Ashley Powers

Mohammed lazed away the weeks before college. Logged on to the extremist forums, but not as frequently, in the way teens tire of high school haunts. Still in his white undershirt and purply-green pajama pants, he opened the front door. A blast of sticky summer air. A man outside with an envelope like the one his acceptance letter had arrived in. Suddenly, he was pinned to the wall. The FBI agents let him change clothes; they watched as he threw on a school outfit — a striped shirt and jeans — and brushed his teeth. Before they took him away, someone reminded him to tell his family goodbye.

Sheriff Finch is conservative, and the sites he visited argued that the sheriff, in his county, is more powerful than the President. That argument was consistent with the beliefs of Finch’s law-enforcement hero, Joe Arpaio, the former Arizona sheriff who last year was convicted of defying a court order to stop the racial profiling of Latinos. “I like Joe, because Joe’s a lot like me,” Finch told me. “He doesn’t take shit from nobody. He knows what his role is, and come hell or high water, he was going to do what he thought was right.” 

I recently spoke to KJZZ’s The Show about this piece.

He stood outside the Camp Noyo kitchen, a rickety wood structure, his back to the camera, his gaze fixed on a small window reflecting a knot of branches. He wore a dark jacket, though because of the camera’s night vision, it gleamed white. His pants had split in the rear, and he’d tucked the ankles into pulled-up socks, pseudo-military-style. In his right hand, he clutched a rifle, as large as anything in the movies.

This piece was featured on Nieman Storyboard.

Around spring break, the school emailed Liz about her still-unpaid tuition and fees: SECOND NOTICE, PAST DUE: $1,931.00. Her financial aid remained on hold. No one had responded to her flyers or to the Facebook page she’d made for homeless students. She felt alone on a precipice: between having a permanent address and not, between staying in college and dropping out — or, as her godmother put it, being forced out. Because that’s how Liz felt: like she wasn’t wanted. She posted on Facebook one afternoon, “Can someone persuade me as to why staying in school is worth it?”

This piece was included on a list in The Atlantic of the best stories of 2017.

I explain my personal connection to it in this Q&A.

A few weeks ago, when the mission was still a dark fantasy, their pal Scott had warned them: “What we’re doing, you know, is dangerous. We could be hurt, we could be shot by these knuckleheads, we could be thrown in prison for the rest of our lives.” David Brutsche didn’t flinch. “I’m willing to give my life for this,” he said.

This piece was featured in a Columbia Journalism Review study, "Can narrative journalism overcome the political divide?" and on Nieman Storyboard.

Ebou’s home, for now, is a tall yellow building where a Catholic group houses a handful of immigrants his age. It smells of freshly washed shirts and cologne, the scent of young men striving. Ebou is 18, a rangy soccer player with dark eyes and an ear-to-ear grin. He grew up in the small West African country of Gambia, and two years ago he arrived in Sicily. His housemates are from Gambia, Guinea, Mali, and Senegal, and razz each other in Sicilian-inflected Italian. They trade off making dinner and play FIFA Soccer on PlayStation into the wee hours. They crave what they lacked in West Africa: stability, opportunity. Ebou tells me, “I don’t want to become useless. I want to become something.”

This story appears in The Best American Travel Writing 2020. A review of the anthology in Publishers Weekly called it a “standout piece.”

In the time I spent in Short Creek, I was struck by how few church members I saw and how quickly they disappeared when they saw me. One woman ducked behind a fence. A little girl stuck out her tongue, and not in a friendly way. It’s risky to talk to outsiders. People have been banished for lesser sins, I was told, and that perpetual threat shapes life — and thwarts civility — more than anything else.

Sean David Morton spent years whisking E.T.-obsessed tourists to Area 51 for $99 a pop, then leveraged his following into stints on the wee-hours conspiracy show “Coast to Coast AM” — at one point, the nation’s No. 3 talk-radio program. He dabbled in other fringe arts, such as remote viewing and psychic predictions about earthquakes, elections and the stock market. But by the time Jeff Lavender saw him talk in Southern California, Morton had shifted to something truly fantastical: instant debt relief.

“You don’t realize how much you hear of yourself,” said Jacob Job, a dark-haired beanpole in a brownish T-shirt and olive cargo shorts. “Your breathing, your clothes moving, your joints popping, the sound of you swallowing.” Only by staying quiet — melt-into-the-forest quiet, hear-twigs-snap-and-insects-buzz quiet — could we find the distinctive trill that had so far eluded him.

This piece was part of the issue "Listen," a finalist for a National Magazine Award in the Single-Topic Issue category.