One of America’s Favorite Handguns Is Allegedly Firing On Its Owners

SIG Sauer denies there’s a problem, yet strangely their P320 pistols have fired unexpectedly — without pulling the trigger — injuring 80 people to date. In this deeply reported feature, The Trace and The Washington Post have learned that the guns have gone off with routine movements such as holstering the weapon. Unintentional discharge is horrific, but what’s even scarier is that no U.S. government agency has the power to investigate gun defects or impose a mandatory recall, leaving gun manufacturers to police themselves.

Navy veteran and former gunner’s mate Dionicio Delgado said his P320 fired a bullet through his thigh and into his calf after he holstered it during a training session at a gun range in Ruther Glen, Virginia. Michael Parker, a welder, said his holstered P320 fired a bullet into his thigh as he removed the holster from his pocket while in his car in St. Petersburg, Florida. Police officer Brittany Hilton said her holstered P320 fired while inside her purse as she walked to her car in Bridge City, Texas. The bullet entered her groin and exited her back just inches from the base of her spine.

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Three Years Later, Covid-19 Is Still a Health Threat. Journalism Needs to Reflect That

For Nieman Reports, Kendra Pierre-Louis reports on the failures of the media to accurately report on COVID-19 — and the dangerous narratives pushed over the past three years that have downplayed its risks to the public. Pierre-Louis suggests ways that colleagues in journalism can and should improve coverage, including conveying nuance, being mindful of unconscious bias, and including perspectives of people in disabled, elderly, low-income, marginalized, and other at-risk communities.

In the process, we’ve failed at our field’s core tenets — to hold power to account and to follow the evidence. Our failures here could last a generation. As reporters, it’s our responsibility to accurately represent the needs of diverse perspectives and avoid an ableist bias that diminishes the real and lasting health concerns not only of those who are keenly at risk but those who are cautious about repeatedly catching a virus that scientists are still grappling to understand.           

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Dril Is Everyone. More Specifically, He’s a Guy Named Paul

Describing the impact that Dril has made on Twitter — and by extension, on digital culture at large — is difficult to do without simply reading off a selection of his utterly unhinged mini-missives. Thankfully, Nate Rogers resists the trap (at least to a degree), and instead turns in a compelling, well-reported profile of the man behind the blurry Jack Nicholson avatar. With a last name and everything!

To most people, he is nothing; show the unaffiliated some of his posts, and they will likely just generate confusion and possibly anguish. (“Uh, so, I think I’ll stick with gardening. Where bull poop helps good things grow, and the tweets come from birds, not nitwits,” read one of many upset people in the comment section of a recent Washington Post feature about Dril, inadvertently adopting their own Dril-esque cadence in the process.) But to a large sect of the Very Online, he is king—the undisputed poet laureate of shitposting, the architect of a satire so effective that it has become impossible to tell when Dril stopped mocking the way people speak online and when we, instead, started speaking like Dril online.

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How Bookshop.org Survives—and Thrives—in Amazon’s World

Untold businesses shuttered during the pandemic. A very few managed to thrive — generally those who satisfied stay-at-home demands. But while you may know about Peloton and Zoom, you can add to that list one Bookshop.org, which launched in January 2020 with the aim of helping indie booksellers become ecommerce contenders. Helping stir-crazy readers and offering a local alternative to certain omniretail monoliths? This profile of the company and its founder manages to feel like that elusive species known as a “feel-good business story.”

Every six months, Bookshop dumped 10 percent of its sales, in equal shares, into the accounts of bookstores that had opted into its earnings pool. Some store owners were caught by surprise when they checked their accounts. VaLinda Miller, who runs Turning Page Bookshop in the suburbs of Charleston, South Carolina, was facing a crisis when a broken air conditioner caused a gnarly mold outbreak in her shop. She realized she would have to move but couldn’t afford to give a new landlord several months’ rent, replace damaged merchandise, and pay movers all at once. When she finally remembered to check her Bookshop account, she was astonished to see that Turning Page had more than $19,000—enough to cover the move. “It hit during the perfect time,” she says. “It’s been a blessing.”

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How Does a Magician Trick Other Magicians? We Went to Find Out

From the late Ricky Jay to the not-so-great Gob Bluth, it’s impossible not to love the characters who populate the world of magic — though this dispatch from the triennial World Championship of Magic might test your limits. The only place on Earth where the answer to “trick or treat?” is always “both.”

Winning FISM requires more than merely fooling other magicians: It demands a new technique, a compelling story, a hilarious twist. And so some performers wove narratives at times surreal and poetic. One Japanese magician romanced an empty shirt that somehow wrapped her in its arms. A 15-year-old German student who goes by the name Magic Maxl dueled with a soft-boiled egg that seemed to come alive while he pretended to get ready for school. Others opted for simple, self-deprecating humor. “I spent two thousand dollars to be here,” one French competitor deadpanned, munching fistfuls of potato chips while pulling the four queens from a messy pile of facedown cards with inexplicable ease.

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The Gambler Who Beat Roulette

In a tale that races along like a James Bond novel, Kit Chellel introduces us to Niko Tosa, the man who had casinos scrambling to change roulette. Was his winning streak down to luck, skill, or a supercomputer? We never find out, but trying to figure it out is still a really fun ride.

That night, March 15, 2004, the thin Croatian seemed to be looking for something. After a few minutes, he settled at a roulette table in the Carmen Room, set apart from the main playing area. He was flanked on either side by his companions: a Serbian businessman with deep bags under his eyes and a bottle-blond Hungarian woman. At the end of the table, the wheel spun silently, spotlighted by a golden chandelier. The trio bought chips and began to play.

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The Case of the Fake Sherlock

In the late 1970s, Richard Walter took a job as a low-paid staff psychologist at a prison on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. But somehow, away from the prison, he successfully invented for himself a more attractive persona: genius criminal profiler. Walter co-founded a club of elite investigators called the Vidocq Society, and for years has touted bogus work credentials and claimed to have reviewed thousands of murder cases he actually knows little about. There’s so much more in this wild, unbelievable story of an impostor, excellently reported by David Gauvey Herbert.

On the stand at Drake’s trial, Walter related an impressive — and fictional — résumé. He falsely claimed that at the L.A. County Medical Examiner’s Office, he had reviewed more than 5,000 murder cases. Walter also said he was an adjunct lecturer at Northern Michigan University (he had spoken there informally, possibly just once), wrote criminology papers (he had never published), and had served as an expert witness at hundreds of trials (he’d testified in two known cases — about a simple chain-of-evidence question and in a civil suit against a car company).

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