Sarma Melngailis owned a booming vegan restaurant beloved by celebrities. But after systematically draining the company bank account, she and her husband skipped town. Last week, after nearly a year on the lam, they were arrested in a Fairfield Inn & Suites in Tennessee. The cops found them after they ordered Domino’s.

At 9:14pm on November 22, 1987, sportscaster Dan Roan was doing the Bears highlights on Chicago’s WGN-TV when the station’s signal was hijacked. Someone wearning a rubber Max Headroom mask appeared, silently, on TV screens around the city. A few hours later, Headroom popped up again on another channel, this time for longer and with audio. Despite FBI and FCC investigations, the case remains unsolved.

An actor, fresh from prison, attempts to reconnect with his son in 1950s California.

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"His friends remembered when Richard became famous. It was the year the hippies came to San Francisco. Richard had published one novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur, but it had sold miserably 743 copies and his publisher, Grove Press, had dropped its option on Trout Fishing in America."

A Q&A:

My mother was called to school frequently because I was yelling out things in class, quips in class, and because I would hand in compositions that they thought were in poor taste, or too sexual. Many, many times she was called to school.

Before the market crashed and home prices tumbled, before federal investigators showed up and hauled away the community records, before her property managers pled guilty for conspiring to rig neighborhood elections, and before her real estate lawyer allegedly tried to commit suicide by overdosing on drugs and setting fire to her home, Wanda Murray thought that buying a condominium in Las Vegas was a pretty good idea.

In the years before World War II, Zacharewicz shined at Cannes and was wooed by Samuel Goldwyn but when the Nazis occupied Poland, he was sent to Auschwitz for defending his Jewish countrymen: “For him, the choice was easy.”

An excerpt from Darnielle’s debut novel, in which a disfigured man talks to maladjusted teens.

A year after her death, a tribute to the Saturday Night Live star who didn’t want to be on TV.

“Norbert Grupe—a Nazi soldier’s son, boxer, professional wrestler, failed actor, criminal, and miserable human being who was never so happy as when he could make someone hate him—was once a man so beautiful that other men wanted to paint him.”

Before ending up in Rikers, Jeremy Wilson — if that’s his real name — had portrayed himself as a Scottish-born DJ, a Cambridge-trained thespian, a Special Forces officer, a professor at MIT, an Apple executive, a soldier seeking asylum in Canada to escape anti-Semitic attacks in the United States, and an Irish mobster. Among others.

An interview on craft:

Writing The Subs in three nights was really a fantastic athletic feat as well as mental, you shoulda seen me after I was done...I was pale as a sheet and had lost fifteen pounds and looked strange in the mirror.

An interview with the novelist, who died on Saturday.

“We take it that all young writers overestimate their work. It’s impossible not to—I mean if you recognized what shit you were writing, you wouldn’t write it. You have to believe in your stuff—every day has to be the new day on which the new poem may be it.”

Stephen Bannon and Jeff Sessions, the new attorney general, have long shared a vision for remaking America. Now the nation’s top law-enforcement agency can serve as a tool for enacting it.

There’s no telling how many guns there are in America—and when one gets used in a crime, no way for the cops to connect it to its owner. The only place the police can turn for help is a Kafkaesque agency in West Virginia, where, thanks to the gun lobby, computers are illegal and detective work is absurdly antiquated. On purpose.

He’d sold his company, chartered a yacht, and set off with his model girlfriend to see the world. Finally, it seemed, Chris Smith was living the life he’d always wanted. But back home there was trouble: missing money, unraveling secrets, and a sudden question. Where the hell was Chris Smith, really?

He came home from Vietnam, wrote the novel that became Full Metal Jacket, was nominated for an Oscar and riding high. Then he got thrown in jail for stockpiling stolen library books, started drinking, cut off his friends and fled to a remote Greek island. He never made it back.

“Fear is running rampant in the Curia, where the mood has rarely been this miserable. It’s as if someone had poked a stick into a beehive. Men wearing purple robes are rushing around, hectically monitoring correspondence. No one trusts anyone anymore, and some even hesitate to communicate by phone.”

The 66-year-old became lost while hiking the Appalachian Trail. She survived for at least 16 days before crawling into her sleeping bag one last time, her journal sealed in a waterproof bag.

“My dad’s whole idea was to do an amusement park differently, not where you just got strapped in and twisted around, but one where you controlled what was going on. You can have an awesome time, but you can also hurt yourself if you don’t use good judgment.”

“When I’ve had courage, I often lacked the healthy choices. When I’ve had healthy choices, I often lacked courage. Ending unhealthy transactional relationships and opening ourselves to radical possibilities is one way we effectively heal ourselves and others in America.”