A s a kid growing up in the small Texas town of Navasota, Jose Alfaro spent his summers playing in the pastures and creeks near his home, examining bugs and frogs, crawfish and turtles. “It was one of those towns where tractors hold up traffic,” he says. Trains slowed things …
Read More »A Missing Musician, a Broken Family, and a Bag of Bones: Inside a 40-Year Murder Mystery
T his story begins in 1982 with less than half a man — a pile of bones discovered under a layer of February snow, his broken skull smiling up at an adolescent worker behind his family’s factory. The bones were far from home, discarded in small-town Twinsburg, Ohio, which got …
Read More »Learjets, Mistresses, and Bales of Weed: My Dad's Life as a Drug Kingpin
The black Cadillac pulls into the diner’s parking lot in Queens. Built in the 1950s, the building looks like it only exists on a rainy day, the rock-lined exterior out of another time. I step out of the Uber and look up at the restaurant where, in 1983, my father …
Read More »How the Pandemic Allowed One Author to Affect Change in Her Community and Reinvent Her Debut Novel
In February 2020, Sarah Thankam Mathews was struggling to write a novel; freelancing wasn’t going so great, either. So, she took a writing break, looked at the burgeoning threat of Covid-19, and immersed herself in the needs she predicted were on the horizon as the pandemic altered everyone’s reality. “What …
Read More »A True-Crime Star Lost His Podcast Over Misconduct Allegations. Then, More Women Came Forward
“It’s the end of an era,” podcast network Exactly Right tweeted in May 2022. “Jensen & Holes: The Murder Squad is going off the air.” The tweet set off dismayed speculation among the true crime community, and rightly so: The podcast, which launched in 2019, was a popular powerhouse of …
Read More »How 'Baby Al Capone' Pulled Off a $24 Million Crypto Heist
T he break-in happened around 4 a.m., on a leafy street in the otherwise sleepy and sleeping village of Irvington, New York. Four men wearing ski masks and gloves, armed with knives, rope, brass knuckles, and a fake 9 mm, crept around the back of the large suburban home, their …
Read More »The 25 Best True-Crime Podcasts of All Time
Ten years ago, most people hadn’t even heard of a podcast. Now, they’re an integral part of the media landscape, and none more so than those about true crime. To rank the best, we polled true-crime aficionados about their favorite shows, then sifted through the top choices. Whether they cover …
Read More »'The Soundtrack of Your Mistakes In Stereo': Documenting Every Detail of Life Behind Bars
On a cold morning in upstate New York, I got arrested while walking down the street with a small Tupperware container filled with heroin. Even though I was at the tail end of my senior year at Cornell University, that outcome should not have been a surprise to anyone who …
Read More »Personality Changes and Viral Disco Videos: Friends and Family Worry Dancers Have Joined a 'Cult'-Like Management Company
Samantha Long knew something was wrong with her friend James Derrick when he started talking about fringe ideas on their first phone call in months. “It was essentially two hours of conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory, from things like ‘Covid isn’t real,’ to [theories about Joe] Biden, who was about …
Read More »U.S. Veterans Start a 'Resistance Academy' in Ukraine. Will It Backfire?
Three days after the Russian invasion, Hannibal told me he was setting up a group of international military volunteers to fight for Ukraine. Hannibal — who asked that Rolling Stone not reveal his name because of security concerns — had been a U.S. Army infantry officer with the 173rd Airborne …
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