Culture

Stormy Daniels and her lawyer Michael Avenatti have consistently made headlines over the last year for challenging, mocking and standing up to Donald Trump. But, in a statement the adult star released yesterday, she claimed that Avenatti — who has suggested he will run for president in 2020 — filed …

Damien Echols’ interest in magick can be traced back to when he was seven years old. While reading one of his grandmother’s tabloids in his family’s Mississippi trailer, he saw an ad for a book: “Wanna learn magick? Send $5.95 to this address, and we’ll send you this book,” he …

The first season of Serial, the explosively popular podcast from host Sarah Koenig and co-creator Julie Snyder, told the story of Adnan Syed and Hae Min Lee, the 18-year-old high school student murdered and left in the woods of Maryland. Syed, her ex-boyfriend, was found guilty of her murder and …

During the busiest week in New York City’s comedy calendar, five comics spent a Saturday afternoon at Sony Hall in Times Square to talk about making jokes in a fraught political moment. The diverse panel included Wyatt Cenac (The Daily Show, Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas), Jordan Klepper (The Daily Show, …

On Tuesday, November 6th — less than three months after his arrest on first-degree murder charges — Christopher Watts, 33, suddenly agreed to plead guilty to killing his pregnant wife, Shan’ann Watts, 34, and the couple’s two daughters, Bella, 4, and Celeste, 3. Members of both of the defendant and …

This week, an FDA panel voted 10-3 to recommend approval for a new fast-acting form of an opioid drug that’s 10 times more potent than fentanyl. Opioid overdose is the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of 50, with the sharpest increase in overdose deaths in 2017 …

Despite a large body of research documenting cannabis’ effectiveness in treating epilepsy, there has yet to be a cannabis-based anti-seizure medication introduced on the U.S. pharmaceutical market – until this week. On Monday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a epilepsy drug utilizing plant-derived cannabidiol (CBD), a common non-psychoactive …

Three years ago, when I published a story about Tony Wright, an innocent man incarcerated 25 years for the rape and murder of a woman he never met (“The Trials of Tony Wright: How DNA Exonerated Convicted Murderer“), I wrote that a black man “has a better chance of justice …

On Monday, Mexican authorities closed in on Keith Raniere, co-founder of the controversial, cult-like self-help group NXIVM. The Albany, New York-based NXIVM is, according its website, “a community guided by humanitarian principles that seek to empower people and answer important questions about what it means to be human.” Charged with …

This story was originally published by Grist and appears here as part of an ongoing collaboration. Generation Z – millennials’ younger brothers and sisters – are increasingly finding their voices in the Trump era, expanding media-savvy campaigns for racial equality and gun control to encompass climate change. A group of …