On an overcast day in early May, I traveled to suburban Philadelphia to visit the family of Sunil Tripathi, the deceased 22-year-old Brown University student who, for about four hours on the morning of April 19, was mistakenly identified as Suspect No. 2 in the Boston Marathon bombings. The Tripathis had just arrived home after nearly two months spent in Providence, R.I., where they went to organize the search for Sunil, who disappeared on March 16. When I entered the house, Judy Tripathi, Sunil’s mother, asked me for a hug. In a shattered voice, she said, “I need hugs these days.” We sat at the kitchen table and talked, and at one point Judy handed me a photo of a young, smiling Sunil, caught in the motion of throwing a ball. “Look how happy he looks,” she said. For the next two hours, she and her husband, Akhil, and their daughter, Sangeeta, described what happened to them in the early-morning hours of April 19, and how the false identification of their son derailed their ongoing search for him and further traumatized their lives...

If you’ve been following 40 Towns, the new literary journalism magazine produced by Jeff Sharlet’s creative nonfiction students at Dartmouth, you’ve seen longform stories about ex-cons, a roadside motel, a bead shop, a diner, a homeless woman named Tecumseh, and more — stories that get inside the lives of people of the Upper Valley. Sharlet’s students fanned out to dozens of towns and communities, looking for the kind of immersion-reporting opportunities that would produce “literary journalism from the fault line between Vermont and New Hampshire,” as the magazine’s Twitter bio puts it. Sharlet, a contributing editor at Harper’s and Rolling Stone, and the best-selling author of The Family and other books, wanted his students writing with a goal: to be read...

The cell phone alert was designed to wake anyone from a deep sleep. “MORTALITY EVENT DETECTED,” the text message read, accompanied by a cacophony of drums and bells blaring from the phone’s speaker at top volume. It was near midnight on May 22nd, but David Pauly wasn’t asleep; he knew this call was coming. Already he had received five alarms like it over the past month, announcing that a female moose wearing a GPS tracking collar and ear tag #075 hadn’t moved for at least six hours.Usually, that’s enough to indicate that a moose is dead. But #075 was a survivor...

When I got the email invite to Tuesday’s top-secret global summit at the world headquarters of Nike Corp., I gotta admit, a little part of me felt like I’d just opened a Wonka Bar and found a golden ticket inside.

Not necessarily because I thought a trip to the bowels of the Swoosh would be anywhere near as cool as visiting the Chocolate Factory and sucking on gobstoppers that last forever, but because I live in nearby Eugene, aka “Track Town USA,” where the sinewy and mustachioed Steve Prefontaine became a folk hero; where he and legendary University of Oregon coach Bill Bowerman and alum Phil Knight basically turned the grunting and panting once known as “jogging” into the sleek, stylish, international obsession with “running” it is today. In Eugene, wearing Nikes passes for business attire. “Pre’s rock,” where the track star died in a car crash, is a sacred shrine. The Nike store in Eugene is a tourist attraction. If you don’t run here, there’s something wrong with you...

When, a couple of weeks ago, the interest rate on subsidized Stafford loans (the loans that the federal government offers to college students) doubled, going from 3.4 per cent to 6.8 per cent, the expectation was that Congress would reach a quick deal to reverse—or at least reduce—the increase. After all, making college more affordable is one of the rare issues on which the differences between Democrats and Republicans seem bridgeable. Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle promised an immediate fix, and last week it appeared that a deal was about to be reached. Then Washington’s obsession with deficits got in the way. And that same obsession explains why, even if Congress does finally agree to a deal, college students are guaranteed to be paying more for loans, come the fall...

The formula didn’t come from a mad scientist. Instead it came from a screenplay guidebook...

By this point, all Americans know the facts. A teenager, Trayvon Martin, was pursued and killed.

The shooter, George Zimmerman, was acquitted, his claim of self-defense validated by a jury. We have lined up to state our views about what should happen next: vocal protesters and advocates (I count myself among them) think that the system failed at critical points and should be corrected, from the “stand your ground” law that empowered Zimmerman to the investigation and prosecution of the case itself. Others are assembling to protect gun rights and the right to self-defense.

In service of these goals, we will march. We will tweet. The Justice Department will investigate, talk radio will opine, and some laws and policies will hopefully, needfully, be changed.

But when it is all over—when the political debates have run their course, when the pundits have moved on—we will still be left with something else. Something harder to describe. A set of noxious gut feelings about Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman—and where we all stand on the issue of race...

SWAT teams raiding poker games and trying to stop underage drinking? Overwhelming paramilitary force is on the rise.

Sal Culosi is dead because he bet on a football game — but it wasn’t a bookie or a loan shark who killed him. His local government killed him, ostensibly to protect him from his gambling habit.

Several months earlier at a local bar, Fairfax County, Virginia, detective David Baucum overheard the thirty-eight-year-old optometrist and some friends wagering on a college football game. “To Sal, betting a few bills on the Redskins was a stress reliever, done among friends,” a friend of Culosi’s told me shortly after his death. “None of us single, successful professionals ever thought that betting fifty bucks or so on the Virginia–Virginia Tech football game was a crime worthy of investigation.” Baucum apparently did...

Not quite an apology, the open letter from a senior jihadist quotes Kissinger and British philosopher Bertrand Russell. Read the bizarre letter here...

On Thursday night in Clifton, N.J., Barnes & Noble was a way station, a third place between work and home where people sought respite and diversion. With its high ceilings, wide aisles and a large Starbucks, it is the kind of retail outlet that gives big-box stores a good name...