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How filmmaker David Ayer’s early years in South Central Los Angeles has given him a distinct understanding of the LAPD: “‘I was feral,’ he recalls, ‘uncontrollable, did my own thing. Brushes with the law and all that stuff.’ He punctuates this with a gruff laugh. ‘It was a disaster.’ Most everyone who knew Ayer was […]

Adapted from Witchel’s forthcoming memoir All Gone. A daughter adjusts after her mother develops stroke-related dementia: “Mom faced me. ‘I want you to kill me,’ she said solemnly. For decades, she insisted that if she was mentally compromised in any way, her children were to pull the plug. But the situations we’d imagined never included […]

[Not singe-page] The rap superstar discusses his career and how he’s remained relevant: “In the years since his masterpiece ‘Reasonable Doubt,’ the rapper has often been accused of running on empty, too distant now from what once made him real. In ‘Decoded,’ he answers existentially: ‘How distant is the story of your own life ever […]

A look at Degrassi, 25 years after resonating with teens: “Degrassi ’s grassroots approach to social class served as a near-invisible narrative strategy, but it anticipated the show’s most memorable legacy: its unflinching, plain-spoken treatment of pregnancy, suicide, interracial dating (a big deal in 1987), and HIV/AIDS. What’s more, Degrassi didn’t treat its characters with […]

How a collective of women in ski masks captured the attention of the world—and now face possible prison time for their stand against Putin: “At 9 p.m. on Thursday night, I’m at a rally of a couple of thousand anti-government protesters, hearing Pussy Riot’s name being chanted in the crowd, and I think I have […]

The life of the great English novelist, as documented in a biography by Claire Tomalin: “The great drama—which is to say, the abiding trauma—of Dickens’s childhood was his year-long stint in a rat-infested blacking factory near the Thames, when he was twelve years old, following the arrest of John Dickens for debt in 1824 and […]

Greg Ousley murdered his parents when he was 14, and is now serving a 60-year sentence. A look at the debate over how we should punish minors for committing violent crimes: “Today there are well more than 2,500 juveniles serving time in adult prisons in the United States — enough, in Indiana’s case, to fill […]

How Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, led by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, became a global, multibillion-dollar drug trafficking business: “Known as El Chapo for his short, stocky frame, Guzmán is 55, which in narco-years is about 150. He is a quasi-mythical figure in Mexico, the subject of countless ballads, who has outlived enemies and accomplices alike, defying […]

An account of how hundreds of Taliban prisoners escaped from Kandahar’s Sarposa prison in Afghanistan through a tunnel in 2011: “At 5 a.m., hours after Rahim and his cohorts passed directly beneath his office, the warden of Sarposa Prison, General Dastagir Mayar, was awakened. One of his guards stood in the doorway. The entire political […]

With Qaddafi’s former guards now in prison, one man leads the interrogation of his brother’s killer: “Nasser called Marwan’s father and invited him to come see his son. For the last six months, the family stayed away out of fear that the thuwar would take revenge on them all. On the following Friday, eight of […]