Stand Clear of the Closing Doors

HIGHLAND PARK, Ill. — It sounded at first like fireworks to the parents who had brought excited children to a charming Fourth of July parade in their town. Or perhaps a military salute to the flag. But within seconds, as marching band members and politicians strutted down the street, horrified…

This article is part of our latest Design special report, about new creative pathways shaped by the pandemic. As the first winter of the pandemic drew to a close, someone in my Twitter feed enthused about an app called Libby that made it especially easy to borrow and read library…

A few miles away, Robert Dicke, a physicist at Princeton, and his students had begun looking into the conditions under which the universe could have begun, if indeed it had a beginning. They concluded that any such Big Bang must have been hot enough to sustain thermonuclear reactions, at millions…

The Justice Department stepped up its criminal investigation of a plan by President Donald J. Trump and his allies to create slates of so-called fake electors in a bid to keep Mr. Trump in power during the 2020 election, as federal agents delivered grand jury subpoenas on Wednesday to at…