Kidnapping

Click Here to Kill

By Brian Merchant,

On a sunny July day in 2018, Alexis Stern was sitting behind the wheel of the red Ford Fusion her parents had given her the previous year when she’d learned…

The Long Rescue

By Sonia Faleiro,

One frigid afternoon in January 2013, a man approached three brothers playing in a field in Kudiya, a hamlet in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. He had some…

Con Voyage

By Wolfgang Bauer, Sarah Pybus,

From Crossing the Sea, by Wolfgang Bauer. In 2014, Bauer, a German journalist for Die Zeit, traveled undercover with Syrian refugees on a boat headed from Egypt to Greece. His…

Gateway to Freedom

By Eric Foner,

On September 4, 1838, a twenty-year-old fugitive slave named Frederick Bailey arrived in New York City. He had long hoped to escape from bondage, gazing out at the ships on…

Bad Romance

By Jesse Barron,

Last August 3, in Boulevard, California, a man named James Lee DiMaggio invited his friend’s wife and son to his home, killed them, shot their dog, and rigged incendiary wire on…

Lakshmi’s Story

By Vaishali Raode, Translated by P. G. Joshi, R. Raj Rao

By Vaishali Raode, from Mi Hijra, Mi Lakshmi (“I Am a Hijra, I Am Lakshmi”), an account of the life of Lakshmi Narayan Tripathi, a transgender-rights activist in the Indian…