Rachel Aviv

Sharon Stern devoted herself to Butoh. Did her mentor lead her down a dangerous path?

Getting a prescription for a psychiatric drug is pretty easy. Hell, getting prescriptions for multiple psychiatric drugs is pretty easy. Understanding where you stop and the drugs start, and getting off of them when they’re not actually serving you — that’s the hard part.

Though she was declared brain-dead by the hospital that treated her, Jahi McMath has remained on a ventilator for four years. Her family and a neurologist argue that she’s still very much alive, challenging the long-held notions of what it means to be dead.

Julie Belshe had thought her parents had been kidnapped: Their house in Clark County Nevada was locked and dark, and they didn’t answer their phone for days. She discovered they had been removed from their home and taken to an assisted living facility, their possessions were sold and their money confiscated. It wasn’t a mistake. It was the law.

Faced with a terrifying past and an uncertain future, young refugees in Sweden are taking to their beds with uppgivenhetssyndrom, or resignation syndrome, “an illness that is said to exist only in Sweden, and only among refugees.”

A profile of Albert Woodfox, a man originally sentenced to 50 years in prison for robbery. A member of the Black Panthers and the Angola 3, Woodfox spent over four decades in solitary confinement, despite a stunning lack of evidence against him in a prison murder.

A searing look at the lives of the immigrant women who tend to the needs of others.

A Belgian law allows people suffering from terminal illnesses and severe psychological disorders to seek euthanasia, but the line becomes gray for non-terminal patients.

An examination of police misconduct in Albuquerque, New Mexico—a city with one of the highest rates in the country of fatal shootings by police.

Facing increased pressure to perform on standardized tests, a group of Atlanta teachers begin cheating. “After more than two thousand interviews, the investigators concluded that forty-four schools had cheated and that a ‘culture of fear, intimidation and retaliation has infested the district, allowing cheating—at all levels—to go unchecked for years.’ They wrote that data had been ‘used as an abusive and cruel weapon to embarrass and punish.’ Several teachers had been told that they had a choice: either make targets or be placed on a Performance Development Plan, which was often a precursor to termination.”