Elizabeth Bruenig

For the first time in her career, Cynthia Short let a folder of crime-scene photographs lie untouched on the corner of her desk, because she couldn’t bring herself to look at them. Short had been a criminal-defense attorney in Kansas City, Missouri, for 12 years, and on the payroll of the Missouri State Public Defender’s Office for the past decade. She had spent much of that time immersed in graphic records of the worst human conduct. Even so, the case of Richard DeLong had shocked her.

Before the mid-19th century, executions in America were presumptively public. Most prisoners were hanged on a gallows, following an hours-long affair that began with the condemned person’s exit from jail accompanied by ministers, the sheriff and his deputies, and sometimes a military escort. Spectators joined the humiliating procession, gathering by the thousands to watch the noose lowered over the prisoner’s neck.

At about 6 p.m. last night, the Supreme Court lifted a temporary stay placed on the execution of Christa Pike, a Tennessee woman who was found guilty of joining two accomplices in murdering a classmate in 1995, when Pike was 18 years old. Roughly an hour and a half later, Pike, who has spent 30 years on death row, was strapped to a gurney in Tennessee’s death chamber for lethal injection.

This past June, a Virginia mother named Karyann Parkinson took a bike ride with her 5-year-old son and stopped by a pond inside their gated community to collect goose feathers from the grass. The two of them rode back home, whereupon Parkinson’s son asked his mother if he could walk back to the pond by himself to fetch a few more feathers. Parkinson, who was eight months pregnant with her fifth child, studying for the bar exam, and—perhaps most pressing—making lunch, agreed.

During the five weeks of her murder trial, Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother accused of murdering her three young children in 2023, spoke barely a word. She has been on display for the entirety of her livestreamed trial, sitting in her wheelchair beside her lawyer at the defense table.

Summer always overstays its welcome by about a month. After the Fourth of July, which has its charms, nothing but a stretch of relentless heat lies ahead, reaching toward Labor Day, and I begin to yearn for fall. So does the grand, semi-malevolent intelligence that organizes American consumption: By mid-August, grocery stores are stocking their shelves with autumnal goods—pumpkin-pie Pop-Tarts, cinnamon-maple Frosted Flakes, pumpkin-spice cinnamon rolls in pressurized cardboard tubes.

Used needles clinked into the plastic medical-waste bin in the death chamber at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. Tony Carruthers was strapped to a gurney for his scheduled execution on May 21, but as his attorney Maria DeLiberato watched the medical team repeatedly try and fail to access her client’s veins, she knew something was going terribly wrong. The medics whispered and gestured to one another. One asked for bigger needles, then smaller ones.

On the morning of October 3, 2012, a trio of unarmed 16- and 17-year-old boys in Elkhart, Indiana, banded together to commit a burglary in their neighborhood. To avoid a confrontation, they planned to hit a vacant home. After some dogs scared them off their first target, the teens called two more friends, who were 18 and 21, to help them break into another neighbor’s house, which seemed empty.

People can change. I have seen it, and I have lived it. Just when change happens can generally be grasped only in retrospect. In the case of Senate hopeful Graham Platner of Maine, many Democrats are understandably eager to see evidence that he is no longer the man implicated by the drumbeat of damning revelations.

Updated at 11:25 a.m. ET on April 24, 2026
While some might pray for hope or peace in such dark times, others are praying for the death of Texas Democrat James Talarico, who is running for the U.S. Senate. During a recent episode of the right-wing Protestant podcast Reformation Red Pill, host Joshua Haymes told the pastor Brooks Potteiger that he prays that “God kills” Talarico, given that the politician seems to be possessed by demons.

Donald Trump’s recent outbursts at the pope—“WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” he said in one of his Truth Social posts—have renewed questions from observers about the president’s cognitive fitness and his apparently limitless capacity for blasphemy. His attacks also echoed old-fashioned fears about the Vatican as an insidious rival to American power.

The four-star Hotel deLuxe in Portland, Oregon, features a soaring lobby with a gilded ceiling that drips with chandeliers. Eileen Mihich, a 31-year-old woman from nearby Beaverton, checked in on the afternoon of March 6, 2025. Two days later, a hotel employee named Stephen Jones noticed that Mihich had failed to check out at the appointed time and went to her eighth-floor room to investigate. No one answered, and the room was silent behind the door, so he let himself in.

In a court document filed earlier this month, the Internal Revenue Service quietly revealed a significant break with long-standing practice: Churches will no longer risk their nonprofit status if clergy endorse political candidates from the pulpit. The change stemmed from a lawsuit brought against the agency by evangelical groups that argued that the prior ban on church involvement in political campaigns infringed upon their First Amendment rights.

Five years ago, Elon Musk told Joe Rogan during a podcast taping that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit.” By that time, the idea that people in the West are too concerned with the pain of others to adequately advocate for their own best interests was already a well-established conservative idea.

