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Four reads to carry you through lunch.
A trucker who voted for Trump found an ICE ankle monitor smashed on an Ohio highway after a Haitian college student ran in front of his truck.
ProPublica reporters with no teaching experience started private schools in Arkansas and West Virginia, and the Arkansas one cost $45 and an American flag.
| The Atlantic | Stephanie McCrummen |
| On the morning of August 31, a young man stepped out of a car on an Ohio interstate and ran into the path of Jack Buhring’s concrete truck. Twenty feet away, Buhring found an ICE ankle monitor, smashed and blinking red. The man was Pierre Damas Bel, a 20-year-old Haitian college student from Springfield whose legal status the Trump administration had revoked. Stephanie McCrummen rode along with Buhring, a first-time Trump voter, as he retraced his route. He learned Bel had enrolled at Wright State to study neuroscience. This is a really beautifully written, if not frustrating, story. |
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| The Washington Post | Geoff Edgers |
| In a borrowed house in Louisiana, Chris Hansen waits in a pantry while sheriff’s decoys chat online with men who think they’re talking to minors. When two show up, he sits them down and confronts them. Hansen, 67, became famous hosting "To Catch a Predator" on NBC, working with a vigilante group and later with police who arrested men as they left. Critics call it humiliation as entertainment dressed up as journalism. The show was canceled in 2008 after scrutiny that followed the death of prosecutor Bill Conradt, who killed himself in 2006 as police closed in. A new film, "Primetime," with Robert Pattinson as Hansen, portrays him as an ego-driven showman and takes liberties with the facts. |
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| In 1990, journalist Earl Swift and his hiking partner Greg "Animal" Hammer were camped beside a stream in Crawford Notch, New Hampshire, when a rotted tree crashed down between them, missing Greg’s legs and Swift’s head by about a foot. Shaken by how blind luck had decided who lived, they hurried south, hoping to catch Molly LaRue and Geoff Hood, a young couple from Kansas whose cheerful Appalachian Trail logbook entries they had followed for weeks. They finally met at a shelter, where an erratic hiker in a suit chanted and danced through the night, and the pair took it with quiet patience. After two more days together, including a pancake breakfast, Swift and Hammer pulled ahead and never saw them again. Weeks later the couple was murdered at a Pennsylvania campsite. In 2023, Swift returned to hike the trail again, asking why fate chose them over hikers who seemed likelier targets, including himself. |
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| ProPublica | Jennifer Richards, Jodi Cohen, Jennifer Hawes, Milo Strain, Henry Culvyhouse, and Carli Brosseau |
| In Arkansas, a group of reporters with no teaching experience became private school founders for $45 and an American flag. They registered a business on the state website, and the education department said it has no rules for opening a school. In West Virginia, they handwrote a notice on notebook paper, then sidestepped a fire marshal’s inspection by registering as a microschool, a category state officials say they cannot regulate. Either school could enroll unlimited students. Arkansas even suggested ways to apply for voucher money, which is worth $7,208 per student. In North Carolina, an application filed at a Durham brewery stalled over a missing school-specific inspection. ProPublica has always done great work, but the pace under which they are working right now is incredible. Check out their other recent investigations if you are looking for good longform reporting. |
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