Seyward Darby

For eight hours last fall, Paradise, California, became a zone at the limits of the American imagination—and a preview of the American future.

A dispatch from CrimeCon, where families and victims of violence collide with the public’s obsession with murder.

What happens when a small tourist hub is suddenly made strange by violence?

Voldemort was not an amenable turtle, at first. He thrashed his right front flipper in defiance at the humans who wanted to touch him as he held his injured left flipper close to his body. He craned his head over his shoulder, his mouth open, and his eyes seemed to squint in frustration. “He was starving,” […]

“Pedophile hunting” or “creep catching” via Facebook is a contemporary version of a phenomenon as old as time: the humiliating act of public punishment. Criminologists even view it as a new expression of the town-square execution. But it’s also clearly a product of its era, a messy amalgam of influences such as reality TV and […]

A Harvard Law professor who teaches a class on judgment wouldn’t seem like an obvious mark, would he?

Paul Gonzales scammed his online dates into buying him expensive dinners. Then they made him pay.

A history of how Peoria became a stand-in for the country surrounding it.

Battles have raged within the Trump administration over family separations, ICE raids and the president’s obsession with a wall. Together, they have remade homeland security.

It would be a mistake to think the violence against Andy Ngo came out of some vacuum-sealed ideological intolerance toward conservatives. Ngo had been building to a dramatic confrontation with the Portland far left for months, his star rising along with the severity of the encounters.