A group of journalists clustered along a table at a lovely restaurant in Bergen, Norway, late last month, chattering about our work and how good it was to be back in the wrap of the narrative tribe after our … Read more
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one of two posts about a complex tale of crime, assumptions and mental health published by The Atavist. Today we talk with writer Katia Savchuk about how she found and reported the story. Tomorrow, Atavist editor … Read more
When I began reading Evan Allen’s powerful, critically acclaimed Boston Globe story about Anthony Pledger, all I could think about was Jimmie. Jimmie is a violent offender — a sanitized way of saying he is a murderer and a … Read more
A line from a 1993 story about gun violence in America has stayed with me all these years. It was by DeNeen Brown of The Washington Post, called “Getting Ready to Die Young,” and featured … Read more
In the winter of 2012, a pair of lovers set dozens of fires over a span of 20 weeks in remote Accomack County, Virginia—once the richest rural county in America, and now one of the poorest. As one or two … Read more
The crime was brutal – two guards shot to death with their own .40-caliber Glocks inside a Georgia Department of Corrections bus packed with prisoners. The setting was primal – a lonely stretch of state highway in rural Putnam County … Read more
I’ve been thinking about Mike Sager’s story, “The Devil and John Holmes,” for a long time. I first read his chronicle of the famous porn star and the Wonderland murders when it came out in 1989; I was 10 … Read more
