She posed as an aerospace heiress. Then a $15 million loan vanished.

01 • 20 Minute Read

Rolling Stone

Cheyenne Roundtree

A True-Crime Producer Posed as an Heiress — Then Allegedly Stole $30 Million

Mary Carole McDonnell, the true-crime producer on the FBI’s Most Wanted list

Mary Carole McDonnell ran a Los Angeles production company churning out cheap true-crime shows like Bizarre Murders, but her own story rivals anything she aired. For decades, she claimed to be an heir to the McDonnell Douglas aerospace fortune, though her father actually ran a St. Louis grocery store. In 2018, she used that story and fake account statements to secure a $15 million loan from Banc of California, drained nearly all of it within six weeks, and fled the country with her husband. Investigators say she ran a Ponzi-style cycle of borrowing from one lender to repay another, stiffing about 100 employees, draining friends' savings, and allegedly forging her own sons' signatures on nearly $3 million in loans. Now 74 and on the FBI's Most Wanted list, she was last traced to Dubai, while a former bank employee turned podcaster races to tell her story.

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02 • 32 Minute Read

The New York Times Magazine

Eve Fairbanks

After a Tornado, He Rebuilt Schools at Lightning Speed. Then Came the Hard Work.

Former Joplin schools superintendent C.J. Huff

When a mile-wide tornado tore through Joplin, Mo., in 2011, it killed 161 people and destroyed six of the city's schools. Superintendent C.J. Huff vowed to reopen them on time just 87 days later, setting up classes in a shuttered big-box store and an industrial building beside a dog-food plant. Enrollment barely dropped, and Huff seized the moment to rebuild ambitiously, turning the high school into a modern campus of career academies. National praise followed, but so did local backlash. Huff sank into depression and resigned in 2015. He now helps superintendents recover from hurricanes, floods, and wildfires, where he's found little federal guidance and the same cycle of heroism and blame.

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03 • 12 Minute Read

Miami Herald

Max Klaver

In motels and on couches, Miami-Dade’s 66,000 ‘hidden homeless’ are suffocating

A Miami-Dade family living in a motel room

Official counts put Miami-Dade's homeless population at about 3,500 people, but that number leaves out roughly 66,000 residents living in motels or crashing on friends' couches because they can't afford their own place. That group includes about 11,000 schoolchildren. Because the federal housing agency doesn't count people in these situations as homeless, they are largely shut out of rental assistance and housing placement programs. Advocates blame a widening gap between local wages and rents, which nearly doubled for an efficiency apartment between 2019 and 2024 while incomes rose far less.

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04 • 28 Minute Read

The New Yorker

David Owen

The American Religion of Self-Storage Facilities

The United States holds about 90 percent of the world's self-storage capacity, with more facilities than Starbucks, McDonald's, Walmart, and several other chains combined, and the industry brings in more than $40 billion a year. Operators say demand is driven by death, divorce, downsizing, and displacement, though plenty of customers are just holding on to furniture their kids don't want. Automatic credit-card billing keeps renters paying long after they've stopped visiting, and one family has spent roughly $50,000 storing their late mother's furniture since 2006, more than it's worth. When tenants do stop paying, their belongings get auctioned off, a business boosted by the reality show Storage Wars. The industry is now chasing new markets, including AI-run facilities, RV and boat lots, and million-dollar "car condos" with bars and racing simulators, while developers eye Europe, where homes are smaller and rents per square foot run higher.

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She posed as an aerospace heiress. Then a $15 million loan vanished.

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