The Informant
[Not single-page] A man helps his friends during a killing spree in Southeast Washington D.C., leaving five young people dead. He then decides to testify against them in court:
“When they sat down a few days later, Williams launched into his standard spiel: Don’t talk on the jail phones, don’t discuss your case with anyone. ‘And I think he was hearing, ‘Blah, blah, blah, blah,’ because he turns to me and says, “Man, what can I do to make this right?” ‘
“Williams couldn’t recall working with a client whose first instinct wasn’t to minimize his exposure. But he did as asked and arranged a meeting with the prosecutors.
“A team of investigators crammed into a small conference room at police headquarters. One of the first things Nate told them was perhaps the most surprising: Malik Carter, the 14-year-old, had nothing to do with the shooting. The government’s working theory—the kid’s name was Carter, after all, and he’d run at the sight of the cops—now had an ugly hole in it. ‘Mike Brittin’s jaw was on the floor,’ Williams says.”
Professors Without Borders
How Udacity, Coursera and other online universities are changing the way we learn—and changing who has access to higher education:
“‘It turns out that two-thirds of our students are from outside the United States,’ Stavens, now the CEO of Udacity, said. ‘It’s about a third US, a third from ten other countries you might expect—western Europe, Brazil, east Asia, Canada—and then about a third from 185 other countries. We have 500 students in Latvia. Now that doesn’t sound like a lot, but it actually means more students take our classes in Latvia than take them on Stanford’s campus.’
“And that’s just it: Stavens and his co-founders aren’t evangelists out to convert the unwashed masses. They simply minister to those who show up, looking to be saved. ‘Learning is a process a lot like exercise. It has great results, but takes a lot of effort. And maintaining that effort is really hard.’ If you don’t want to learn Python, or how the smartphone game Angry Birds works, fine. There are 500 Latvians who do.”