Jacob C. was 11 years old and living in Michigan when he was convicted of criminal sexual conduct for touching his younger sister’s genitals. After serving a three-year sentence, he was placed on the state’s sex offender registry and forced to live separately from his mother and sister, in a foster home.

At 18, he began attending a local college, but his "sex offender" status drew the attention of campus police, who tailed him everywhere. He soon dropped out. Jacob tried to make a new life in Florida, but with his name, address, photograph, and details of his past offense available on an online registry for all to see, he had difficulty finding a job or a place to live, and for a time he was homeless. He married and had a daughter, but when he and his wife divorced he was denied custody, again because of his history.

It was supposed to be a night of celebration, but it ended in tragedy.

As of Monday, California authorities still don’t know what caused a 1999 white Lincoln stretch limousine to burst into flames on a San Francisco bridge Saturday night, killing five women inside, including a new bride. Four other women in the car, as well as the driver, were able to escape.

WE SCRIMP. We save. We plan. And we dream that when we retire—at 50 or 70 or 90—we’ll ride off into the sunset on a chariot made of our sequestered gold.

But you can stop the dream right there.

TWO YEARS ago, Gaia DiLoreto, who’d fled a thankless office job managing the IT help desk at an insurance company, started By Brooklyn, a shop featuring the wares of the borough’s burgeoning artisan community. She was inspired, she told me, by Meg Paska, whose Brooklyn Homesteader blog explored her adventures in beekeeping, home brewing, and backyard chicken raising. DiLoreto’s store sells handcrafted jewelry and ceramics, fancy $8 candy bars, and cocktail bitters in flavors like black mission fig and sriracha. The majority of her vendors are women who, like her, started their businesses as alternatives to frustrating, soul-draining office gigs. She’s located on the same trendy Carroll Gardens block as La Casita—a yarn shop, café, and bar founded by refugees from the real estate industry—where every afternoon fashionable women with playful tattoos can be found knitting over cappuccinos or glasses of wine.

“People moved to the city, floundered in the crappy jobs, and realized that’s just not enough,” says DiLoreto. Many of her sellers got their starts hawking goods on Etsy or at the Brooklyn Flea Market, a sprawling weekend fair as thick with effervescent young hipsters as the trendiest of nightclubs. Founding a successful microenterprise has become a widespread bohemian dream, particularly among women. HBO’s Girls underscored the painful trendiness of one of its young, single characters by having her start a mustard company. A decade ago, when hip young women were presumed to be more interested in cocktails than condiments, that would have made no sense at all.

Howard Kurtz, the former Washington bureau chief for The Daily Beast, apologized Sunday on his CNN show Reliable Sources for erroneously saying Jason Collins was not open about his engagement to a woman in the Sports Illustrated article in which Collins became the first active male athlete in a major sport to come out as gay. “It was a mistake that I made and it was sloppy and inexcusable,” Kurtz said, while also apologizing for initially modifying the story rather than retracting it. "I am truly sorry." Kurtz said he read the profile of Collins, but did so “carelessly” and missed the part where Collins stated that he'd had a fiancée. Kurtz also said he took an “inappropriate” tone in a video about Collins he made with Lauren Ashburn at the Daily Download, a media criticism website in which Kurtz’s involvement has raised questions. Kurtz said it was simply “unfortunate timing” that he left The Daily Beast the same day that his Collins story was retracted, and that an “amicable divorce” had already been in the works, about which The Daily Beast has no comment.

Kurtz: ‘Here’s What Happened, Here’s Why I Did What I Did, and Here’s Why It Was Clearly Wrongly Handled by Me’

Katherine Russell was devoted enough to Tamerlan Tsarnaev to convert to his religion when he was a champion boxer, but she declined to claim his body as he lay in the coroner’s office after becoming a terrorist bomber.

She instead released the remains to an uncle of Tamerlan’s who had very publicly declared that his nephew had fully merited his violent death.

In 1997, when I was a college senior living in New England, I wanted to hear The Stooges, the iconic 1967 debut album by Iggy and the Stooges. This wasn’t easy.

The record store in town didn’t have a copy. Neither did my college’s radio station, the library, or any of my friends. To get the record, I had to (1) find a phone book; (2) call a bunch of record stores in Connecticut—shops with limited shelf space that might be taken up by Barbra Streisand, the Grateful Dead, or N.W.A; (3) hope that one of these stores had a copy of a CD reissue of a then relatively obscure proto-punk LP; (4) get directions from a clerk who might or might not be under the influence of marijuana; (5) have a car or access to one; (6) fill that car with gas; (7) find a map; (8) drive 40 minutes from my room to the store; (9) hope no one would buy the store’s only copy before I could get there; and (10) drive 40 minutes back. At least I had a portable CD player, and could listen to the record during the return trip.  

Closing arguments wrapped up Friday with accused killer Jodi Arias’s lawyer asking jurors to keep an open mind about his client, even if they weren’t big fans of the former blonde bombshell portrayed by the prosecutor as a manipulative liar and a killer.

After four months of testimony, it is now up to the jury to decide the fate of the 32-year-old California waitress and budding photographer. Arias, who intermittently wept through the two days of final statements, claims she killed 30-year-old Travis Alexander in self-defense when he attacked her at his Phoenix home after a day of sexcapades. Prosecutors argued that Arias meticulously planned to bump off the Mormon businessman and motivational speaker after she learned he was ending their tumultuous affair and taking another woman on a vacation, and took her first steps toward that end by stealing a .25 caliber handgun—the same caliber weapon used in the killing—from her grandparents’ home in Northern California a week before the slaying.