This article will not restore your faith in humanity. Nor will it amaze, stun, delight, shock, charm, or in any literal or figurative way, blow your mind.

The men pack the witch’s mouth with rags. The time for confessions has come and gone.

In the moments just before Kim Suozzi died of cancer at age 23, it fell to her boyfriend, Josh Schisler, to follow through with the plan to freeze her brain.

One of the most surreal experiences about spending time in a country that is at its core still a military dictatorship is sitting down to read the morning paper.

It’s 3:35 a.m. in the morning. I am standing in an open doorway, peering into a dark wood, wearing only a pair of thermal long johns. Snow is drifting onto my face from a moonlit sky. My heart is pounding. And I am holding an axe.

The first thing you need to know is that drowning is usually a quiet thing.

On September 10, 1976, during an evening flight from New York to Chicago, a bearded passenger handed a sealed envelope to an attendant. The note began: “One, this plane is hijacked.”

If you want to feel bad about your looks, spend some time in Seoul.

The kidnapper sounded polite, even deferential, when she called on a Tuesday afternoon last May.

Every morning, Kim Casipong strolls past barbed wire, six dogs, and a watchman in order to get to her job in a pink apartment building decorated with ornate stonework in Lapu-Lapu City.

I was still quite a small girl when I decided to kidnap Enzo Ponza.

“Three, two, one, applause!” The audience in the Beijing studio cheered as excitedly as anyone could be expected to cheer for an empty stage.

I never thought I’d work a job that was dictated by human shit. But things change. When you’re responsible for following men around and cleaning up after them it’s, at best, funny and humbling, and at worst, humiliating.

Listen up, newly discovered planet suitable for sustaining human life. We got plans for you. Big plans.

The fire in the tobacco barn was starting to rage, and inside was the most wanted man in America: John Wilkes Booth, the traitor who had shot President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre 12 days earlier.

Good goddamn, the way Julian told that story. It was the sort of story that imbued the mind with possibility. That lingered like campfire smoke in a sweater.

One of the skinniest, best-dressed drug dealers in Hidalgo County was throwing himself a birthday party, and I was drinking his beer.

Stephen Torres was meeting with a client at his law office, in downtown Albuquerque, on April 12, 2011, when he received a call from a neighbor, who told him that police officers were aiming rifles at his house. He left work and drove to his home, in a middle-class suburb with a view of the mountains. There were more than forty police vehicles on his street.

You heard me right: Come in. No, you won’t disturb a soul in this locker room. They’re all lost in that place most folks go maybe once or twice in a lifetime, when their mamas or daddies die or their children are born, a place they don’t go nearly as often as they should. Trust me, these boys will never know you’re here.

It’s funny what being held at gunpoint will do to you. And being held at gunpoint by a megalomaniacal rock star? Well, that doesn’t feel very good at all.

The two fingers were found along the main road that borders the Camilo Torres barrio, in the Valley of Cauca, port of Buenaventura, in southwest Colombia. At least, that’s what the girl told the police.

“So how was it? How was…the moon?” You have no further questions. Because he went to the moon. And now he’s sitting here, at your table in a dark and crowded D.C. restaurant.

Since the beginning of time, bullshit, flowery overgeneralization with at least one thesaurus’d vocabulary word. In addition, irrelevant and misleading personal anecdote.

I am afraid of the cops. Absolutely petrified of the cops. Now understand, I’ve never been arrested or held for questioning. I’ve never been told that I “fit the description.” But that doesn’t change a thing. I am afraid of cops the way that spiders are afraid of boots.

Hey, bitches! Today I acquiesce to the peer pressure of my educated, professional, affluent female friends and start ending every sentence with “bitches,” bitches.