Fair and balanced bug reporting

The Cruel and Unusual Execution of Clayton Lockett

Jeffrey E. Stern

The untold story of Oklahoma's botched lethal injection—and America’s intensifying fight over the death penalty

On the morning of his execution, Clayton Lockett hid under the covers.

Before a team of correctional officers came to get him at 5:06 a.m., he fashioned a noose out of his sheets. He pulled the blade out of a safety razor and made half-inch-long cuts on his arms. He swallowed a handful of pills that he’d been hoarding. And on April 29, 2014, when the team of officers knocked on the door of his cell in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, Oklahoma, Clayton Lockett—a 38-year-old convicted murderer—pulled a blanket over his head and refused to get up.

The officers left and asked for permission to tase him. While they were gone, Lockett tried to jam the door. They came back, forced their way in, tased him, and dragged him out.

Natsuno Ichigo / Courtesy Penguin Random House

The Economics of Tidying Up

Bourree Lam

Months after publication, Japanese home-organization guru Marie Kondo's book about de-cluttering has reached peak interest. Behavioral science may explain the appeal.

“In this book, I have summed up how to put your space in order in a way that will change your life forever.”

This is the ambitious first sentence of Marie Kondo’s best-selling manifesto, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Direct and devoid of clutter, this sentence rings true to her philosophy. Unlike most self-help books, there are no extraneous words, no pandering—the lack of “wink wink” gesturing reads as an appealing, authentic statement.

Though Kondo’s book was published in English in October of last year, a search on Google Trends still puts interest in her near an all-time high. (A search for her name in Japanese produces a similar result, though her book was originally published in 2010.) If Google searches are any indication, interest in tidying is also at an all-time high, and some of this interest must be attributed to the rise in Kondo’s method—which is to hold onto only items that “bring joy.” Following the purge, Kondo provides clear directions for how to store all your belongings in a way that makes them easily accessible and hard to mess up. A good number of journalists swear by her methods, and effusive referrals of “She changed my life” abound. During Kondo’s AMA on Reddit, one superfan asked her how to teach her method to children under 10.

What ISIS Really Wants

Graeme Wood

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Diary of a Madman

Christopher Orr

The visceral, unexpected brilliance of Mad Max: Fury Road

Let it roll over you like heavy surf, like encroaching thunder. Let it roll over you like the wheels of an armor-plated tanker truck full of women fleeing sexual slavery. Because that’s what Mad Max: Fury Road is built to do.

It’s been 30 years since director George Miller (or anyone else) made a Mad Max movie, and it was easy to view this new sequel/reboot/whatever with a certain amount of drilling-an-old-well skepticism. But skepticism burns away like vapor in the heat of the blazing, arid dystopia Miller has created. Fury Road is an A-plus B-movie, an action flick so vivid and visceral, so striking in conception and extraordinary in execution, that it comes almost as a revelation.

The American West, 150 Years Ago

Alan Taylor

None

In the 1860s and 70s, photographer Timothy O'Sullivan created some of the best-known images in American History. After covering the U.S. Civil War, (many of his photos appear in this earlier series), O'Sullivan joined a number of expeditions organized by the federal government to help document the new frontiers in the American West. The teams were composed of soldiers, scientists, artists, and photographers, and tasked with discovering the best ways to take advantage of the region's untapped natural resources. O'Sullivan brought an amazing eye and work ethic, composing photographs that evoked the vastness of the West. He also documented the Native American population as well as the pioneers who were already altering the landscape. Above all, O'Sullivan captured -- for the first time on film -- the natural beauty of the American West in a way that would later influence Ansel Adams and thousands more photographers to come.

The Wedding Sting

Jeff Maysh

How a police department tried to save a failing Rust Belt town by luring all the local drug dealers to one party

There was a drug deal going down that night in rural Michigan. It was September 4, 1990, just after sunset in the town of Owosso, population 16,360. There, about 90 miles northwest of Detroit, the Shiawassee River meanders past a hamlet of low-rent, brick apartment buildings. Inside one of them, a dealer with a brown moustache handed a bag of marijuana to Debbie Williams. He told her firmly it was $20 for the quarter ounce, nothing less. “It’s a good thing you don’t want any more,” said Williams, “because that’s all I got.”

