As one blockmate after another fell ill, we tried to stay safe and care for one another. It wasn’t always enough.

If you were a U.S. prison warden trying to figure out how to kill people with an electric chair in the ‘80s, there was basically one guy to call. His name was Fred A. Leuchter Jr. He ran a business out of his house in the Boston suburbs, providing consulting or execution equipment to at least 27 states between 1979 and 1990. Some of Fred Leuchter’s equipment is still in use today, which is why I wanted to talk to him.

This isn't an essay or simply a woe-is-we narrative about how hard it is to be a black boy in America. This is a lame attempt at remembering the contours of slow death and life in America for one black American teenager under Central Mississippi skies. I wish I could get my Yoda on right now and surmise all this shit into a clean sociopolitical pull-quote that shows supreme knowledge and absolute emotional transformation, but I don't want to lie.

“Think about that: Kim has so thoroughly monetized the very act of living that the money she earns from being filmed going about her life constitutes a relatively small sum compared with the one she generates from allowing people to see pictures and cartoon drawings of the life she has already filmed. She has figured out how to spin the mundanity of being herself—something billions of people do every day for free—into a more lucrative business than being the most famous rapper in the world.”

Since being revealed as a CIA operative and selling Blackwater, Erik Prince has set to work building U.A.E. a mercenary army, made up heavily of Colombian and South African troops, to be used “if the Emirates faced unrest or were challenged by pro-democracy demonstrations in its crowded labor camps or democracy protests like those sweeping the Arab world this year.”

How Tide became a black market currency.

How an informant helped authorities nab a notorious anti-abortion activist.

The investigation that brought down K2 Productions.

Ghost towns and nuclear waste sites are among what you find in the Nevada desert.

Visiting a cattle market in Karachi, right before the feast of Eid.

How much time does Manny Pacquiao have left?

One year later, a dispatch from Steubenville.

A story from the end of the earth.

Projectionist provocateur Robin Bell lights up the night.

Could a global icon of extinction still be alive?

Inside the Rams-Chargers marriage.

Giving birth as a black woman in America.

Investigating the unsolved murder of Malcolm X’s grandson.

I remember when you were a little girl, you used to call yourself “peach-brown”. Peach represented your mother, brown represented your father, and together they made peach-brown, a perfect articulation at the time for what you were. The colors came from the crayons you matched to the skin of your parents, and although they were separate and didn’t mix together very well on paper, they were the best you had at the time. This silly little phrase represented what would become a lifelong struggle of coming into your own identity.

How homelessness is criminalized in small cities and towns across the West.

Utah says the White Mesa Mill isn’t contaminating groundwater, but its neighbor, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, disagrees.

How governments and private companies have engaged in digital arms trading by building a global black market for ‘zero day’ hacks.