Once a week, Adrian Billings drives his white Chevy pickup from his home in Alpine, Texas, to Presidio, a city along the Mexican border. This summer he’s been taking his son Blake, who’s home from college, with him. The drive, through mountains and desert on a two-lane highway across which actual tumbleweeds roll, takes an hour and a half.

Billings is a family doctor, one of only a handful in this part of West Texas. He offers a one-stop shop for his patients’ ailments: heart murmurs, kidney stones, etc. Most of the time he works in Alpine or the nearby city of Marfa. But he makes the weekly drive to Presidio because, without doctors like him, it wouldn’t have medical care. There’s no hospital and no full-time doctor. His clinic, which opened in 2007 with the help of government grants, is the only access residents have to even a local pharmacy.

Abortion-rights activists are warning of the consequences of weak digital privacy protections in a post-Dobbs landscape. Even before the decision, law enforcement had been honing tactics that could now be used against people seeking an abortion in states where it’s banned—or beyond.

Academics have found that searches for

Founded by Missett in 1969, the closely held company, which is based in Carlsbad, Calif., has grown to encompass 8,000 franchisees teaching 32,000 classes each week worldwide. Even as much of the fitness industry contracted during the Covid-19 pandemic, Jazzercise had revenue of $73 million last year. How then is it that an exercise business that harks back to the era of Jane Fonda workout tapes, neon spandex, and legwarmers remains here in 2022—and is thriving? It’s thanks to a...

While right-wing politicians and activists fight to keep all kinds of supposed messages out of children’s education, the Tuttle Twins are trying to build an online audience of budding Milton Friedmans and Friedrich Hayeks.

And yet 2 million people follow Marr on social media, and he’s attracted big brands looking to drive sales by partnering on his posts, including International Business Machines, Microsoft, and Alphabet’s Google. “It’s always been companies coming to me saying, ‘Do you want to work together? We’ve got these interesting stories to share, and you’ve got an audience,’” says Marr, whose social media content creation takes up a third of his working hours and contributes as much as half of his income.

Wall Street loathes bank stress tests—and arguably owes a lot to them. The regulatory checkups by the Federal Reserve, instituted after the 2008 global financial crisis with the aim of averting another one, run banks’ balance sheets through simulated doomsday scenarios to gauge whether they’d make it through. This year banks were tested on a hypothetical cocktail of surging unemployment, collapsing real estate prices, and a plunge in stocks.

All 33 of the biggest lenders in the US

“Please stay clear of the flight line,” warns Keith Hyde, director of U.S. operations for Wing. Safety comes first on these two fenced-off acres at the dead end of Welcome Street in Christiansburg, Va., where Wing has since 2019 been running the first North American drone delivery service. The drones are electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL, pronounced “ev-tol”) aircraft, so instead of a runway, they park on a grid of landing pads that double as charging stations. Three dozen of the pads are arranged on a gravel patch the size of a basketball court, each topped with a QR code large enough for an incoming drone to scan and confirm its touchdown location.

For decades, US households bailed out the global economy when it needed a consumer of last resort. America’s latest spending spree has come with a sting in the tail.

Stuck at home in the pandemic, people all over the world bought more goods—TV sets, laptops, and exercise bikes, to name a few—at the expense of services such as hotel rooms and gym memberships. The shift was significantly bigger in the US than in other rich countries.

Russia’s military began sending large numbers of weapons and troops into Belarus in late January. The official purpose of the movement was a joint military exercise, but Belarus, which has a 650-mile border with Ukraine and a government closely aligned with Moscow, was also a logical staging point for Russian President Vladimir Putin to carry out an invasion.

Several days after the troops arrived weird things started happening to the computer systems that ran the Belarus national railway system, which the Russian military was using as part of its mobilization. Passengers gathered on train platforms near Minsk, the capital, watched as information screens flickered and normal messaging was replaced by garbled text and an error message. Malfunctioning ticket systems led to long lines and delays as damaged software systems caused trains to grind to a halt in several cities, according to railway employees and posts that circulated on Belarusian social media.

And yet 2 million people follow Marr on social media, and he’s attracted big brands looking to drive sales by partnering on his posts, including International Business Machines, Microsoft, and Alphabet’s Google. “It’s always been companies coming to me saying, ‘Do you want to work together? We’ve got these interesting stories to share, and you’ve got an audience,’” says Marr, whose social media content creation takes up a third of his working hours and contributes as much as half of his income.

Imagine for a second life before smartphones. Simple tasks—ordering takeout, staying in touch—become frustratingly difficult, never mind dealing with emergencies. In China that’s sort of what it’s like to live without

Investigating authorities say that Henan Xincaifu Group Investment Holding Co., the main shareholder of five rural lenders, colluded with bank employees to steal about 40 billion yuan ($5.9 billion) in deposits and investments. They used online platforms to pull in depositors and fabricated lending agreements to transfer the money, the authorities say. (Xincaifu has ceased operations, and the banks involved have asked affected customers to register information with them online in order to

Turbocharging fast fashion’s business model has turned Shein into the face of the industry and one of the world’s top startups. But as

The clear-cut through the forest in Mexico’s southeast is long (the section shown above will be 121 kilometers, about 75 miles), 40 meters (131 feet) wide, and as straight as modern engineering can make it. It’s the right of way for a train—the Maya Train, or Tren Maya, which will run for 1,554 kilometers and connect five states in the Yucatán Peninsula. This is arguably President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s most ambitious infrastructure project, and he’s vowed, repeatedly, to have it ready by the end of next year.

Natalie Claus was getting accustomed to her sorority and preparing for winter break one evening in December 2019 when people she knew began receiving unusual messages from her. These Snapchat messages, which contained nude photographs of Claus, went to her friends, a cousin, an ex-boyfriend, and dozens of others she knew, more than 100 people in all. Some of the recipients responded with enthusiasm, others with confusion, as if Claus had played a bad joke. But one of her friends, Katie Yates, immediately recognized the messages as an online attack—and knew just how Claus should respond.

Yates was also a student at the State University of New York College at Geneseo, 40 miles south of Rochester, where Claus was a sophomore. Several months earlier, after Yates reported being sexually assaulted, someone had begun sending her abusive messages on social media. Feeling like she wasn’t getting enough support on campus, Yates began researching ways to identify her harasser.

In the early days of the pandemic, when markets plunged and 22 million Americans lost their jobs, Congress and the Federal Reserve sprang into action to stabilize an economy at risk of buckling. After trillions of dollars of Covid-19 relief cash and a monsoon of cheap federally sponsored loans, US households are sitting on

Ever since he transformed Louis Vuitton from a venerable maker of steamer trunks into a handbag juggernaut more than 30 years ago, Bernard Arnault has pursued a simple yet lucrative strategy: buy respected but slightly fusty brands; freshen up their management, marketing, and operations; and weave them into the ever-expanding luxury tapestry known today as