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The students at Oxford High School were trudging between rooms during passing time, the short recess between classes. It was late November 2021, a mid-day like any other. Oxford is located just outside Detroit, Michigan, so it was cold, about minus 1C, and snow covered the ground. At 12.46pm, 15-year-old Ethan Crumbley ambled to the…
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At around 7:00 a.m. on June 16, 1998, Barton McNeil, a thirty-nine-year-old divorced father, woke up on the couch after a muggy, stormy night. It was the beginning of one of those long summers in Bloomington, Illinois, the air so heavy you could chew it. The evening before, he and his girlfriend, Misook Nowlin, had…
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I. On the evening of July 29 2011, in the Quebrada de San Lorenzo, a subtropical nature reserve in northern Argentina, a tourist was admiring the view. The man was standing with his family where he could see across the muggy, green valley with its broadleaved Tipuana and Cebil trees, all the way down to…
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When Guillermo Gómez was a boy, in the mid-1980s, he was lying in bed next to his mother at their home in Buenos Aires, when she asked him a strange question: “What would you do if one of these days, when I’m working, a woman comes along and tells you she’s your mother? Would you…
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On 24 June 2022, around 1,700 people, most of them asylum seekers from Sudan and South Sudan, filed down the wooded slopes of Mount Gurugu in north-eastern Morocco. They were headed to the enclave of Melilla, a Spanish city of some 85,000 people, perched on the coast of mainland Africa. At first, the migrants met no…
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César Ortigoza looked out over the Arizona desert and sighed. “It’s not easy out there,” he said. It was 5.30am, and we had driven eight hours eastward through the night from San Diego, California, to a remote region of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument near the Mexican border, some 110 miles from Tucson, Arizona. Before…
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David Rossi was sitting at home in Rhode Island one night in early 2022, his prime having all but passed him by. His days as an Engelbert Humperdinck impersonator, of Florida cruise ships, of $2,000-a-week cash payouts, of hanging out with Tom Jones and meeting Elvis, all the girls, the glamour — he’d left it…
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Bobomurod Abdullayev was a decent enough sports reporter, but he was a really good politics blogger. Household-name good. Getting-things-done good. So good that he lived in fear of government agents showing up to take him away. For most of the past two decades, Abdullayev kept this second beat a secret from even his wife and…
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On a late spring day in 2000, Manuel Ramírez was hosting a dinner at his home in Tepexpan, a dusty industrial town near Mexico City. His firstborn son was one month old, and his family and friends had come to meet him. The guests reclined in wicker armchairs with drinks in their hands and fawned…
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One late spring evening in 2018, Justo Gallego Martínez said he would show me his grave. The old man was warming his hands by a stove in the dim back room of his cathedral. A dusty film coated the cement floor. The shelves and tables were full of relics, screws, chipped wood, crushed glass, and half-eaten…
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Matthew Bremner: Journalist 