The case of Adriana Smith, a 30-year-old Georgia nurse who has been brain-dead since early February, became the center of a skirmish between the country’s pro-choice and pro-life factions last month after an Atlanta news station’s interview with Smith’s mother, April Newkirk, was picked up by national media. Smith, Newkirk told a local news station, is being kept alive via life support without her family’s prior consent so that her unborn child can continue to gestate until delivery.

In his final Easter address, Pope Francis touched on one of the major themes of his 12-year papacy, that love, hope, and peace are possible amid a rising tide of violence and extremism: “What a great thirst for death, for killing, we witness each day in the many conflicts raging in different parts of our world!” Archbishop Diego Ravelli read the prepared text aloud to crowds gathered in St.

Elon Musk has allegedly fathered his 13th child with a fourth woman, the conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair. Judging by St. Clair’s public remarks on Musk’s platform, X, theirs was not necessarily a love connection: In asking that Musk acknowledge his paternity, St. Clair did not issue an emotional appeal but rather, through her spokesperson, a request that Musk “finish” an unspecified “agreement” with her.

This morning, the White House announced that President Joe Biden has commuted the sentences of 37 men on federal death row to life without parole. The historic move came shortly after a batch of pardons and commutations for hundreds of people convicted of nonviolent crimes, as well as Biden’s pardon of his own son.

Hunter Biden has lived a troubled life, and faced years in prison—until Sunday, when his father rescued him, issuing a full executive pardon clearing him of all charges. Show me a parent who wouldn’t have done the same. If saving Hunter was politically improper or reputationally risky, it was also done in accordance with the higher and fiercer laws of familial love.

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In the decade since Donald Trump began to define American politics, critics have struggled to understand his massive appeal. They have perhaps sensed by now that Trump’s support comes from someplace underneath conscious and rational political analyses.

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When I think of death, I think of love. I am convinced that I’m not alone in this. The dying seem driven to meditate on love, and love suffuses the scene of an ideal death: lying in bed surrounded by family, reassured by the promise of enduring affection.

There’s something sermonic about the speeches of Shawn Fain, the president of the currently striking United Auto Workers. Since autoworkers began targeted work stoppages following the expiration of their contract on September 15, Fain has regularly addressed the public—and his message has a uniquely moral cast.“I’ve been without,” he told me last month.

Last year, the state of Alabama made history by botching three consecutive executions in its death chamber. Two of the condemned men survived their own executions: Alan Miller and Kenneth Smith. Both were pierced repeatedly with needles in an attempt to set IV lines until the midnight expiry of their death warrants forced their executioners to halt further attempts to kill them.

At Holman Correctional Facility, in Atmore, Alabama, the prisoners have a tradition of beating their doors when guards take a man from the holding area colloquially known as the “death cell” to the execution chamber to be killed. More than 150 men slam their full strength against solid steel, rolling thunder down the halls.

Immediately after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs came down, anti-abortion groups began distributing press releases celebrating their victory and vowing to get around to something the movement has politically neglected for the past several decades: helping mothers afford children. For so many millions already distraught by the ruling, the ready promises of help on the way came not so much as a comfort but as an insult.

Immediately after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs came down, anti-abortion groups began distributing press releases celebrating their victory and vowing to get around to something the movement has politically neglected for the past several decades: helping mothers afford children. For so many millions already distraught by the ruling, the ready promises of help on the way came not so much as a comfort but as an insult.

You develop certain psychological reflexes to get you through the initial shock of the first push alert: Some number dead, others wounded in a mass shooting someplace in America. At this point we all know that the earliest reports are typically flawed, so you can suspend belief a degree or two, just for the time being. It’s summer; school’s out, which means they—the murdered, whoever they were—likely weren’t children, which means you can exhale a little, uneasily.

Photographs by Andres GonzalezIn the halls of schools where students have learned about the archaeological remains of failed civilizations, they have unwittingly shed the wreckage of their own. The visual artist and author Andres Gonzalez spent six years dutifully photographing the debris of a society in a specific form of decline: the letters, cards, notes, mementos, keepsakes, toys, talismans, objects, and ephemera that accumulate following a school shooting.

Society cannot demand courageous self-sacrifice; we can only ask for it. Most of us know we ourselves would be too frightened to face an armed gunman in a direct confrontation, and we accordingly choose to seek work that doesn’t put us in such positions—or shouldn’t. But perhaps even some of those who do volunteer for danger now lack the fortitude, the relevant virtues of courage, honor, and selflessness, to take up the task.

We were told today, in the latest version of events offered by authorities in Texas, that police left children locked in a classroom with a gunman for 78 minutes as they repeatedly called 911 begging for help, not knowing that their would-be rescuers were standing idly by.