Based on thousands of pages of documents, a reporting team reveals how colleges and universities are using AI technology to surveil student protests: Documents from Kennesaw State show campus police tracked demonstrators’ online activity for days with Social Sentinel before a contentious 2017 town hall. Brandy White, a criminal intelligence analyst in KSU’s police department, […]
Seyward Darby
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Johnson & Johnson and a New War on Consumer Protection
The company has spent billions on cases about one of its most popular products. As its executives try a brazen new legal strategy to stop the litigation, corporate America takes note: Johnson & Johnson has always insisted, including to this magazine, that its baby powder is “safe, asbestos-free, and does not cause cancer”; however, a 2016 […]
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The Number Ones: Crazy Town’s “Butterfly”
A delicious deep dive into a rap-rock anthem by a one-hit wonder: “Butterfly” is the band’s only song that ever appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 in any capacity. But “Butterfly” also represents a kind of culmination. “Butterfly” is the only song that ever came out of the late-’90s rap-rock wave and topped the Hot 100. The biggest bands […]
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In Hasidic Enclaves, Failing Private Schools Are Flush With Public Money
New York’s Hasidic Jewish religious schools have benefited from government funding but are unaccountable to outside oversight. A months-long investigation reveals that these schools are “failing by design”: The leaders of New York’s Hasidic community have built scores of private schools to educate children in Jewish law, prayer and tradition — and to wall them […]
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What Chinatown Means to America — And to Me
In the wake of a nationwide surge of anti-Asian hate crimes, writer Bonnie Tsui reflects on the resiliency of Chinatowns: Chinatown is a place of contradiction. It serves as scapegoat and sanctuary. The first Chinatowns were ghettos for male Chinese laborers, who were forced to live among, and yet apart from, whites; Chinese women were […]
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The Match
A generation of Europeans is now returning to Sri Lanka, a country from which they were adopted as children, to search for their birth mothers. What they learn about their families, and themselves, has deep consequences: A shady network of hospital employees, court clerks, lawyers and social workers lubricated the baby pipeline to the West. […]
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Welcome to Cancerland
Esteemed journalist and activist Barbara Ehrenreich died Sept. 1, at the age of 81. A prolific author, Ehrenreich wrote seminal books and essays about economic inequality, feminism, and many other topics. But among her most celebrated works is a deeply personal one, which she wrote after being diagnosed with breast cancer: I could take my […]
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Can the American Mall Survive?
A writer meditates on loving and loathing some of the country’s most common public spaces — except are they really public? Were they ever? The mall is “ubiquitous and underexamined and potentially a little bit embarrassing,” the design critic Alexandra Lange notes in the introduction to her new book, Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside […]
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Dust and Bones
In 2021, the bodies of 225 migrants attempting to reach the U.S. were recovered from the Arizona desert. This year, 126 bodies have already been found. A third of these deaths are due to environmental exposures — like heat. For the first time, a team of researchers has measured how exactly climate change will exacerbate migrant deaths along the […]
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Rocky Mountain Massacre
Was Yellowstone’s deadliest wolf hunt in 100 years an inside job? Ryan Devereaux investigates: “I friggin’ watched that thing, and it’s not a wolf hunt,” Ralph told me. “It’s killing is what it is.” Much of that killing, Ralph said, was orchestrated by a crew of around 20 locals he recognized from Gardiner, Emigrant, and […]