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01 • 25 Minute Read

The New York Times Magazine

Elizabeth Barber

She Fought the State Over Her Son's Cancer Treatment. Then He Got Sicker.

Parental rights and medical freedom have become organizing causes on the right, and in Oklahoma a leukemia case gave that movement a mother to rally behind. Dayna Mooney had stopped taking her 17-year-old son Presten to his oncologists and was treating his cancer at home with supplements recommended by an unlicensed naturopath, and when the state took him into custody, Republican candidates and state senators showed up at the hospital calling it medical kidnapping. Elizabeth Barber spent six months with everyone involved, including Presten, who is back on his medication, living with his father, and has his own view of what happened to him.

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02 • 11 Minute Read

The Atlantic

Stephanie McCrummen

The Women Obsessed With Lindsay Clancy

The Lindsay Clancy case has dominated headlines and the true crime world throughout her trial. For the dozens of women lined up outside the Plymouth, Massachusetts courthouse hoping to secure a seat inside, it has become an obsession. Stephanie McCrummen focuses her article on these women and the stories they tell in line, how they see themselves in Clancy as they struggled with their own postpartum mental health issues.

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03 • 14 Minute Read

ESPN	Elizabeth Merrill and David Purdum

'We are broken': One family's fight against gambling addiction

Illustration for ESPN gambling addiction story

Sports betting is now everywhere in American life, and the people counseling addicts say the ones showing up are getting younger. Elizabeth Merrill and David Purdum follow one Ohio family through it. Their son, an honors student and tennis player, learned poker in his dorm common room freshman year, and by the time his mother picked him up from the University of Cincinnati two years later he had flunked out, lost 20 pounds, and been draining his parents' accounts. His mother, a pediatrician, had no idea what she was looking at. The irony of this story appearing under a Sports Betting banner at the top of the ESPN site is not lost on me, but the story is a good look at the ways younger generations are being used and manipulated by technology.

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04 • 20 Minute Read

Bloomberg Businessweek

Stacey Vanek Smith

The Diamond Industry's Old Guard Wants You to Buy 'Natural'

A pair of half-carat lab-grown diamond studs sells on Walmart's website for $12, and the stones are chemically identical to the ones that took a billion years to make. Stacey Vanek Smith reports on how De Beers and the rest of the mined-diamond establishment responded, which was not with a better product but with a better story: rebranding their gems as "natural," commissioning documentaries, and reviving brown diamonds nobody wanted as a luxury line. She also visits the lab-grown side, including a Texas company that grows diamonds from the ashes of dead relatives and pets.

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Republican senators called it medical kidnapping. Her son had leukemia.

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