Javier Flores had hopes of a last-minute change in policy that would allow him to stay in Ohio with his wife and four kids, where he had a good job, a house, paid taxes. It didn’t come.

“‘Make America Great Again’ means ‘Make America White Again.’ So now you have this other explosion of people who want to feel above something, better than something. And who is that? That’s me.”

Rebecca Raffle came to Indianapolis from Los Angeles with dreams of building a cannabis empire. She introduced herself as a West Coast #girlboss, SEO ninja, LGBTQ Family, and avid baker. But she was altogether something different.

How the Newtown Bee covered Sandy Hook.

The daily deals company turned down a $6 billion offer from Google and went public. Now its stock is down 80% and its founder/CEO has been fired. On Groupon’s failed strategy and tenuous future.

The writer, entering her thirties single and adrift, heads to San Francisco to spend time with Kink.com’s Princess Donna Dolore and attend a gangbang “where all the men were dressed as panda bears.”

Gretchen Molannen was perpetually aroused. She couldn’t work or sleep.

On December 1, the day after this story was published, she killed herself.

With Just Mayo, Josh Tetrick wanted to build the first sustainable-food unicorn. He’ll need to fend off the feds first.

“Those who were born in the U.S.S.R. and those born after its collapse do not share a common experience,” wrote Svetlana Alexievich, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2015. “It’s like they’re from different planets.”

"I have the sensation, as do my friends, that to function as a proficient human, you must both 'keep up' with the internet and pursue more serious, analog interests."

An essay on technology’s reach into daily life.

No one knew how Suzanne Jovin ended up in a wealthy neighborhood away from Yale’s campus in New Haven, or why she was brutally stabbed on the sidewalk, apparently by someone she knew. The only suspect that police named was her thesis advisor.

One student’s struggle, and the lawsuit that could put an end to a controversial “neutrality policy” in the Minnesota school district.

On being South Africa’s “public protector,” charged with watching over the people who once liberated it.

The ride-share company has 250 lobbyists and 29 lobbying firms registered in capitols around the nation, a third more than Wal-Mart Stores. Among other things.

Sheikh Humarr Khan was a globally renowned expert in tropical diseases, and the hero who ran Sierra Leone’s worst Ebola ward. So why, when he finally fell ill, was he denied the extraordinary treatments that could have saved him?

On the final two holdouts in Treece, Kansas, a former mining town that is soon to be wiped off the maps.

How Cosmo, with 64 international editions and a readership that would make it the world’s 16th largest country, conquered the globe.

A just-barred Pakistani-American attorney attempts to save a young family’s home from foreclosure and glimpses the contradiction-rich bureaucracy that has emerged in response to the housing crisis.

An investigation into a social media-fueled gang war in Detroit.

The Red Zone is part pharmacy, part killing field and part music studio where gang members peddled drugs, fought rivals and shot rap videos on street corners.

A conversation between the writers Nadifa Mohamed, who left Hargeisa, and Aleksandar Hemon, who left Bosnia.

The author, who works remotely, and her evolving relationship with her physical representation at the office: “an iPad on a stick on a Segway-like base.”

Steven Carrillo’s path to the Boogaloo Bois shows the hate group is far more organized and dangerous than previously known.

On the Long Island Inferno, two fathers, both with complicated pasts took it all too far. Neither man was ever the same.

A local reporter set out to profile the celebrated writer. He ended up lampooned in The New Yorker.

Excerpted from Updike.