Homs, The Islanders, and Picasso

A summary of the best reads found behind the paywall of The New York Times.

This article is from the archive of our partner .

Now that The New York Times pay wall is live, you only get 10 free clicks a month. For those worried about hitting their limit, we're taking a look through the paper each morning to find the stories that can make your clicks count.

Top Stories: The competition for the female swing voter, a "quadrennial obsession" that "can sometimes lead to mythmaking."

World: In Homs, where a reporter was embedded with Syrian soldiers, "the military and the insurgents play a lethal game of cat and mouse."

Politics: Name-calling and accusations in Florida House races where, as a a Democratic leader in the State Capitol says, “nasty is the new normal,"

New York: A split decision in a case about surrogacy in New Jersey "neatly captured the continued uncertainty across the country, 25 years after New Jersey was at the center of what remains the best-known surrogate custody dispute, over a child known as Baby M."

Business: The Tax Policy Center—"a small nonpartisan research center operated by professed 'geeks'"—finds itself in the middle of the presidential race because of a study, which "concluded that Mr. Romney’s plan, on its face, would cut taxes for rich families and raise them for everyone else."

Technology: Zynga tries to hold on even as "it warned that its third-quarter numbers would be a pre-Halloween horror, and so investors naturally started thinking about the apocalypse."

Health: Conflict over state laws which require clinics that perform mammograms to tell patients if they have dense breast tissue  "is pitting angry patients against the medical establishment. Advocates say women have a right to know, but medical groups argue that the significance of tissue density is uncertain and that reporting it may panic women and lead to an avalanche of needless screening tests and biopsies."

Sports: With the Islanders coming to Brooklyn discussion pops up as to whether the name should be changed, even though Brooklyn is on Long Island.

Opinion: Eamon Javers on a "new generation of spies."

Art & Design: Conservators Guggenheim set out to discover details about the painting that lay underneath Picasso's "Woman Ironing."

Books: Markus Zusak's The Book Thief has had a life far longer than it's author expected it to have and now in a stage adaptation at Steppenwolf in Chicago and a film is in the works.

Fashion & Style: Alex Tyron and Scott Carleton run Artsicle, a borrowing system for art which is aimed "at novice collectors with small budgets, limited art knowledge and no appetite for the intimidating atmosphere at many established art galleries."

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.