The story of Universe 25, a mouse utopia that became an overcrowded hell, and its implications for the future of humankind.

June 4, 1974: the first and last 10-cent beer night in Cleveland Indians history.

A 4-year-old girl was the sole survivor of a U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan. Then she disappeared.

Arthur and Kathleen Breitman thought they held the secret to building a new decentralized utopia. On the way, they plunged into a new kind of hell.

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.

On “the Incidents”, three shootings in a single month in a 1,300 person hamlet tucked inside the 12-year-old Nunavut territory. (The complete 4-part series.)

In 1965, a mother was charged with killing her 5-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter in Queens. Fifty years later, it still isn’t clear if she did it.

What’s wrong with some forgery, fraud, and crystal meth if you’ll soon be gone? A better question: What the hell happens if you survive?

For a few weeks a few years ago, Jeremy Lin was on top of the basketball world. Now he’s riding the bench, being taunted by Kobe Bryant, and trying to figure out what the hell happened.

She survived an evil, gruesome attack. Her partner did not. An account of a victim, a widow, telling her story on the witness stand.

Update, 4/16/12: This piece was just awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing.

Nearly 4 years ago, a 12-year-old boy was murdered in a small town in upstate New York. The suspects are well known, but nobody has been convicted of the crime.

“I was never falling-down drunk. I was never belligerent. I always got my work done. I was never unkempt. I was always clean, I was always shaved, I always performed at work. I was always kind and gracious in the dining room. But I lived in hell.”

Anytime the racial temperature goes up and hell pays a visit to earth, the disappointment takes a holiday. And you fight. You fight because you’re tired. Yet you’re tired because you’ve been fighting. For so long. In waves, in loops, in vacuums, in vain.

The last thing child-welfare supervisor Chereece Bell wanted to see was what happened to 4-year-old Marchella Pierce. The last thing she expected was to go to jail for it.

More than 4 million Syrians have fled the war. 2,647 have made it to the United States.

Barry Jones has spent the last 22 years on death row for the murder of a 4-year-old girl. Prosecutors have fought against reopening his case even as the basis for his conviction has fallen apart.

Twenty-five years after 82 Branch Davidians and 4 federal officers were killed, the lead negotiator at the scene is still arguing about what happened.

“Last August, I found myself wrung out and miserable over the state of the United States—the vitriol of the presidential election, the deep chasms of reality where we all seemed to find ourselves. I wanted to get the hell away, but not just away. I wanted out. I wanted nothing that resembled where I was coming from. I wanted everything new.”

He’d sold his company, chartered a yacht, and set off with his model girlfriend to see the world. Finally, it seemed, Chris Smith was living the life he’d always wanted. But back home there was trouble: missing money, unraveling secrets, and a sudden question. Where the hell was Chris Smith, really?

Watching Florida government on the state and local level is like watching two parents bring an alcoholic home after he got kicked out of rehab and deciding that the best course of action is leaving him with $5,000 in an apartment up the street from a dive bar and then going to Cancun for the week. It was on the calendar already, there wasn’t any choice, he looked very healthy at the time!

Ten years ago, a man moved to Marsing, Idaho. He had a strange accent and didn't know much about cattle. The folks in Marsing were a little skeptical at first, but when he built a house and started a family, he earned his neighbors' acceptance. Last February, while buying hay, he was cornered by federal agents and arrested for violent crimes tied to the Boston Mob. And the town wondered: Who the hell is Jay Shaw?

On the tragic flood of elder death in the wake of COVID-19.

And as time arcs and stops and speeds and slows now, I watch myself ride the agony of the death. It’s not out of resistance, exactly, but a need to inquire into both time’s speed and the callous logic, basically eugenicist, that on bad days, the rest of the world seems to hold: that she was old enough to die this way.

One possible (if depressing) conclusion to take from this is that strategy is just an illusory abstraction that we have invented to give meaning to that which has none. We use it as a retrospective framing device to explain a complex series of events (of our own making but mostly of external provenance) that we do not understand. So maybe strategic theory is really just an gussied up form of conspiracy theory. We need to impose order on the world and believe that someone, somewhere, knows that the hell is going on.