Riley Cote’s journey to enlightenment began in earnest when a hulking man punched him in the face. Cote, now 40 and retired from professional hockey, remembers the moment with a dark laugh. He’d gotten into this particular bust-up one night during the 2009 season with one of the NHL’s most …
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Alicia Cardenas’s friends knew she had enemies, but they never thought she was in imminent danger. With her thick gray and black hair, piercings, and tattoos on nearly every inch of her body, Cardenas was both a physical force and an iron-willed artist who friends say wielded her words with …
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Two years ago today, I was in the midst of my eighth-straight week of Covid-19 misery, wondering what the hell was wrong with me, and why, instead of recovering, I continued to accumulate new symptoms. In addition to those that had been with me from the very beginning — shortness …
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It’s almost 4/20, which is more than enough reason to sit back, light up and celebrate. Thanks to more widespread marijuana usage and legalization in 18 states, the official pot-smoking holidayhas grown from a small event on society’s fringes to a nationally-recognized event. Though its originshave been (incorrectly) linked to …
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There’s nothing like a good true crime story, andKilling Time‘s teen protagonist Natalie Temple is possibly the genre’s biggest fan. When reporters from her quiet, simple town inform her that her teacher — and fellow true-crime aficionado — Mrs. Halsey was found dead, she takes it upon herself to uncover …
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In 2018, while reporting from the Flat Earth International Conference in Colorado, I met a man who’dtowed a rocket ship into a hotel conference room. He was Mike Hughes, an amateur rocket stuntman and vocal champion of Flat Earth theory. He hoped to launch himself into space to take a …
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When I was little, I used to make my Barbies participate in the Miss America pageant. I’d dress them up in evening gowns and parade them down the hall one-by-one, making them do the talent competition and the interviews. At the end, my mother, a diehard fan of the competition, …
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With lines for Covid-19 testing snaking down the sidewalks, and messages announcing closures posted on the shuttered doors and Instagram accounts of local businesses, New York City residents have been witnessing scenes this week that they hoped they’d never see again. That’s because Covid-19 has once again been making its …
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The following is an excerpt from Casey Michel’s book, “American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World’s Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History,” out November 23rd, 2021. When Teodoro “Teodorin” Nguema Obiang Mangue was growing up in the small central African country of Equatorial Guinea, he appeared to have it …
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In 2002, Dimitri M. was ready to die. He’d been addicted to heroin for over 20 years, and his once-promising artistic life had collapsed into a series of banal pit stops: from the methadone clinic, to the valet parking gig, to the coke dealer, to the dope dealer, to the …
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