The Accusation
Ray Spencer went to jail for 20 years for molesting his kids. Then they started to question their memories.
Why Sally Yates Stood Up to Trump
A profile of the former acting attorney general.
The Secret Life of Urban Crows
Among other things, crows can recognize human faces—and train each other to avoid people they don’t like.
At Home With the Best Surfer on the Planet
A profile of 24-year-old John John Florence.
A Place Where Something Evil Happened
Ira Tobolowsky, a prominent lawyer, was burned alive in his North Dallas garage. A strong suspect quickly emerged. So why can’t the cops solve the case?
The Big Fish
The rise and fall of Suck.com, the web’s first daily-updated site.
Notes From An Emergency
A talk from the re:publica conference in Berlin:
The good part about naming a talk in 2017 ‘Notes from an Emergency’ is that there are so many directions to take it. The emergency I want to talk about is the rise of a vigorous ethnic nationalism in Europe and America. This nationalism makes skillful use of online tools, tools that we believed inherently promoted freedom, to advance an authoritarian agenda.
The Most Important Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of
For 60 years, American drivers unknowingly poisoned themselves by pumping leaded gasoline into their tanks. Clair Patterson—a scientist who helped build the atomic bomb and discovered the true age of the Earth—took on a billion-dollar industry to save humanity from itself.
The Circus Leaves Town
Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus performs the last shows of its 146 year run.
Poisoning Daddy
How a loving daughter and star student stole barium acetate from her high school chemistry lab, put it in her father’s refried beans, and almost got away with murder.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Hamlet, Claudia, Zanzibar"
A young mother and child, secluded in an apartment, face dangerous outside forces.
Gerhard Steidl is Making Books An Art Form
Steidl, who is sixty-six, is known for fanatical attention to detail, for superlative craftsmanship, and for embracing the best that technology has to offer. "He is so much better than anyone,” William Eggleston, the American color photographer, told me, when I met him recently in New York. Steidl has published Eggleston for a decade; two years ago, he produced an expanded, ten-volume, boxed edition of “The Democratic Forest,” the artist’s monumental 1989 work. Eggleston passed his hand through the air, in a stroking gesture. “Feel the pages of the books,” he said. “The ink is in relief. It is that thick.”
“I’ve Told People What They Need to Hear to Get Their Money In...”
How a creator of Assassin’s Creed sold investors on a magic marijuana product that he claimed could predictably produce specific feelings in users.
Update: Co-founder Michael Wendschuh has attempted to subpoena Alex Halperin’s notes and sources.
The Dictator's Team
How Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian government has woven soccer into its grisly campaign of oppression.
Rafe Bartholomew is the former features editor at Grantland and the author of Two and Two: McSorley’s, My Dad, and Me.
“I never saw it as something negative because [my dad] comes out, to me, at the end, extremely heroic. … He becomes this dad who I idolized as a bartender, a guy who would hang out with me and make me laugh, a guy I just adored almost every step of the way. I mean, of course, everybody gets into fights. But to me it was always so obvious that he had overcome the problems in his childhood, he’d overcome his own drinking problem, he’d done all these things, and by the time I was older, he’d even found a way to get back into writing and self-publish a couple of books of poems about the bar. So he’s sort of managed to tick off all those goals, just maybe not on the same schedule, maybe not in the most normal way.”
Thanks to MailChimp, V by Viacom, and 2U for sponsoring this week's episode.
Location, Location, Location
A personal history of house moving.
America Reloaded
The documentary filmmakers from Longbow Productions said they wanted to tell the story of the Bundy Family and their standoff with the government. Their cameras were real, but the people behind them were undercover FBI agents.
Three Murders in Philadelphia
Three killings, three young accused killers, and the two homicide detectives that link them.
My Family's Slave
“She lived with us for 56 years. She raised me and my siblings without pay. I was 11, a typical American kid, before I realized who she was.”
What Makes a Parent?
A brutal custody battle raises questions about who has a right to rear a child and what the legal meaning of a family should be.
Her Eyes Were Watching the Stars
A profile of Missy Elliott.
His Kampf
“Richard Spencer is a troll and an icon for white supremacists. He was also my high-school classmate.”
Finding Lisa
The search for a woman’s true identity and the unmasking of a serial killer.
The Trash Heap Has Spoken
On women who take up space.
The McSorley Poet
A son on his father's career behind the bar.
Excerpted from Two and Two.
