Li Dao, a young Minnesota nurse, appeared in suicide chat rooms, contacted the most desperate, and made pacts to die with them via webcam. After some in the forum caught on, Dao disappeared; or rather, Dao had never existed at all. She was a middle-aged man. And he may have encouraged and witnessed dozens of live suicides.

Modern methods allow the Islamic State to keep up its systematic rape of captives under medieval codes.

To speak of the human as such, as the modernists did, is like taking a piece of the wild, putting it into a petri dish, adding bleach and antibiotics until more than half of what’s in there is dead and then celebrating the barely-living remains as “the human.” Provocatively put, the human is a sterile abstraction, a harmony of illusions.

New from 7STOPS: </em>Donald Judd, Judge Roy Bean, and the impact each man had on his West Texas home.

As someone who’s knocked on countless doors with nothing but a hunch and a prayer, I believe all doomed reporting missions should be seen through to their end. Besides, Zelonka’s pluck was entertaining, and I’d come all this way, so we went, two guys in masks, one zapped on Monster Energy and the other on Starbucks double espresso, roaming an empty office park in Rancho Cucamonga as the world was falling apart.

“Which is how, despite the drinking, the stealing, the racist outburst, the abysmal courtroom performance, the disbarment, and the ultimate imprisonment of his lead attorney, an intellectually disabled man has ended up on the verge of execution.”

Tech investors gave Seth Bannon, co-founder of the seemingly surging startup Amicus, over four million dollars, despite knowing almost nothing about him.

How a network of evangelical Christian crisis pregnancy centers turned the complex reality behind black abortion rates into a single, fictional story.

An essay on craft, excerpted from Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities.

On Jack Idema, a con-man who once ran a pet hotel before reinventing himself as a black-ops secret agent in Afghanistan, and the history of counterinsurgency theory.

An interview with Steve Albini on art, commerce, and ethic.

An interview with New Yorker critic Alex Ross about his book The Rest is Noise and why there’s really no such thing as “classical music.”

Kansas City’s most powerful political journalist is a 36-year-old blogger who resides in a porn lair in his mother’s basement, posting rants on local government and bikini shots 24-hours-a-day.

“There are no good options. But some are worse than others.”

Hollywood is aggressively adapting material that doesn’t have a narrative or even any characters. But not all intellectual property is created equal.

Tyler Haire was locked up at 16. A Mississippi judge ordered that he undergo a mental exam. He would wait 1,266 days in an adult jail.

A late night host finds a new voice.

“It’s not like I told myself, okay, this is it, you’re gonna take the guy outside and throw him off the goddam boat.”

In the poorest congressional district in the country, where thousands of people are arrested each year, one former cop with a complicated past made high-profile cases fall apart by insisting that the ends justified his means.

California has more charter schools than any other state. But the way they’re overseen is flawed—and questionable operators are making millions.

One cyclist rides west, another rides east. They meet on an empty stretch of road in a Kazakh desert.