Josh and Jack are in their mid-20s, when they graduated from university they wanted to be comedians, and now they plan to be Church of England priests. Their friend, Lamorna Ash, wants to know why. This is an interesting look at how people find God — at a time when the number of young Christians is declining.

How can a person travel from one ethical standpoint to another like that? How can you have no belief, and after only a few years see the Christian faith as the gamut by which you live your life? Sometimes as we talked, I wanted to ask if this was their final conviction, if there might not be another shift to a new worldview in five, 10 years’ time.

An estimated tens of thousands of newborns in Spain were stolen from hospitals during the end of Francisco Franco’s regime, taken away from often poor and single mothers and given to wealthy and conservative Catholic parents — families that could suppress these babies’ “Marxist red genes.” Nuns, some of whom were powerful enablers in this kidnapping scheme, encouraged women to give their babies up for adoption. Women who refused were sometimes put to sleep or forcibly separated from their babies and were later told that they had died. In 2017, after stumbling upon medical records, Ana Belén Pintado suspected that the couple who raised her weren’t her birth parents after all; she was, in fact, a stolen baby. In this incredible piece, Nicholas Casey tells Pintado’s heartbreaking story as she searches for her birth mother.

On July 9, 1973, Pilar felt contractions and returned to Santa Cristina. It was an easy birth with no complications. She even remembers holding her baby for a brief moment. But then the baby was taken away and someone came to put an anesthesia mask over Pilar’s face. She cried when this happened; it was as though she knew something terrible was coming. When she woke up again, a doctor and nurse told her the baby was stillborn. The hospital would handle the paperwork and the burial. It never occurred to her that they had lied.

Pilar had never gone searching for her daughter because she had thought there was no daughter to look for. Now, she was sitting right there, a grown woman with a family and an entire life story that Pilar was only starting to know.

Imagine that you and two friends end up incarcerated at the same federal prison. You study together to help pass the time, to help keep your minds occupied. But what do you do when the prison decides to ship your friends to new facilities based on a quote taken out of context in a magazine story? If you’re Eric Borsuk, you spend the final five years of your sentence teaching yourself how to write.

“Why are our streets so violent?” asks Dan Schwartz. Why did our roads transform so drastically from public spaces into private spaces for drivers? Simply put, the combustion engine holds more value than the beating heart. In this piece for Bicycling, Schwartz reports from Hempstead Turnpike, a congested stretch of highway 24 at the edge of New York City, on the eastern border of Queens, where drivers hit an average of three people a month. Schwartz tells the heartbreaking story of 13-year-old Andrew Alati, a boy who spent his days roaming the streets on his bike with his friends — as most preteens do — and what happens one day when he tries to cross the intersection.

Cars are blasting west and east and east and west at such a volume and speed they howl. Attilio watches the cars. They move like one big animal. Every day in our country, this animal kills people. You won’t often hear about it on the news because it’s old news. We decided that long ago when the combustion engine became king and everything in its path was made subservient, when we asked our streets to accommodate higher speeds and more volume, and we allowed ourselves, with some coaxing from the automobile industry and positive feedback from our economy, to forget what we traded. What we traded were lives.

In this touching piece, Laurie Penny finds out that the queue was not about the Queen — it was about the people queuing with you. Told with her trademark wit, this is a story about being British.

“It sounds a bit excessive,” says a friend I once saw snort a whole bag of unidentified powder they found in a club toilet. “Why would you walk all night just to look at a box?” The truth is I’m not here for the Queen; I’m here for the Queue. I heard it calling – the way bad ideas call to any broken heart, saying, This will hurt, but you want it. Come and find out why.

Author Jarett Kobek believes he’s uncovered the true identity of the Zodiac Killer: an eccentric man named Paul Doerr, who died in 2007. Doerr’s daughter, Gloria, isn’t so sure — until Aaron Gell suggests that the two of them come together to meet. In this chilling story for Los Angeles magazine, Gell describes how Kobek’s research led him to Doerr, and how the evidence against Doerr is strong, especially after conversations with Gloria about her father, her childhood, and their relationship. But is Kobek just another amateur sleuth claiming he’s cracked the case?

As Jarett is quick to point out, the timing of the incident seems important. Gloria was only allowed to date on Friday nights, and she remembered this life-changing moment occurring at the beginning of Christmas break. Assuming her memory is accurate more than 50 years later, a quick glance at the 1968 calendar narrows down the date to one possibility: December 20. “You know why that’s interesting?” Kobek asks. It dawns on me slowly, although every halfway decent Zodiac researcher will likely know the answer: It was the night the killer claimed his first victims.

Indeed, the first three attacks took place at teen hangouts, places that, as Paul well knew, Gloria herself frequented, either on dates, as with the makeout spots at Lake Herman Road and Blue Rock Springs Park, or when cutting school with friends to swim at Lake Berryessa. Moreover, they were all places, Gloria confirms, where drugs could be procured.

Whether or not Paul Doerr crossed the line from domestic abuser to murderer that night, it’s easy enough to imagine him out looking for her, a tormented parent in search of his unruly daughter.

Haji Muhammad Sultan owns a business in the center of Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city, dedicated to handcrafting high-quality dentures. Founded by his grandfather 80 years ago, the shop was a place that Sultan came as a child to learn the family craft; he became a military doctor during the U.S.-led occupation and made teeth for Afghan soldiers and war victims. Now, Sultan runs the shop with four of his sons. For Al Jazeera, Lynzy Billing profiles Sultan and their family’s longtime business.

After gaining experience treating soldiers, Sultan returned home and continued to work with patients disfigured by the war. “There was a boy, who was only 14, and he came to me with his mother asking for my help. A suicide bomb had blown his teeth out of his jaw,” says Sultan. “They didn’t have the money to pay for the work, but I made him a new set of teeth anyway. A set to be proud of.”

To this day, Sultan continues to run the business, although he is now joined by four of his seven sons. They say they would choose no other profession than that of their father, grandfather and great-grandfather.

What do you do with a subway car that’s been operating 25 years longer than it was designed to? What do you do with a phone that’s only designed to work for three? In this thoughtful essay, Alex Vuoco suggests that we look to the make-it-last ethos as a course out of the increasingly wasteful spiral that capitalism has wrought.

There is tension in the question of whether to build objects more intensively, so that they last longer, or to recognize that some things cannot endure and thus should be designed that way. There’s no hope for a paper plate in the long run, for example. It’s designed to enter the waste stream as cheaply and easily as possible. Conversely, a toaster could last for decades if maintained properly, assuming the manufacturer hasn’t built obsolescence into it (as is often the case).

Step — or skip — into the world of a fascinating character, charmingly portrayed in this piece for Outside. Kurt Steiner is the world’s greatest stone skipper, and it has cost him a lot to get there. Sean Williams tells his story with genuine affection and respect.

Skipping has brought Steiner respite from a life of depression and other forms of mental illness. It has also, in part, left him broke, divorced, and, since the death of his greatest rival, adrift from his stone-skipping peers. Now, in middle age, with a growing list of aches and pains, he must contemplate the reality that, in his most truthful moments, he throws rocks not simply because he wants to, but because he has no choice.