The Emotional Toll of Witnessing 278 Death Row Executions
For more than a decade, Michelle Lyons’s job at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice required her to witness the state’s executions. “I started thinking about it all in very personal terms after I had a child, and that was my downfall.”
‘Jared Lorenzen and I Are in Love with the Same Woman’
Tommy Tomlinson meets Jared Lorenzen, a former New York Giants quarterback whose struggles with weight gain meant an early end to his NFL career.
The Moral Dilemmas of Narrative
Bill Marvel on journalism and the quest for empathy in telling other people’s stories.
A Brutal Dictator, and the Wall Street Hedge Fund That Gave Him $100 Million
How Robert Mugabe, the notorious president of Zimbabwe, raised money from Wall Street to violently crush his opposition.
The Spy Who Loved Me
Jacqui met Bob Lambert at an animal-rights protest in 1984, when she was twenty-two. Their son was born the next year. Two years after that, Bob disappeared from their lives, seemingly without a trace. In this piece for The New Yorker, Lauren Collins investigates who Bob Lambert really was: a British police officer part of a massive undercover operation, whose officers— known as “deep swimmers,”—spent years surveilling different radical groups.
SeaWorld’s Most Rewarding and Traumatic Job
Animal care workers, who tend to the health of mammals at SeaWorld and other marine parks, have unrivaled access to the animals—and the challenges of captivity. They are on the front lines of the debate over marine mammals in captivity, and their stories are fascinating and deeply troubling. Here, three former employees go on the record about their experiences.
Football in Ferguson
Despite the turmoil tearing apart their small Missouri town, the boys of the McCluer High School football team still have their first game of the season Friday. Sports Illustrated‘s Robert Klemko follows the team and their coach, as they try to make sense of the madness around them as well as their “city’s conflicted past, its tumultuous present and its uncertain future, and what it all means for the people of Ferguson.”
‘SNL”s Political Secrets: An Oral History
Impersonations, political cameos, and the skit that never made it to air: An excerpt from the newly expanded oral history by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales.
The Man Who Hid from the World for Nearly 30 Years
Michael Finkel tracks down the man known as the North Pond Hermit: Christopher Thomas Knight lived in a secret camp in the woods of Central Maine, stealing food and supplies from nearby homes. “I never felt lonely. To put it romantically: I was completely free.”
If Only They Had Treated Him Before
When Will Bruce killed his mother in 2006, he believed she was an al Qaeda agent. Bruce suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, and after seven years in a psychiatric hospital he is slowly reintegrating back into society with the help of his father. Together, they question why the American mental health system is unable or unwilling to help potentially violent patients before tragedy occurs, and advocate for change.
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