Paige Williams

Moms for Liberty claims that teachers are indoctrinating students with dangerous ideologies. But is the group’s aim protecting kids—or scaring parents?

William Sean O’Toole, the longtime commander of the Bronx Homicide Squad, gets a bagpipe sendoff and recounts running into mayors at murder scenes.

In Southeast Oklahoma, a father-son reporting duo’s series on the county sheriff led to an explosive revelation.

A lightly occupied fair cabin sleeps twenty-six; some sleep sixty. Upper floors resemble bunkhouses: bed after bed after bed. The fair is not the place for introverts, neat freaks, sensitives, or anyone who cannot tolerate unrelenting, bone-deep heat. Central air-conditioning is heresy, as is television. Did the fair’s founders watch “American Ninja Warrior”? They did not. Indoor plumbing and electricity are acceptable—fans and window units blow wide open. This year, during the hottest month in…

Banyai is a fifty-year-old former landscaper from Poughkeepsie. Ten years ago, he bought thirty undeveloped acres on Briar Hill Road, an unpaved thoroughfare in West Pawlet, a few miles from where the historic center—Town Hall, the library, Mach’s Market, Lake’s Lampshades—knuckles onto a bend in the Mettawee River. The property borders a quarry, and Banyai named it Slate Ridge. His patch of woodland was tucked out of sight, at the end of a long, gravel driveway. Banyai liked the “clandestine” l…

A booster is a professional thief who typically sells to a fence—someone who resells stolen materials. A fence may buy a hundred-dollar drill from a booster for thirty bucks, to resell it for sixty. Or he may pay in drugs. In sworn testimony before a House committee on homeland security, Scott Glenn, Home Depot’s vice-president of asset protection, recently accused criminal organizations of recruiting vulnerable people into retail-theft schemes by preying on their need for “fast cash” or fentany…

On a recent Friday, Hansen-Miller helped a new immigrant from Afghanistan with some paperwork, then greeted her next visitor, Robert Blood, a skinny, soft-spoken former cook with eyeglasses and a goatee. He had on a puffy jacket and wore a baseball cap over his shoulder-length hair. Blood had been mostly unhoused for about seven years when, last summer, Hansen-Miller helped him land a studio apartment on the tenth floor of a public-housing building downtown, for sixty-one dollars a month. He mov…

Inside the Slimy, Smelly, Secretive World of Glass-Eel Fishing

A road trip through America’s annual celebration of other people’s stuff.

As resistance to integration mounted, Florence Mars bought a camera and began to photograph thousands of subjects, including the trial of the killers of Emmett Till.