Twenty-five years ago this month, “superpredator” was coined in The Weekly Standard. Media spread the term like wildfire, creating repercussions on policy and culture we are still reckoning with today.

The author teaches a college class about what it means to be white in America, but interrogating that question as a black woman in the real world is much harder to do.

Chicago’s predictive policing program told a man he would be involved with a shooting, but it couldn’t determine which side of the gun he would be on. Instead, it made him the victim of a violent crime.

Prison Doctor David Ross was powerless in the role of bedside bystander as he tended to ten hunger strikers who died during the 1981 Maze Prison hunger strike. Five years later, he killed himself.

The author remembers his stepfather, E.B. White.

The anatomy of a collapse.

The economics of being a young writer.

The science of sleeplessness.

The story of Lilly Grossman’s genome.

The story of a suicide.

On working in an artists’ colony.

In the slums adjacent to Mumbai’s airport.

A meditation on Hell.

Scenes from the Los Angeles tech boom.

On the mountain lions of Los Angeles.

On not making the NBA.

The author on her childhood in Wingham, Ontario.

On the life and death of Elliott Smith.

Behind the scenes with Maury.

What caused the worst shipping disaster in maritime history?

Today, in the electronic age of instantaneous communication, I believe that our survival, and at the very least our comfort and happiness, is predicated on understanding the nature of our new environment, because unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitute a total and near-instantaneous transformation of culture, values and attitudes.

How Warren Buffett’s public image has aided his success.

As a successful investor, he merely moved markets; but as the charismatic, reassuring, quotable prototype of the honest capitalist (a sort of J. P. Morgan with a moral sense), he's capable of influencing elections, galvanizing rock-concert-size crowds, and in general defining how we Americans feel about the system that underlies our wealth.

The story of a professional assassin.

The life and politics of Joan Didion.