She spoke with the slow drawl of a habitual stoner. But she was an undercover police officer, and one of the few women to have crawled, shot, and boxed her way through the male-dominated police academy in Flint. Since graduating college she had dreamed of catching criminals (“Michigan State police required female employees to have four years of college,” Williams told me, “its male applicants, none”). She was 30 before they let her in. Now, the 38-year-old divorcee with a shock of curly blonde hair was her department’s undercover secret weapon, because buying drugs was easy when you didn’t look like a cop.

What People Around the World Dream About

Roc Morin

An atlas of the subconscious, from Tijuana to Reykjavik

The first thing I learned is: Everybody flies.

Consider the surly taxi driver I met in Ukraine who, when asked what he dreamed of at night, responded, “I jump and then I fly—higher than the trees, higher than the trolley wires.”

“I think when I die,” he mused, “that’s what it’s going to be like.”

As an instructor in psychology at the City College of New York, I teach about the power of the subconscious, whose hidden cognition comprises the vast majority of brain activity. Increasingly, research is confirming that we humans are almost entirely subconscious beings, largely oblivious to the mind’s extensive inner workings. Dreams are one of the few exceptions.

I’ve always had an active dream life (just recently, I sent a herd of buffalo rampaging through a deserted Times Square, and performed psychic surgery on a thousand-chambered heart). Curious whether others had similar experiences, I started the World Dream Atlas project, a Facebook page of dreams gathered on my off hours while traveling as a journalist. Over the last 10 months, I’ve collected dreams from hundreds of people in 17 countries.

The Emptiness of the Rubio Doctrine

Peter Beinart

Why the senator isn’t serious about foreign policy

In a presidential field as crowded as this year’s Republican one, every candidate needs a niche. Marco Rubio is trying to own three: generational change, Hispanic outreach, and foreign-policy gravitas.

It was in pursuit of the third that he went to the Council on Foreign Relations on Wednesday to lay out his foreign-policy “doctrine.”

Presidential “doctrines” have a long history in American foreign policy. The earliest, and most famous, was James Monroe’s insistence that the United States would prevent European powers from gaining a beachhead in the Americas. More than 80 years later, Theodore Roosevelt added the “corollary” that in order to prevent the kind of instability that might invite foreign meddling in the region, the United States could intervene to topple Latin American governments. In 1947, in an effort to justify aid to anti-communist regimes in Greece and Turkey, Harry Truman outlined the doctrine of containment, by which the U.S. would “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Jimmy Carter refocused that doctrine on the Persian Gulf, where he vowed that the U.S. would use military force to repel Soviet domination. Ronald Reagan turned containment on its head by insisting that the U.S. would not merely prevent Soviet expansion but aid anti-communist rebels seeking to roll back pro-Soviet regimes. Finally, in response to the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush took this aggression a step further by arguing that rather than deterring or containing hostile regimes seeking weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. would launch preventive wars to overthrow them.

Why Order a Salad at IHOP?

Olga Khazan

A new report highlights 100 restaurant salads that are supposedly worse than a Big Mac. But why do people order grease-laden items when they want health food?

Let’s be honest for a second: Salad is usually not the most delicious thing on a menu. Salad—not the highfalutin, ramps-and-pine-nuts kind, but the patriotic, iceberg-lettuce-and-a-petrified-tomato-wedge kind—is the food you order when you’re at a place where you’re expected to be eating food (chain restaurants, broadly), but it’s a time of year when you should not really be eating the food they serve there (the seemingly 10-month annual timespan known as “swimsuit season”). Salad is a necessity, a type of proto-Soylent. In its purest form, it says, “I’m taking care of a basic bodily need, but it’s just crunchy water!” Salad, at its best, feels like a strategically good choice without being truly satisfying to the soul, like dating someone who’s not that smart, but has a beach-adjacent timeshare.

Emily Farris Is Not Running for President

Yoni Appelbaum

Pollsters included the name of a random woman in a survey—and 20 percent of Republican primary voters said they dislike her.

Pity Emily Farris. Republican primary voters just don’t like her very much.

In a survey released on Wednesday, Public Policy Polling found that Farris near the bottom of the GOP field. She polled well behind fellow Texans Rick Perry and Ted Cruz. Just 3 percent of voters had formed a favorable opinion of her, while 20 percent reported unfavorable views. Only embattled New Jersey Governor Chris Christie faced a wider gap.

And Farris isn’t even running. She’s a political science professor at Texas Christian University, whose name was included within the enormous field of Republican hopefuls as a statistical control. “It’s a little surreal to think that 20 percent of Republican primary voters have a negative opinion of you, when they most likely don’t know you,” she told me.