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.

Source: Hazlitt
Published: May 22, 2015
Length: 7 minutes (1,850 words)

The Real Lolita

Did the 1948 abduction of eleven-year-old Sally Horne change the course of twentieth-century literature?

Source: Hazlitt
Published: Nov 20, 2014
Length: 35 minutes (8,846 words)

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.

Source: Hazlitt
Published: Oct 31, 2014
Length: 24 minutes (6,233 words)

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.

Source: Hazlitt
Published: Sep 11, 2014
Length: 20 minutes (5,015 words)

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.

Source: Hazlitt
Published: Jun 26, 2014
Length: 24 minutes (6,014 words)

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.'”

Source: Hazlitt
Published: Aug 23, 2012
Length: 13 minutes (3,260 words)