Meet the artist who hid away for a month in total darkness.

Here’s what’s become of them.

The fall of CBS showrunner Peter Lenkov.

A psychoanalytic reading of social media and the death drive.

On hope, violence, and being Black in the outdoors.

On the downfall of ubiquitous accident law firm, Cellino & Barnes.

Love, loss, and growing up in the Utah desert

A viral short story and the real person it mysteriously drew on.

On the retirement of Ted Williams.

A profile of the gymnast.

An interview with Amia Srinivasan.

How your family tree could catch a killer.

Less than half a decade after The Hills brought them massive celebrity, Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt are broke and his living in his parent’s vacation house. Their onscreen relationship was mostly fake, but the reality, as their current situation attests, was far worse:

By the end of 2009 (and the show’s fifth season), their lives seemed insane. Instead of riding bikes, Spencer was holding guns. Heidi’s plastic surgeries gave her a distorted quality, but she vowed to have more. Spencer grew a thick beard, became obsessed with crystals, and was eventually told to leave the series. There were daily updates on gossip sites about them “living in squalor,” publicly feuding with their families, and attacking The Hills producers (or claiming The Hills producers attacked them). By the time they announced they were (fake) splitting, followed by Spencer threatening to release various sex tapes, and Heidi (fake) filing for divorce, it seemed like they had ventured into, at best,Joaquin Phoenix-like, life-as-performance-art notoriety and, at worst, truly bleakStar 80 territory that could end with one or both of them dead.

He was a hedge-funder with a coke problem. She liked to drink and was thrice-divorced before they got married. When the police arrived, she was clutching his dead body in the shallow end of their pool. She would soon be accused of murder—not by the cops, but her Internet psychic.

“Before Glenn Greenwald was the journalist who broke and defended the most important story of 2013, he was many other things: an underage South Florida politician, a lawyer at a high-powered corporate firm, Kips Bay’s most combative tenant, and even the legal arm of his business partner’s gay porn distribution company.”

“Places like the New York Times, Le Monde and the Washington Post are not given to elevating editors—of any gender—who would accept anything other than the highest of standards. As in tough, demanding, challenging. But there’s no doubt that many find this off-putting and threatening from a certain kind of woman. Like me.”

Tereza Sedgwick trains to become a nurse aid, the fastest-growing job in America. It pays just better than minimum wage and has one of the highest burnout rates of any career.

An unlikely friendship bloomed in Oxford, Mississippi between a 30-year-old drug dealer and a college-bound teen after a chance meeting at a hotel pool. Then the dealer began to suspect that his friend was one of the 30 or so confidential informants that Metro Narcotics recruits from around the college town each year.

It had seemed simple in the beginning. Now everything was so complicated, he wasn’t sure what the truth was. He had to admit that he might have gotten involved with the wrong people—that he might have become part of a scam within a scam.

He was just another coked-up agent (repping the likes of Steven Soderbergh) when he disappeared into Iraq, shooting heaps of footage he would attempt to package into a pro-war documentary. And that was just the beginning.

In 2016, a West Virginia police officer came upon a young man in distress who asked the officer to shoot him. The officer didn’t. A few minutes, another officer did. Only one of them lost their job.

Many of the 230,000 women and girls in U.S. jails and prisons were abuse survivors before they entered the system. And at least 30 percent of those serving time on murder or manslaughter charges were protecting themselves or a loved one from physical or sexual violence.

A eulogy of sorts for the King.