Forrest Welborn was cleared of four murders. He says he's still not free.

01 • 40 Minute Read

Texas Monthly

Michael Hall

He Was a Suspect in the Yogurt Shop Murders for Thirty Years. He Can’t Forget.

Forrest Welborn at the Manchaca Springs Saloon

In December 1991, police fitted Forrest Welborn's best friend with a wire and sent him to get Forrest to confess to murdering four teenage girls at an Austin yogurt shop. Forrest never did. In 1999, after two other young men gave false confessions naming him, police charged him with capital murder. Prosecutors dropped the charges, but the suspicion followed him for 34 years. DNA tied the killings to a serial killer. Michael Hall, who first sought an interview with Forrest in 1999, watched a court exonerate Forrest and the city pay him nearly $5 million to avoid a lawsuit. He still has not forgiven the men who accused him. You can watch more about Welborn’s case in the HBO documentary The Yogurt Shop Murders.

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02 • 78 Minute Read

ProPublica

T. Christian Miller, Megan Rose and Robert Faturechi

Fight the Ship: Death and valor on a warship doomed by its own Navy.

I have somehow missed this mammoth ProPublica investigation from 2019, but I am glad I found it…even if I stayed up way too late to finish it last night. At 1:30 a.m. on June 17, 2017, a cargo ship three times the size of the USS Fitzgerald tore open the destroyer's hull, and in 90 seconds seawater nearly filled a compartment where 35 sailors slept. Seven drowned. Drawing on 13,000 pages of confidential Navy records, ProPublica reconstructed a ship that had passed seven of 22 certification tests, a radar operator who had to press a button 1,000 times an hour, and an officer who turned into the cargo ship's path. The Navy blamed the crew.

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03 • 16 Minute Read

The New York Times

Amanda Hess

Her Brand Was Tradwife. Now She’s Divorced.

The first time Bernadine Barber saw the word "tradwife," it described her. As Bernadine Bluntly, she sold $25 "R.I.P. Feminism" shirts, spoke against women's suffrage, and drew 20 million views mocking feminists. Privately, she was miserable. In May 2025, with six children, the youngest only 4 months old, she quietly slipped into the night, snuck down the gravel path from her off-grid Missouri home, and met a patrol car. A court later found she had proved domestic violence, something her ex-husband denied. Amanda Hess followed her into a new job warning women away from the movement she once sold.

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04 • 16 Minute Read

The Atlantic

Kevin Roose

Inside the Biggest Feud in Artificial Intelligence

Illustration of Sam Altman and Dario Amodei

In December 2017, Dario Amodei emailed OpenAI's leaders objecting to a plan to auction future AGI rights to governments including China and Russia. OpenAI says it never considered selling to either country. Three years later, Amodei and six colleagues announced their exit at an all-staff meeting, and OpenAI bricked their laptops before the meeting was over. Reporter and author Kevin Roose traces how Amodei's grievances against Sam Altman became Anthropic, a company with thousands of employees and a trillion-dollar IPO in view. The feud never cooled. This is an excerpt from Roose’s forthcoming book The AGI Chronicles.

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Forrest Welborn was cleared of four murders. He says he's still not free.

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