The same forces that put his family in the slum also gave him the golf course on the other side of the wall, and the teachers and sponsors, and the strange ability to hit a ball with a club. But it still doesn't make sense. Sometimes it seems as if fate is wrestling with itself, making sure the circumstances of his birth are always conspiring to take away whatever gifts might allow him to escape it. He lives in two worlds, each one pulling away from the other. Anil is in the middle, trying to keep his balance.

Somewhere in the desert, buried under a mountain of sand and rock, is an ancient shipwreck. Maybe.

On June 4, 1989, the bodies of Jo, Michelle, and Christe were found floating in Tampa Bay. This is the story of the murders, their aftermath, and the handful of people who kept faith amid the unthinkable.

The champ is now a vegan, claims to be broke, and says he feels freer than ever before. “I have this uncanny ability to look at myself in the mirror and say, ‘This is a pig. You are a fucking piece of shit.’”

In the fantasy and superhero realm, the most chilling and compelling villain of the year was surely Magneto, who in X-Men: First Class is more of a proto-villain, a victim of human cruelty with a grudge against the nonmutants of the world rooted in bitter and inarguable experience. Magneto is all the more fascinating by virtue of being played by Michael Fassbender, the hawkishly handsome Irish-German actor whose on-screen identity crises dominated no fewer than four movies in 2011. Magneto, more than the others, also evokes a curious kind of self-reproach, because his well-founded vendetta is, after all, directed against us.

The comedian speaks to his alma mater about the importance of taking risks, and his own rocky path from college to the late-night stage:

What else can you expect in the real world? Let me tell you. As you leave these gates and re-enter society, one thing is certain. Everyone out there is going to hate you. Never tell anyone in a roadside diner that you went to Harvard. In those situations, the correct response to, “Where did you go to school?” is “School? I never had much in the way of book learnin’ and such.” And then get in your BMW and get the hell out of there. Go.

Gaile Owens was a churchgoing mother of two boys in suburban Memphis. Now she’s the first woman sentenced to die in Tennessee in nearly 200 years. The jury never heard her whole story; this is it.

The homeless population of New York City is higher than it’s been in decades. Nobody seems to notice.

“The most decorated athlete in all of Kazakhstan is a five-year-old Mongolian horse named Lazer.”

“Adaptation is one explanation of how a lot of executives stay alive. As the fish in the Silurian rivers began to develop swim bladders in order to live in shoal waters, so American executives have developed certain compensating features. The process can be observed particularly in the big cities where conditions are the most trying. Executives have developed an insensitivity to noise, an uncanny time sense (needed in commuting), and an attunement to the city’s terrifying rhythms. Instead of trying to escape the phenomenon of modern life they fling themselves at it.”

Kurdistan is the safest and most stable region in Iraq and at the center of its modern history is Amna Surak Prison, ground zero for both a genocide and an uprising.

The NBA’s greatest draft bust, Darko Milicic is now an enthusiastic farmer of cherries in his native Serbia.

“Choice is a great burden. The call to invent one’s life, and to do it continuously, can sound unendurable. Totalitarian regimes aim to stamp out the possibility of choice, but what aspiring autocrats do is promise to relieve one of the need to choose. This is the promise of “Make America Great Again”—it conjures the allure of an imaginary past in which one was free not to choose.”

A man is presumed murdered. In this town of 12, everyone is a possible suspect.

“If you’re a glass is half-full kind of person, you’d say they’re repurposing the abandoned coal mine” and using it to create jobs, says Wright. “And if you're a glass is half-empty kind of person, you'd say it's pretty unconscionable that you’re putting people in cages at gunpoint and putting them in toxic waste sites.”

Walter Isaacson’s book is long, dull, often flat-footed, and humorless. It hammers on one nail, incessantly: that Steve Jobs was an awful man, but awful in the service of products people really liked (and eventually bought lots of) and so in the end his awfulness was probably OK.

The Academy of Art University in San Francisco is very profitable for the family who runs it. But not so much for the students who attend in hopes of becoming artists.

The president of the Philippines’ kill list is reputed to have over million names of supposed drug pushers and addicts, including many mayors and politicians. There is no reliable way to get off the list other than dying in a hail of bullets from assassins on motorbikes.

“In the past, when he has spoken, he has sometimes replied to questions by protesting that he is boring. Maybe he believes that this is the case, or just believes there is no point in allowing himself to seem interesting in the way interviewers usually want people to be. Still, he has told himself that tonight he will be truthful. He’s feeling calmer these days. He has not had one of these conversations for a while, and he intends it to be a long time before he has another.”

Nearly four years later, I sometimes type his email address in the search box in my Gmail. Hundreds of results pop up, and I’ll pick a few at random to read. The ease of our everyday interactions is what kills me.

Remembering a relationship through IM.

A talk from the re:publica conference in Berlin:

The good part about naming a talk in 2017 ‘Notes from an Emergency’ is that there are so many directions to take it. The emergency I want to talk about is the rise of a vigorous ethnic nationalism in Europe and America. This nationalism makes skillful use of online tools, tools that we believed inherently promoted freedom, to advance an authoritarian agenda.

On the pair of entrepreneurs behind a Wal-Mart of weed in Oakland. The duo is talking IPO. “Everybody I was meeting was a little bit older, more a part of the hippie generation,” says one. “I was like, ‘I bet there’s so much room for innovation and new ideas.’”