Carolyn Wells

“The religion of the internet posits questions like, ‘what’s the harm in believing?’ and ‘why shouldn’t I be prepared for the worst?’ The deeper you go, the harder those questions are to answer.”

“I took his calls for a while, but then, like everyone else, started ignoring him. Even as his alcoholism grew worse, no one did what my mom kept threatening to do: stage an ­intervention. We were all too hopeful, maybe. Too stupid, probably. Uneducated about the disease, definitely.”

“No longer allowed to work, for days Wahida sits on her balcony. It was once her favourite place in the house, where she could hear people chattering, birds singing and dogs barking. It’s now dead quiet. In late August she would count planes leaving Kabul airport, sometimes 10, sometimes 20 per day, carrying Afghans away […]

“Now, I am not ashamed to say that a sticky Heineken can holds enormous value. It is what feeds me every day and pays for my clothes. It unites my family and helps me understand the value of hard work.”

“Dustin and his wife, Mandy Hoffpauir, a registered nurse, made a plan. Dustin recalled his time working in the Gulf: the challenges of providing medical care on offshore oil rigs mirrored those in the Permian Basin. He figured he could replicate the model he’d learned out there.”

“Three days later, he was free. All charges were dropped, his record wiped. The moment was a decade in the making, yet he knew better than to celebrate too joyously: in the public eye, suspicion would follow him until Christine’s real killer was found.”

“By the time Elisapee died, she had drifted in and out of homelessness for years, self-medicating with alcohol to numb a lifetime of surviving: genocide, domestic violence and the cruelty of street life.”

“As two EW veterans who’ve consumed more yuletide movies than is medically advised (and one of us is Jewish!), we set out to create the ideal Christmas flick while learning all the ingredients that make for the perfect holiday dish.”

“Other than whale barnacles, nothing else reliably recorded the month-to-month movements of ancient whales, says Taylor. Bone tissue doesn’t care about the chemistry of the water it grew in; baleen does, but it’s hardly ever fossilized. But a well-preserved whale barnacle is the perfect time-traveling tracking device.”