O n a long stretch of County Road 106 East, somewhere near the border of Texas and Oklahoma, three conspicuously souped-up trucks pull off to the side of the road. It’s around 6 p.m. on a warm spring evening in late April, and it just started raining, the thick drops …
Read More »When Your Crime Becomes a Dick Wolf Show
I n the spring of 2024, while Andre Shariff Smith was leading the Ramadan community prayer, asking for forgiveness with his forehead planted in the prison mosque’s carpeted floor, Netflix was releasing the first episode of its new series Homicide: New York, “Carnegie Deli Massacre.” It was about the crime …
Read More »Inside the Grassroots Fight Against Trump's Deportation Machine
O n the morning of June 7, a California State Assemblyman named José Luis Solache Jr. posted a video to his Instagram account of a phalanx of Customs and Border Patrol vehicles congregated across the street from a Home Depot in Paramount, California, a small city in Los Angeles County …
Read More »The Hotel Oloffson Was a 'Safe Haven' in Haiti. Gang Wars Have Turned It to Ashes
T ucked away in a hillside garden a short walk from the restive heart of Port-au-Prince, the Hotel Oloffson was a strange kind of refuge. Through good years and a lot of bad ones, it stayed open to all comers, welcoming despite its dark undertones and somehow immune to Haiti’s …
Read More »The Heavy Metal Festival Aiming to Curb Teen Suicide
W hen Nate Newton, bassist for the band Converge, first learned how steep the suicide rate among Native American teens was, he was shocked. “I was like, ‘That can’t be right. That’s so absolutely fucked up,’” he tells Rolling Stone. Native Americans have the highest suicide rate of any ethnic …
Read More »My Best Friend's Murder Was a Tabloid Circus. Now, I'm Looking for the Truth
I ’ve been dreaming about the Badlands again. It’s a scorching July day in 2002, and Nicole and I are hauling ass in my VW Beetle across South Dakota. I’m driving; she’s riding shotgun, eating a Slim Jim. We’re blasting The Eminem Show with the windows down, our hair whipping …
Read More »Tear Gas, Human Stampedes, and ICE Raids: 100 Hours in L.A.
Have you ever been caught up in a human stampede? You’d remember it. But let’s back up to calmer times. Even social unrest has an internal clock. It is the eighth day of protests in downtown Los Angeles since Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began grabbing immigrants from …
Read More »What You've Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us
L ike many people alive today, I have no desire to live on Mars. It is, by all accounts, a pretty shitty place for human habitation. Heat escapes its atmosphere so quickly that, were one to stand at its equator at noon with skin exposed — not a great idea! …
Read More »What You've Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us
L ike many people alive today, I have no desire to live on Mars. It is, by all accounts, a pretty shitty place for human habitation. Heat escapes its atmosphere so quickly that, were one to stand at its equator at noon with skin exposed — not a great idea! …
Read More »The Death of a CrossFit Athlete
The sun was just beginning to rise on Marine Creek Lake in Fort Worth, Texas, and Lazar Ðukić was feeling confident. A 28-year-old from Serbia, Ðukić was known in the CrossFit community for his easygoing attitude — a relentless optimism that showed up as a beaming smile, the first thing …
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