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Fascination with tragedy is a normal threat-learning response, not a character flaw.

Unresolved cases hold our attention longest because the mind keeps working on open questions.

When following a story stops informing you and starts activating you, it’s time to change how you consume it.

This post is part 1 in a series.

This year, a few stories have taken over our feeds, our group chats, our dinner tables, and, more often than I expected, my therapy office.

In Massachusetts, the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse who killed her three young children, ended in a mistrial in September after jurors couldn’t agree on whether she was criminally responsible.

In New York, a lawsuit alleges that seven Cornell University fraternity members sexually assaulted a fellow student in 2024. The accused, dubbed the “Cornell 7” online, deny criminal responsibility, and the investigation has since been reopened.

In Mississippi, 18-year-old Nolan Wells went to Horn Island with friends on the Fourth of July and never came home. Months later, his family is still searching for answers. So is the family of Daniel Erving, an 18-year-old in Texas who drowned in April after jumping into a lake with two companions, both of whom are now charged with tampering with evidence.

Sadly, none of these stories is the first of its kind. Andrea Yates’s trial put postpartum psychosis in front of a jury more than two decades ago. A case at Stanford turned a campus sexual assault into a national argument in 2016. And the question of whether a young Black man’s death will be honestly investigated is one Mississippi, and the country, has been asking since Emmett Till. What’s........

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