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01 • Most Clicked in July
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The Atlantic
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Stephanie McCrummen
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Mike and Andrea Brewer decided the bookstore across the street from their Tennessee church was a stronghold for a demon named Lilith. Stephanie McCrummen traces how the Well, a charismatic congregation practicing "strategic spiritual warfare," targeted Southland Books and its owner, Lisa Misosky, over drag shows and a mah-jongg group. Masked men showed up armed. Misosky slept on the floor with a shotgun. The same language now runs through Trump's cabinet, Tucker Carlson's nightmares, and the war room where a lieutenant governor calls his opponents demonic, which raises a sharper question about where a metaphor stops and a plan begins.
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THE TELEGRAPH
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Max Stephens
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Sonia Exelby booked a return flight home for the Monday after she landed in Florida. She never intended to use it. Max Stephens reconstructs the two years that led a 31 year old from a quiet English seaside town to a stranger's Airbnb, where she had arranged to pay him $4,000 to kill her. Her sisters had already called police once to stop her flying to America. This time nobody knew she had gone. The messages she sent from inside that cottage are almost too much to read.
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The Associated Press
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Juliet Linderman
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Jean Booth was 43, newly divorced, and just laid off when a handsome paratrooper named Donnie messaged her on Match. He was tender and attentive. He did not exist. Juliet Linderman documented how, over 237 days, Jean wired him more than $90,000, even after confronting a second woman he was draining at the same time. She knew by then he wasn't real. She sent the money anyway. Weeks after Donnie vanished, a stranger in Lagos named Clin started calling her beautiful. Her friends warned her it was happening again. Three days later, she sent him $400.
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Bernadette Vander Meer fell from Angel's Landing at Zion in August 2006, and her husband David, a youth pastor, told detectives the sunrise was lighting their path. Investigators ruled it an accident, and David collected about $567,000 in life insurance. Lauren Mascarenhas traces how the story came apart 19 years later, after David's former boss told authorities he believed David pushed her. One officer used NASA data to show the sun rose that day around 6:54 a.m., more than half an hour after David's 911 call. Then, days before his extradition hearing, David was found dead in his cell. His family has not said what his note explained.
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The Atlantic
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Amy Weiss-Meyer
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Robby and Michael Rosenberg spent 50 years proving their parents' innocence, only to learn in 2024 that their father Julius had indeed spied for the Soviet Union. The brothers received declassified documents showing their mother Ethel knew about the work but didn't participate in it. Yet she chose execution over cooperation, leaving Michael and Robby with a question that has never let go of them: why? Amy Weiss-Meyer traces how two orphans became lifelong advocates, the revelations that shattered their certainty, and what they still don't know about their mother's final choice.
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