If you watch much Dateline, this may not be a new story for you. More than 12 years ago, law professor Dan Markel was shot twice in the head in his Tallahassee driveway, two years after his wife, Wendi Adelson, left him and took their two sons. Wendi’s mother, Donna, spent those years pushing to relocate the boys to Miami, floating schemes that included paying Dan $1 million or threatening to baptize the children. When a judge blocked the move, Donna’s son Charlie arranged a hit through his girlfriend, paying $100,000 and putting her on the family business payroll. Investigators traced a rented green Prius, then phone records, then paychecks signed by Donna. Five people were convicted, ending with Donna in September 2025.
Winston Walters was 19 and the breakout star of a catfish-noodling reality show when Oklahoma police charged him in a brutal home invasion near Comanche, where masked men shot Mark Roebuck twice, duct-taped his wife to a chair, and took $28,000. Walters said he’d never met the couple, but when his roommate confessed and blamed him for everything, a jury convicted Walters. He was sentenced to 92 years. The case against him was largely circumstantial, and online supporters have since raised money for his appeals. This year Roebuck sent word through a prison guard that if Walters admitted his guilt, he would push for a shorter sentence. Walters wrote back apologizing for other things, but refusing to confess.
Great piece in Vanity Fair by Chris Whipple. JD Vance arrived at Yale Law School in 2010 as an ex-Marine from Middletown, Ohio, who showed up to class in a rumpled purple sweater and threatened to drop out repeatedly. Professor Amy Chua, the “Tiger Mom” author, became his mentor and pushed him to write what became Hillbilly Elegy. She says he hasn’t changed at all since. A 2011 campus talk by Peter Thiel pulled him toward religion and eventually Catholicism, and Thiel later put $15 million behind his Senate run. In 2016, while publicly refusing to vote for either candidate, Vance quietly fed advice to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, urging her to focus on the Midwest and apologize for the Iraq War. Now the 2028 frontrunner, he’s stuck defending an unpopular Iran war, carrying the Epstein files, and absorbing Trump’s private mockery.
Richard Dyer sits in a Cambridge café on a July Sunday while the bells of Great St Mary’s play a melody composed in 1793. A bell is struck, rings at its own frequency, gives up its energy, and goes silent. Dyer, who studies the final milliseconds of black hole mergers at the Institute of Astronomy, sees the same pattern in his data. LIGO caught the first of those signals in September 2015, from a collision 1.3 billion light years away, and the merged remnant rang briefly before settling into complete silence. Dyer writes contemplatively about the scale of loss from the cosmos to our daily lives.
