Medicine used to be obsessed with eradicating the tiny bugs that live within us. Now we’re beginning to understand all the ways they keep us healthy.

A growing body of mortality research on immigrants has shown that the longer they live in the United States, the worse their rates of heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes.

The Syrian disaster is like a superstorm. It’s what happens when drought, a fast-growing population, a repressive and corrupt government, and sectarian and religious passions combine.

One doctor is going to the front lines in the battle against a new strain of bacterial meningitis affecting New York’s gay community.

Alienated from the broader Internal Revenue Service culture and given little direction, specialists in a Cincinnati office struggled with the caseload of groups seeking tax exemptions.

A tower being built on Park Avenue is part of Manhattan’s booming ultraluxury construction business, a trend that is warping the real-estate market and driving up overall costs.

Refining Canada’s petroleum-soaked oil sands produces petroleum coke, and the question of what to do with it has found at least one answer in Detroit, where a large coke pile covers an entire city block.

In 12 exercises deploying only body weight, a chair and a wall, it fulfills the latest mandates for high-intensity effort, which essentially combines a long run and a visit to the weight room into about seven minutes of steady discomfort — all of it based on science.

Now comes the mess with the I.R.S. The president could use a little J.F.K., and a little Bulworth.

A journey across Pakistan’s crumbling railway presents a picture of the country’s troubles: natural disasters and hardened insurgencies, abject poverty and feudal kleptocrats, and an economy near meltdown.

Just west of Austin you’ll find the Hill Country, an area home to Comfort and Welfare, the echoes of Willie and Waylon and the tension between rural and refined.

A young man screamed antigay slurs at another man before killing him on Friday night in Greenwich Village.

Two groups of M.I.T. entrepreneurs were working on similar ideas for high-tech clothing. But instead of becoming rivals, they combined their efforts into a single, growing company.

Alana Hadley of Charlotte, N.C., the top 16-year-old long-distance runner in the country, practiced for her first marathon by running 110 miles a week for seven weeks.

“Breaking Bad,” like classic literature, explores the mystery of the human heart.

Some cities have done away with the plastic shopping bag, but much of America seems more addicted than ever.

The Smithsonian is dismantling a cabin, plank by plank, and moving it to the National Museum of African-American History and Culture.

Given new evidence on carbon pollution, President Obama should get moving on global warming.

Young writers show an appetite for risk in college application essays about money, class and the economy, submitted at a columnist’s invitation.

Visitors from mainland China turn to Hong Kong bookstores for forbidden delights: shelves of scandal-packed exposés about their Communist Party masters.

BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is far from being an activist investor, but it is starting to ask more questions about companies in which it has stakes.

From “American Idol” to American politics, it’s all about the suffering. And it’s exhausting.

Is there a link between suicide and weakened social ties?

Economists have studied the stock market extensively, but that does not necessarily make them good stock pickers.

Why the difference between a personal fortune of $100 million and $1 billion meant the world to the former McKinsey director.

An obsession with the least-visited National Park Service property in the country animates an argument for vanishing.

Once too numerous to count, many juke joints have slipped away. So what remains? A pilgrimage through the South reveals the music and magic keeping this culture alive.

If I had to change — and it was clear that something had to give — I wanted to become someone who could love and be loved, for the long haul.

In looking back at the past, we need to remove the rose-colored glasses.

The Bayonne Medical Center billed Medicare for common treatments at a rate more than four times the national average, according to a Times analysis of 2011 data.

The secretary, Eric Shinseki, is being held accountable for his overwhelmed agency’s problems dealing with claims for disability compensation.

The author of “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies” prefers books with action: “I don’t like overrefinement, or to dwell in the heads of vaporous ladies with fine sensibilities.”

There is always that moment when you are alone with the prejudice: the joke, the leer, the disregard, the fact that the moment you walk through the door you are seen as lesser.

A hysterical and wondrous child will get a top honor at the Cannes Film Festival.

Two types of inequality demand our attention. Liberals and conservatives have to open their ears.

Even the most bland work area reflects the personality of its inhabitant. Here is the first of an occasional look at how successful people make use of their office space.

Characters in “The Great Gatsby,” “Spring Breakers,” “Pain & Gain” and “The Bling Ring” share a craving for the finer things.

Viewers tend to ascribe to January Jones the chilly detachment and questionable judgment that define her character on “Mad Men.” And she seems in no hurry to set them straight.

With summer looming, The Times looked at the condition of public beaches in the region battered by Hurricane Sandy, surveying three states and hundreds of miles of coastline.

Awash in hits, but not in profits, a proud Hollywood studio has suddenly found itself in the cross hairs of an activist investor who wants to spin it off from Sony.