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.

Like hundreds of other local slaves — [they] had been pressed into service by the Confederates, compelled to build an artillery emplacement amid the dunes across the harbor. They labored beneath the banner of the 115th Virginia Militia, a blue flag bearing a motto in golden letters: “Give me liberty or give me death.”

On the complete corruption of Paul Bergin, a federal attorney turned high-priced defense lawyer now awaiting trial on a host of charges.

If Paul is guilty of half the things they say, he’d be the craziest, most evil lawyer in the history of the State of New Jersey. That is saying something.

Growing up in Toledo, Ohio, Gina Grimm always wondered who her biological parents were. “You know, you go to the supermarket and think, ‘That lady kinda has my nose.’ Or, you know, ‘That man kinda has a resemblance to my face.’”

There’s a tale about a boy in Waycross. Near a canal, he struck a match, lit a piece of newspaper, and tossed it into the water. But when the burning paper touched the surface, it didn’t go out. The water burst into flames.

A frustrated Black Lives Matter activist. A die-hard Confederate loyalist. A sheriff who won’t back down. In a place where protests are restricted and violence feels imminent, many cry: “We don’t want to die no more.”

“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.”

Few men have acquired so scandalous a reputation as did Basil Zaharoff, alias Count Zacharoff, alias Prince Zacharias Basileus Zacharoff, known to his intimates as “Zedzed.” Born in Anatolia, then part of the Ottoman Empire, perhaps in 1849, Zaharoff was a brothel tout, bigamist and arsonist, a benefactor of great universities and an intimate of royalty who reached his peak of infamy as an international arms dealer -- a “merchant of death,” as his many enemies preferred it.

Transcript of the 1969 Montreal “bed-in.”

JOHN: How long have you been there, in the teepee? I mean, before you sussed the wind and everything, and you know, got your senses back? ROSEMARY: We had to put the teepee up three times before it was right. It’s like you can touch it, and it resounds like a drone, and then it’s perfect, the canvas. It’s a wind instrument that plays like a drone.

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.

Rosie grew up in a succession of decrepit houses in South London with one man and a rotating cast of women, who claimed that they had found her on the streets as an infant. The man, Aravindan Balakrishnan—Comrade Bala, as he wanted to be called—was the head of the household. He instructed the women to deny Rosie’s existence to outsiders, and forbade them from comforting her when she cried.

As the snow tires rumbled on the highway beneath us, a neo-Nazi "troll army" was several days into attacking the Jewish people of Whitefish on Spencer's behalf, based on a belief that some Whitefish Jews had recently tried to run Spencer and his mother out of town. Details about what actually happened between the town and the Spencers were in short supply, and, among the neo-Nazi troll brigades, anti-Semitism was in abundance.

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

When Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison were roommates.

He and I had our differences. I am not inclined to be sentimental about those Arcadian or Utopian days. He didn't approve of my way of running the place. I had complained also that his dog relieved himself in my herb garden. I asked, "Can't you arrange to have him do his shitting elsewhere?"

It mostly had to do with Patch, the executive’s hyperlocal and unprofitable baby.