He was in line to run the Seahawks. Then came the crossbow killing.

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01 • 26 Minute Read

The Athletic

Katie Strang, Nathan Fenno and Zak Keefer

A playboy NFL agent was in line to run the Seahawks. Then came the crossbow killing

Michael Blatt ruled 1980s Stockton as a ruthless developer turned NFL super-agent, and by 1989 he had all but landed the Seahawks general manager job. Then a rival, Larry Carnegie, spread damaging rumors, Blatt lost the post, and weeks later Carnegie was shot with a crossbow and strangled on a country road. Two juries deadlocked. Blatt walked. Katie Strang, Nathan Fenno and Zak Keefer trace what came after: a detective who suspected Blatt was the Golden State Killer, decades of deals that never stopped. Then a man who crossed him found two arrows on his car.

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02 • 17 Minute Read

The New York Times

Maxine Joselow, David A. Fahrenthold, Tyler Pager and Clarence Williams

How the Reflecting Pool Came to Mirror Trump's Washington

Workers crossing the drained Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool

A Trump golf-club manager with no engineering training flew to a Las Vegas concrete show to figure out how to fix the leaking Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool by July 4. His plan: coat it in American-flag-blue polyurea. The Interior Department handed out no-bid contracts worth $14.7 million and waved off its own experts. The liner peeled within a week. Maxine Joselow and David Fahrenthold document how Trump blamed vandals, and how prosecutor Jeanine Pirro charged bystanders before reversing and faulting a botched installation. One of those charged, a veterinarian, paid $6,000. Then the administration went looking for someone to fire.

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03 • 27 Minute Read

The Guardian

Shaun Walker

A bungled bomb plot in Poland exposed a spy – but whose spy was he?

A parcel of Soviet detonators, nitroglycerine, and a false-bottomed flask tore open in a Polish sorting facility, addressed to Igor Rogov, a 27-year-old Russian activist granted asylum after fleeing the Kremlin. Then his wife told police he had informed to the FSB for years. Shaun Walker mined thousands of court pages and found a stranger story: the courier was a lovestruck Odesa model, the package may have been a Ukrainian bomb bound for Russia, and Rogov's guilt shaded into something murkier. A court sentenced him to seven years behind closed doors. His old roommate reached a blunter verdict.

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04 • 30 Minute Read

ProPublica

Jesse Coburn

Fiasco in the Factory: Taxpayers Funded a $533 Million Artillery Plant That Made Nothing

A soldier attends to 155 mm shells in Ukraine

A robot was on fire. Again. That was routine inside the Texas plant General Dynamics built to churn out artillery shells for Ukraine, where steel blocks heated to 1,800 degrees crashed to the floor and presses had to be beaten with a sledgehammer to run. Jesse Coburn found the factory never produced one usable shell. Taxpayers paid $533 million. All the while executives told investors the line was running as planned, the Army recovered nothing, and it handed the same division $2.5 billion in fresh contracts. The company's proposed fix for machinery that cracks steel is artificial intelligence.

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He was in line to run the Seahawks. Then came the crossbow killing.

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