The Truck Stop Killer

When she was a 15-year-old runaway, the writer was nearly killed by a truck driver. Twenty-seven years later, she investigates whether her attacker was truck stop serial killer Robert Ben Rhoades, who often kept his victims chained in the back of his truck for weeks before killing and dumping them.

Underworld

Five hundred feet below ground with Ohio coal miners.

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I followed them underground, home, to church, to the strip club where they drink and gossip and taunt and jab and worry about one another. I listened while they worried about Smitty, the loner of the group, who had just ordered himself a mail-order woman.

The Redemption of Justin Bieber

“And while maybe you don’t care if Justin Bieber ever does make his way back to a kind of normalcy, perhaps you can admit there is at least something admirable, in the abstract, about someone finding a way to survive, and even to become kind, when all they’ve been taught since a young age, by millions of adoring people, is that there is no need for them to be kind at all. And if that doesn’t move you, then maybe you can at least find sociological interest in the process that Bieber is about to recount here, which is how you turn into someone you don’t want to be, and what you do about it once you decide you want to be someone else. Someone better, even.”

American Battlefield: 72 Hours in Kenosha

Last summer, in a small Wisconsin city, the country’s fiercest differences collided in the streets—and a teenager named Kyle Rittenhouse opened fire, shooting three people. In the aftermath, a disquieting question loomed: Were these among the first shots in a new kind of civil war?