In 2020, author and journalist Wright Thompson traveled to Drew, Miss., for a private tour of a barn with a bloody and tragic history that many in the Mississippi Delta would like to forget. The barn is where, on Aug. 28, 1955, a 14-year-old Black boy named Emmett Till was brutally beaten and killed by … Read more
After four years prosecuting sexual assault cases in Orange County CA, deputy district attorney Matt Murphy was called into the office of his supervisor, Lew Rosenblum. He had good news – a promotion. “Welcome to Homicide,” said Rosenblum. “If you think that was crazy, just you wait.” The book includes the murder of John Meehan, the … Read more
Faced with the dilemma of devoting their lives to their religion or firebombing the homes of rivals, Mormon gangbangers decided they could do both. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, youngsters in Salt Lake City engaged in vicious beatdowns, stabbings, and drive-by shootings over drug-trade turf and in solidarity with members of their crews. Some … Read more
A woman’s hair is more than something that merely covers her head. Little girls learn this early. At least I did. I watched my mother color her gray roots over the bathroom sink, pomade her short crop, hide her frizz under a hat. I suffered as she combed out my knotted tresses and sat still as she … Read more
In December of 2002, Sharyl Attkisson, an Emmy-winning investigative reporter for CBS News, had an unsettling interview with smallpox expert Jonathan Tucker. In a post-9/11 world, with fears of terrorists using a long-eradicated disease like smallpox as a bioweapon, the US was preparing to bring back the smallpox inoculation program. But to Tucker, the very idea was … Read more
“The stadium,” writes Frank Andre Guridy in ‘The Stadium – An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play’ (Basic Books), “has never been a merely a sports facility.” From the first wooden ballparks, through the huge concrete edifices of the 1950s and 1960s and on to today’s vast, state-of-the-art arenas, Guridy reveals just what the stadia means to American life — … Read more
When Vladimir Putin’s Russian army invaded neighboring Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Chad Robichaux knew he had to help. The former Force Recon Marine gathered a team of elite special operations veterans, as well as his 25-year-old Marine son, Hunter, and headed to Europe to help those about to be subjected to “untold brutality,” as … Read more
In September 2008, members of a Wayward, Fla., chapter of the Ku Klux Klan concocted an elaborate scheme to kill Barack Obama days before he was elected president. They planned every detail, identifying the day, time, and location of the hit; obsessing over the senator’s motorcade alignments; securing .50-caliber rifles for the deed; and arranging … Read more
American designers are some of the biggest names in fashion today: Marc Jacobs and Michael Kors, Tory Burch and The Row’s Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. Ralph Lauren made Americana romantic, Thom Browne made shrunken suits masculine, and Halston and Calvin Klein — at different points in their careers — made minimalism chic. But that wasn’t always … Read more
Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van de Grift should never have been together, but as Camille Peri writes in “A Wilder Shore: The Romantic Odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson” (Viking), their “unlikely Victorian love story” somehow worked. The contrast in their backgrounds was marked. Stevenson was from a wealthy Scottish family and had recently passed the bar to … Read more
Thelma Ryan was only 13, a freshman at Excelsior Union High School in Artesia, Calif., when her mother Kate, a German immigrant and Christian Scientist from South Dakota, died from liver cancer at 45. Outside Rose Hills Memorial Park, in Whittier, where the funeral was held in January 1926, Thelma’s friends stood waiting. “We were … Read more
A brutal decades old murder-by-hit man of a prominent young married black socialite in the South — a killing shockingly contracted by her craven white millionaire husband — is given the full forensic treatment in journalist Deb Miller Landau’s “A Devil Went Down to Georgia: Race, Power, Privilege, and the Murder of Lita McClinton.” Just … Read more
This year marks the 200th anniversary of one of the weirdest and most reality-shifting moments in science. On Feb. 20, 1824, at the annual meeting of the Geological Society in London, the world was introduced to the very first dinosaur: the megalosaurus. Life-size prehistoric dinosaurs at Britain’s Crystal Palace Park. Heritage Images/Getty Images Before a … Read more
In ‘Rinsed: From Cartels to Crypto: How the Tech Industry Washes Money for the World’s Deadliest Crooks’ (Penguin Business), Geoff White asks: what would you do with sudden wealth if it came from a source you couldn’t admit to. “You’re faced with an excruciating dilemma,” he writes. “How do you enjoy your huge amounts of … Read more
In Gill Paul’s latest book, “Scandalous Women,” a historical novel about phenomenally bestselling authors Jacqueline Susann and Jackie Collins — both famous for their sex-driven fiction, and their battles for recognition and critical acceptance in the male-dominated publishing world of the 1960s — there’s a shocking scene that could be right out of the #MeToo … Read more
When a fundraising email from the California Department of Education arrived in reporter Thomas Fuller’s inbox in November 2021, informing him of the unbeaten season that a local school football team were having, he thought little of it — until he realized it was the Cubs, the team from the California School for the Deaf (CSDR) … Read more
Trad wives are all the rage on social media, but Tia Levings reveals the dark underbelly to being a wife in a deeply conservative Christian marriage in “A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy (Macmillan, Aug. 6).” Levings was raised in a Southern Baptist church that railed against homosexuality and abortion while encouraging women … Read more
The early summer of 1982 was a very spacey time on America’s movie screens. Six major studios released a whopping eight science fiction and fantasy films between May 16 and July 9, with hundreds of millions of dollars riding on the line — from “E.T.” to “The Thing,” from “career-grounding flops to career-making triumphs,” writes … Read more