Three days after last Christmas, a 25-year-old Los Angeles man named Tyler Barriss allegedly called police in Wichita, Kansas, and pretended that he’d murdered his father and was holding hostages in a house near the city’s downtown. Barriss thought the house belonged to an avid Call of Duty gamer he wanted to harass, but he […]
The typical Wichita City Council meeting is a dull affair, dominated by bureaucrats droning on about street repairs, zoning codes, and general obligation bonds. But even before the April 17, 2018, meeting was called to order, its atmosphere was electric. As the council’s wood-paneled chambers filled up that Tuesday morning, a dozen or so spectators […]
I understand that it’s easy to dismiss Tyler Barriss as a monster who should never be granted a platform to tell his own story. He took pleasure in terrorizing strangers with his hoaxes, and his alleged actions—calling authorities in Wichita, Kansas, and pretending that he was holding a family hostage—led to an innocent man being […]
Kevin and Julia Garratt had spent nearly all of their adult lives in China. A devout Christian couple in their fifties with an entrepreneurial streak, they operated a café called Peter’s Coffee House, a popular destination in the city of Dandong, according to TripAdvisor. Dandong is a sprawling border town that sits just across the […]
It was a perfect sunny summer afternoon in Copenhagen when the world’s largest shipping conglomerate began to lose its mind. The headquarters of A.P. Møller-Maersk sits beside the breezy, cobblestoned esplanade of Copenhagen’s harbor. A ship’s mast carrying the Danish flag is planted by the building’s northeastern corner, and six stories of blue-tinted windows look […]
On the Morning of April 11, Abu al-Nour was lounging at home in a small town in Syria’s Idlib Province. It was a pleasant day, and his seven children—ages 2 to 23—were playing outside or studying inside. The house was small, but al-Nour was proud of it. He had built it himself and enjoyed having […]
When we met in early March, Jonathan Albright was still shrugging off a sleepless weekend. It was a few weeks after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School had killed 17 people, most of them teenagers, and promptly turned the internet into a cesspool of finger pointing and conspiracy slinging. Within days, ultraconservative YouTube […]
When the history books are written, Rod Rosenstein might just be the most interesting figure of the Russia investigation—the beleaguered deputy attorney general whose memo in his first days on the job was used to justify the firing of James Comey. After that he quickly appointed Robert Mueller as the special counsel and spent the […]
Five years ago, 25-year-old radical libertarian Cody Wilson stood on a remote central Texas gun range and pulled the trigger on the world’s first fully 3-D-printed gun. When, to his relief, his plastic invention fired a .380-caliber bullet into a berm of dirt without jamming or exploding in his hands, he drove back to Austin […]
In the midafternoon of January 11, 2007, US Air Force major general William Shelton sat at the head of a table in a command center at California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base, holding a telephone to each ear. Shelton was the commander in charge of maintaining the US military’s “situational awareness” in space—and the situation, at […]