By Reason of Insanity
The high-profile murder trial that led to America’s first successful insanity plea: It involved a congressman who shot a man he believed was having an affair with his wife.
The Real Lolita
Did the 1948 abduction of eleven-year-old Sally Horne change the course of twentieth-century literature?
MetaFilter: The Internet’s First Family
Stephen Thomas on how and why a site originally intended for sharing “best of the web” links become a place where strangers help each other in real life in extraordinary ways.
An Investigation Into the Reappearance of Walter Benjamin
The influential German literary critic, who died in 1940 at the age of 48, makes a reappearance in the form of a person who has replicated his identity.
Prey
“This is how I went from prey to predator.” A young woman testifies against her rapist and becomes obsessed with dangerous animals in the aftermath.
My Boss Has Body Odour and I Have Sex with My Twin
Four advice columnists, Dear Sugar’s Cheryl Strayed, Salon’s Cary Tennis, Slate’s Emily Yoffe, and The Globe and Mail’s Lynn Coady, discuss what it’s like to give advice to people online:
“Are there common threads or themes that you see over and over in the questions you get? Questions that seem to be real problems in a lot of people’s lives that they keep writing in about in variations?
“Cheryl: Yes, a ton. There are a lot of people with broken hearts. And they’ll never get over so and so leaving them.
“Emily: Yeah, I never run those because the answer is the same and it’s very boring. It’s just, ‘Move forward.’ The guy I thought I’d kill myself over when I was 27 I can’t remember the name of now. There are some big general categories. One is cubicle land. The horrors of the farters, the breathers, the hummers, the eaters. I can only do a limited number of ‘My husband looks at porn.'”