“I always walk away from an interview — no matter how well it went — knowing that there’s so much that I don’t know about that person.”

Immigrants from Africa and the iron gateways of mass deportation.

Instead, they got scorched.

A slick-talking con artist turned an innocent brother and sister into his personal slaves.

On the ethics of putting the internet’s spotlight on a neighborhood restaurant.

He never saw it coming.

Is the genetically engineered chestnut tree an act of ecological restoration or a threat to wild forests?

How killing by remote control has changed the way we fight.

Was she the reason he was alive today?

She tore up a picture of the pope. Then her life came apart. These days, she just wants to make music.

Why a Nova Scotia community is still searching for the killer of a beloved farmer thirty years later.

During the pandemic, people from the author’s hometown got sucked into QAnon and the Q-adjacent “Save the Children” movement.

What I learned about rich people, conspiracy, “genius,” Ghislaine, stand-up comedy, and evil from 2,000 phone calls.

Why did I ever believe a teen girl could hold all the power?

A sketch artist and a grieving mother set out to solve a cold case. The more they dug, the more terrifying the truth became.

For nearly 200 years, San Francisco has been the last stop of petty thieves, con artists and killers. Iva Kroeger was all three.

Trees have always migrated to survive. But now they need our help to avoid climate catastrophe.

Inside the shadowy meetings between Chicago’s violent gang members and its elected officials.

Drones, renditions, and underground prisons; inside the war on terror’s African front.

In the eighteen years since the infamous “Black Hawk Down” incident in Mogadishu, US policy on Somalia has been marked by neglect, miscalculation and failed attempts to use warlords to build indigenous counterterrorism capacity, many of which have backfired dramatically. At times, largely because of abuses committed by Somali militias the CIA has supported, US policy has strengthened the hand of the very groups it purports to oppose and inadvertently aided the rise of militant groups, including the Shabab.

The author expounds on culture and crime in the early 90s:

Yes, I know there are sensational tabloid crimes everywhere and the closeness to the Manhattan media nexus tends to magnify everything. But even so, that was always true. There's just no denying that something has changed in the past decade, that, as our bard Billy Joel sings on his new album, there's "lots more to read about, Lolita and suburban lust." But why? Why is this Island different from all other islands? And why are so many Long Islanders suddenly running amok?

On being gay in the military, three years before Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell:

A vast majority of those interviewed had been interrogated at least once, and what they described was nearly the same. They said those under suspicion of homosexuality suffer bright lights in their eyes and sometimes handcuffs on their wrists, warnings that their parents will be informed or their hometown newspapers called, threats that their stripes will be torn off and they will pushed through the gates of the base before a jeering crowd.

A pilgrimage to J.D. Salinger’s New Hampshire home:

The silence surrounding this place is not just any silence. It is the work of a lifetime. It is the work of renunciation and determination and expensive litigation. It is a silence of self-exile, cunning, and contemplation. In its own powerful, invisible way, the silence is in itself an eloquent work of art. It is the Great Wall of Silence J.D. Salinger has built around himself.

“When I’m in Nigeria, I find myself looking at the passive, placid faces of the people standing at the bus stops. They are tired after a day’s work, and thinking perhaps of the long commute back home, or of what to make for dinner. I wonder to myself how these people, who surely love life, who surely love their own families, their own children, could be ready in an instant to exact a fatal violence on strangers.”