...
This episode contains strong language.
When the coronavirus hit the United States, the nation’s public health officials were in the front line, monitoring cases and calibrating rules to combat the spread.
From the start, however, there has been resistance. A Times investigat...
Over the past year, a record 2,000 migrants from Africa have drowned trying to reach Spain.
Many of these migrants make the journey in rickety vessels, not much bigger than canoes, that often don’t stand up to strong currents.
What happens, then, when their bodies wash ashor...
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