Showing results by author "Matthew Shaer" in All Categories

It was one of the strangest sights the Coast Guard pilots had ever seen: a tall-masted wooden ship, the kind that sailed centuries ago, capsizing in the wind and towering waves of Hurricane Sandy off the coast of North Carolina. It looked like something out of a movie - and, in a way, it was. The ship was the Bounty, a replica of a British merchant vessel of the same name whose crew famously mutinied in 1789. She had been built for a Marlon Brando film in the 1960s - and now she was sinking, her 16-person crew fleeing into the sea amid the splintered wood and torn canvas.

Inside the hidden world of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn's Crown Heights--a close-knit but divided community. On a cold night in December, the members of a Hasidic anti-crime patrol called the Shomrim are summoned to a yeshiva dormitory in Crown Heights. There to break up a brawl, the Shomrim instead find themselves embroiled in a religious schism which has split the community and turned roommate against roommate, neighbor against neighbor. At the center of the storm is Aron Hershkop....

In August 1982, a young couple was murdered in a Chicago park. Months away from their wedding, Jerry Hillard and Marilyn Green were shot to death on the bleachers overlooking a pool on the South Side of the city. A year later, Anthony Porter, a local man with a checkered past, was found guilty of the crime and sentenced to death. Fifty hours before his execution, Porter was freed, thanks to an investigation by David Protess and his students at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.