Seyward Darby

A winding essay on food, fatherhood, body image, and one of the most famous movie stars in the world: There are many options available if you want to watch a supercut of Brad Pitt eating. They range from three-minute collections of the obvious clips to the more satisfying 20-minute epics that trace his consumption across […]

He grew up speaking a language of the enslaved on the shores of Pin Point, Georgia. He would become the most powerful Black man in America, using the astonishing power vested in a Supreme Court justice to hold back his own people. Now he sits atop an activist right-wing court poised to undo the progressivism […]

An extraordinary investigation into the Trump administration’s family separation policy: Over the past year and a half, I have conducted more than 150 interviews and reviewed thousands of pages of internal government documents, some of which were turned over to me only after a multiyear lawsuit. These records show that as officials were developing the […]

An essay on the author’s “Tinder decade” — ten years spent swiping, dating, ghosting, getting ghosted, and considering how the app shapes lives: I learned to be buoyant in the face of disappointment. So many of these dates were just people plucked out of a random void and returned to that void after. The memory […]

An authority on child sex trafficking has spent decades trying to understand whether the unthinkable happened to her, too. Together with a journalist, she went looking for evidence — and found it: Agents told Kate her father was “upset” about her allegations. “He said he wouldn’t admit to something he didn’t do just to give […]

Andres Beckett dreamed of competing in a punishing rodeo event known as the Suicide Race. But more difficult than charging down its dangerously steep track was earning a spot at the starting line: It’s not hard to see what makes the race so dangerous. There’s the hill itself, more than 200 feet of earth pitched […]

A profile of three women carrying pregnancies after New York legalized paid surrogacy in 2021: In the days following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, photos of herself with her IFs went viral on TikTok. Portia, who wore a long red dress, cradled her bump, her IFs in the foreground. Were the three a throuple? Was she placing her baby for […]

Glen McCurley was living a quiet life in Fort Worth when new DNA evidence linked him to a notorious crime: the killing of a teenager named Carla Walker, more than 45 years prior. Police suspect it wasn’t his first murder — or his last. The story of how he got caught takes some surprising turns, […]

An interview with the pioneering writer, progressive activist, and historian of all things Los Angeles, on the heels of his decision to cease treatment for his terminal cancer: SD:  The act of organizing seems to rest on hope for changing the world, but your books paint a grim picture: ecological collapse, political corruption, white supremacy, […]