D Magazine

On June 15, 2013, an inebriated 16-year-old named Ethan Crouch slammed into four people with his truck, killing them instantly. During his sentencing hearing a psychologist infamously blamed his bad behavior on “affluenza,” a portmanteau describing the psychological problems that can affect children who come from money. Mooney takes us behind the story.

Chefs in Dallas are unhappy with Leslie Brenner, the restaurant critic for The Dallas Morning News, and her newspaper’s star rating system. So they’ve stop cooperating with her.

Frank Howard hired a hit man—and then his extended family and their friends—to kill his wife. The criminals repeatedly told the police about their harebrained plans, who didn’t believe them. And then everything unraveled.

Amanda Barbour endured 10 years of conversion therapy. But she finally got her dream wedding.

“Nichols steeled herself for the work that lay ahead, reminding herself, as she had so many times before, You wanted this job.” A profile of Sergeant Brenda Nichols, a former head of the Dallas Police Department’s Child Abuse Squad. The story goes deep on one of the hundreds of child abuse cases Nichols has investigated.

A profile of Matt Rutledge, the founder of deals site Woot, which sold to Amazon in 2010. Rutledge is starting a new deals site called “Meh.”

On saving souls in the suburbs:

Ruth morphs into another person altogether when Larry commands these spirits to manifest. Either she is an Academy Award-winning horror-film actress, with Ferrari-smooth shifts of body and voice, or she is encountering something in a subconscious realm. At one point, she speaks the name of a demon in a distinctly foreign voice: “Ba-al.” Later, in casual conversation, the pronunciation comes out differently: “Bail,” with a bit of a twang—the name of a Canaanite god mentioned numerous times in the Bible.

She describes the experience as sitting in a passenger seat, watching things unfold beside her as though another part of her brain controls them. “It becomes our little scavenger hunt,” Ruth says cheerily. “What’s the crazy little person inside me going to say next?”

A stunning rise in tremors connected to fracking:

All along, the Railroad Commission, the state’s oil and gas regulator, maintained it had “not identified a significant correlation between faulting and injection practices.” But when the shaking didn’t stop, it tweaked its stock statement in December to say that the correlation was not “definitive.” Yet it remained at odds with everything else McKee had heard, not just from folks at church, but from the USGS.

Finally, she read in the Azle News that Railroad Commissioner David Porter would host a town hall meeting in the Azle High School auditorium on January 2. McKee resolved to go, determined to win back her quiet country life.

The story of Caleb and Colten Moore—two talented brothers who competed in the X Games doing tricks on snowmobiles. After Caleb died in a competition, Colten had to learn to move on without his older brother, whom he looked up to all his life:

Wade was not enthusiastic about their desire to ride freestyle. They’d already spent so much time and money on racing and some of those stunts seemed so crazy. But soon Caleb had an agent who wanted to pay him to perform in arenas all over the world. The shows were full of pyrotechnics and heavy metal and, on occasion, monster trucks. And at every opportunity, Caleb would tell his agent about his little brother and all the fantastic tricks he could do. When he finally convinced someone to give Colten a shot, he then had to convince Colten that he could do it. Colten actually crashed in his first show, but Caleb was relentless with both his little brother and the promoters, and Colten eventually got another shot. Every time her sons left home, Michele would remind them to take care of each other.

Inside couples counseling with Harville Hendrix and Helen Hunt:

Harville and Helen take turns talking and clicking through a PowerPoint that includes slides in both English and Spanish. Helen explains that half the people here tonight are the “draggers,” the other half are the “draggees,” and that it will actually be that second group that’s more excited by the end of the workshop. “See,” she says. “Your partner already decided that you’re the problem.”

Harville goes over what couples generally want from a relationship, which he boils down to: safety, a connected feeling, and joy. Helen explains that even if we forget everything else, they hope we remember three things. One idea: that childhood influences marriages. One skill: the ability to have safe conversations. One decision: a commitment to zero negativity.

We both bristle a bit at that last one.