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.

A son chronicles his father’s death:

My father's mortician was a careless barber. Stepping up to the open casket, I realized too much had been taken off the beard. The sides were trimmed tidy, the bottom cut flat across. It was a disconcerting sight, because in his last years, especially, my father had worn his beard wild, equal parts loony chemist and liquor store Santa. The mortician ought to have known this, I thought, because he knew the man in life. My father — himself the grandson of a funeral home director — would drop by Davey-Linklater in Kincardine, Ontario, now and then for a friendly chat. How's business? Steady as she goes? Death was his favourite joke.

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.

A history of how Tuareg separatists, jihadists seeking a “desert caliphate,” cigarette smugglers, and narcotraffickers have turned Northern Mali into “the globe’s most significant terrorist threat.”

On the legal and practical details of the drone strikes that killed New Mexico-born Anwar al-Awlaki and later, accidentally, his sixteen-year-old Colorado-born son.

“Fast food and hedge funds. That’s where we’re going.”

“You read enough books in which people like you are disposable, or are dirt, or are silent, absent, or worthless, and it makes an impact on you. Because art makes the world, because it matters, because it makes us. Or breaks us.”

What do we give up when we become freedom-seeking, self-determining, autonomous entrepreneurs? A lot, actually.

The team’s grand, analytics-driven experiment led by a business school grad who won the GM job after giving a “PowerPoint presentation that Sixers executives now recall as an ‘investment thesis.’”

Creators, gatekeepers, and the future of the comedy business.

A transcript of Oswalt’s keynote at last week’s Just For Laughs conference.

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

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.

Each year, about 50,000 women are severely injured giving birth. Half of these injuries could be reduced or eliminated with better care.

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

When a longtime resident started stealing her neighbors’ Amazon packages, she entered a vortex of smart cameras, Nextdoor rants, and cellphone surveillance.