A man was stabbed at Burning Man. By morning the crime scene had driven home.

01 • 17 Minute Read

SFGate

Kevin Kunze and Sam Anderson

New details uncovered in last year's shocking Burning Man homicide

Vadim Kruglov, a 37-year-old Russian immigrant attending his first Burning Man, was found stabbed in the neck in a tent on the outskirts of Black Rock City on August 30, 2025, the first homicide in the event's history. The timing made it close to unsolvable. Nearly all of the 70,000 attendees were watching the effigy burn in the center of the playa, and within hours the entire temporary city packed up and drove out through the gates, killer included, taking the crime scene with it. Sam Anderson and Kevin Kunze interviewed more than 80 people to reconstruct Kruglov's nine days there. He improvised a popular art piece after a shipment fell through, had a brief romance, and also spent stretches convinced someone was after him, refusing tea he thought was poisoned and begging friends to track him with AirTags. He spent most of his last day in the event's field hospital and was killed under four hours after leaving it.

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02 • 15 Minute Read

ProPublica

Richard A. Webster and Kathleen Flynn

He Spent 27 Years on Death Row as a Wrongfully Convicted Man. What Comes Next?

Jimmie Duncan spent 27 years on death row at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, a former slave plantation that is now the largest maximum security prison in the country, convicted of drowning his girlfriend's 23-month-old daughter. The case rested on bite marks that a dentist appears to have pressed into the child's body himself, using a mold of Duncan's teeth. A video showing him do it sat unused for two decades. The Louisiana Supreme Court threw out the conviction in June, with the chief justice comparing the prosecution to witch trials. ProPublica interviewed Duncan about what those years cost him: solitary 23 hours a day for almost 20 years, cell heat that hit 115 degrees, a mother who drank herself to death and a brother who overdosed, neither funeral he was allowed to attend. The district attorney has until June to decide whether to try him again, and until that clock runs out Duncan cannot claim a dollar of the state's compensation for the wrongly convicted.

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03 • 14 Minute Read

The New York Times

Jodi Kantor

How the Supreme Court Locks Away Its Own History

The Supreme Court is the only branch of government with no law telling it what to preserve or when to release it. Each justice owns their own papers and can shred them, seal them, or open them at will. After Scalia died in 2016 without leaving instructions, John Roberts quietly led the other justices toward tighter seals, and the trend since has been to lock everything away for decades. That matters more now because the court keeps deciding major cases on the shadow docket without explaining itself, and the working papers are the only place that reasoning exists.

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04 • 13 Minute Read

The Atlantic

Nancy Walecki

The Golden Girls, but in a Camp Cabin

Making friends as an adult is hard enough that 60,000 women are on a waitlist for a weekend of sleeping in bunk beds in the Poconos. Camp Social runs archery, a ropes course, tie-dye, and choreographed flagpole dances to Shania Twain, and it promises that everyone arrives alone and leaves with friends. Nancy Walecki signed herself up and spent the weekend with Cabin 3, eight women in their 50s and 60s working through divorce, retirement, and empty nests, who picked the flamingo as their mascot because a flamingo that loses its color can get it back.

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A man was stabbed at Burning Man. By morning the crime scene had driven home.

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