On the Thomas Pynchon Trail

“Now Pynchon hides in plain sight, on the Upper West Side, with a family and a history of contradictions: a child of the postwar Establishment determined to reject it; a postmodernist master who’s called himself a ‘classicist’; a workaholic stoner; a polymath who revels in dirty puns; a literary outsider who’s married to a literary agent; a scourge of capitalism who sent his son to private school and lives in a $1.7 million prewar classic six.”

City of the Lost

Life inside Za’atari, a camp for Syrian refugees just across the Jordanian border, where “the dispossession is absolute. Everyone has lost his country, his home, his equilibrium. Most have lost a family member or a friend. What is left is a kind of theatrical pride, the necessary performance of will.”

Taken

A 55-year-old cold case ends with a conviction. But was justice really served?

  1. A Child Vanishes

    Playing outside after dinner, best friends Kathy and Maria meet a man calling himself “Johnny.” Kathy runs home to grab mittens; upon her return, her 7-year-old friend and the stranger are nowhere to be found.

  2. Women Wronged

    The story of Jack McCullough, once known as John Tessier, a man who once lived near Kathy and Maria and has a troubling history of abusing women.

  3. Bulldogs on the Case

    Police zero in on McCullough after a deathbed confession.

  4. 'That's Him'

    Half a century after her friend was abducted, Kathy identifies the man who took Maria.

  5. The Whole Truth?

    Jack McCullough is convicted of Maria’s kidnapping and murder, but questions are raised about the evidence (or lack thereof) presented at trial.

Sponsor: Nate Anderson's Guide to Internet Crime

This guide is sponsored by </i>The Internet Police: How Crime Went Online, and the Cops Followed</b></a>, the new book from Ars Technica Deputy Editor Nate Anderson.</p>

A excerpt from </i>The Internet Police is available on Longform. Already read it? Here's a collection of Nate's all-time favorite internet crime stories.

Eli Saslow is a staff writer at the Washington Post and a contributor at ESPN the Magazine.

"It's not really my place to complain about it being hard for me to write. I wrote the story ("After Newtown Shooting, Mourning Parents Enter Into the Lonely Quiet") and I got to leave it. And even when I was writing the story, I was only experiencing what they were experiencing in a super fractional way. The hard part is that it was a story where there are no breaks, there's no—it is this relentless, sort of bottomless pain and I struggled with that. … A story can only have so many crushing moments, otherwise they just all wash out. But the other truth is: it is what it is. It's an impossibly heartbreaking situation. And making the story anything other than relentlessly heartbreaking would've been doing an injustice to what they're dealing with."

Thanks to TinyLetter and Squarespace for sponsoring this week's episode.

Remote Control

On the immense power of ESPN.

  1. Part 1: The Mechanics of Influence

    How ESPN dictates the college football schedule.

  2. Part 2: Anytime, Anywhere

    How ESPN turned Louisville into a powerhouse.

  3. Part 3: Protecting the Empire

    How ESPN, which earns more than four times what any other cable channel does in subscriber fees, fights in Washington to preserve its “beautiful business model.”

Sponsor: "The Internet Police" by Nate Anderson

In The Internet Police: How Crime Went Online, and the Cops Followed, Ars Technica editor Nate Anderson takes readers on a behind-the-screens tour of landmark cybercrime cases, revealing how criminals continue to find digital and legal loopholes even as police hurry to cinch them closed.

Questions of online crime are as complex and interconnected as the internet itself. With each episode in The Internet Police, Anderson shows the dark side of online spaces—but also how dystopian a fully “ordered” alternative would be.


Read an Excerpt


Buy the Book:</a></em>
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