The Chinese called it lingchi – which roughly translates as ‘lingering death’ or ‘death by a thousand cuts’. The barbaric execution method saw victims tortured with small incisions for hours or sometimes days until they finally died. It was eventually outlawed, but not until 1904. Fianna Fail plans to use a similar technique to end […]

A lawyer and I stepped into a windowless conference room in her office building in Washington, D.C., and she reflexively closed the door. I had forgotten to restock my tissues and would soon regret that. By then, I had been interviewing American mothers about their work-family conflict for several weeks. I asked women I had […]

Obsessed with mythology as a girl, I read and reread the “Book of Greek Myths,” by Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire. I fell in love with Artemis — her lack of sentimentality, her plea to Zeus to never have to marry. I even admired her assassination of Actaeon, the man who spied on her as […]

Dan Mallory, known best for writing The Woman in the Window under the pen name A.J. Finn, admitted in a New Yorker exposé this week that he faked having an inoperable brain tumour. Per the magazine, Mallory’s fabrications were plentiful: he said his mother slowly died from cancer (she had cancer but is still alive), […]

It is now 961 days since that fateful date of June 23, 2016, when Britain voted to exit the European Union. Here’s 15 things we now know about Brexit as we approach ‘B-Day’ on March 29. 1. Political careers could be destroyed within a few months as brinkmanship reaches fever pitch. Leo Varadkar and Theresa […]

This article is part of David Leonhardt’s newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it each weekday. Scenario #1: A governor becomes embroiled in a scandal. So, amazingly enough, do the lieutenant governor and attorney general in the same state. They’re all from one political party. But the speaker of the state house — […]

EL PASO — This tranquil city of bilingual trans-border commerce is where lurid fantasy meets humdrum reality. President Trump will come here Monday, risking life and limb at “our very dangerous southern border,” that “lawless” frontier facing a “tremendous onslaught.” I can reassure the president: He will be able to gaze at Mexico without breaking […]

To the Editor: “One Lawyer, One Day, 194 Felony Cases” (news article, Feb. 3) highlights a national crisis: State and local governments’ failure to ensure adequate funding for public defense is resulting in widespread violation of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel for poor people charged with crimes. The harms that result from such dereliction […]

Since the 1930s, policymakers have known that rural communications is a “market failure” — something that happens when private companies cannot or will not provide a socially desirable good because of a lack of return on investment. At that time, electricity and telephone companies were simply unwilling to enter rural America: The population was too […]

To the Editor: Re “Trump Says He’d Be Wary of Letting His Son Play” (SportsMonday, Feb. 4): President Trump complained to The New York Times’s publisher at their meeting last Thursday that just once he would like to see a positive piece about him. And a couple of days later one actually appeared. The president […]