Culture

A 33-year-old Georgia man will serve no prison time after keeping a teenage girl in captivity for a year, imprisoning her in a dog cage and allegedly forcing her to have sex with him against her will. On Thursday, Michael Wysolovski pleaded guilty to first-degree cruelty to children and interstate …

On Saturday, news broke that a gunman had opened fire at the Chabad of Poway synagogue in Poway, a suburb of San Diego, California. One woman, Lori Gilbert Kaye, was killed in the shooting after leaping in front of the congregation’s rabbi to protect him from gunfire; the rabbi and …

Prosecutors in Chicago dropped all criminal charges against Jussie Smollett and the actor will have his record wiped clean as part of a deferred prosecution deal, the Chicago Sun-Times reports. The surprise move comes just weeks after the Empire actor pleaded not guilty to 16 counts of disorderly conduct for …

The first episode of HBO’s new documentary, The Case Against Adnan Syed, premiered this past Sunday, once again bringing the murder conviction of the Baltimore man accused of killing his ex-girlfriend back into the headlines. Syed, the subject of the popular 2014 podcast, “Serial,” is currently serving a life sentence …

Comedian Hannah Gadsby remembers her first on-stage performance, the time she made an audience member throw up, and how she became an accidental political activist (though she has no idea what she was protesting) in our latest installment of “The First Time.” Gadsby has been a working comedian and actor …

UPDATE: YouTube announced that they would no longer allow videos featuring Momo to be monetized — to feature ads before, after or during the clips — even if they come from respected news organizations who are reporting on the phenomenon, which is widely seen to be a hoax. **** From …

Attorney Kathleen Zellner has filed a new letter with the Wisconsin Court of Appeals on behalf of her client, Steven Avery, accusing the Attorney General’s Office of “trying to deceive” her and the Court about the status of key forensic evidence in the Making a Murderer case. Zellner’s letter, submitted …

Within moments of the jury announcing the guilty verdict of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman in the snow-laden court in Brooklyn, word of the result was rippling across Mexico, from the valleys sprinkled with opium poppies to the sprawling mountain capital. People gathered at stalls and watched on televisions as U.S. …

The Supreme Court has allowed President Trump’s partial ban on transgender people serving in the military to go into effect, CNN reports. However, the Justices haven’t ruled on the merits of the case — they’ve just said that they won’t hear the case until the lower federal appeals court challenges …

When Kristen Roupenian wrote “Cat Person” in the spring of 2017, she didn’t expect the premise — a young woman’s brief relationship with an older man, the uncomfortable sex they share and the vitriol he spews at her after she ends things — to hit a nerve. But when the …