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“The Big Error Was That She Was Caught”: The Untold Story Behind the Mysterious Disappearance of Fan Bingbing, the World’s Biggest Movie Star (May Jeong for Vanity Fair)
At first no one thought anything of it. For starters, everyone knew that Cui, a household name in China, had an ongoing feud with the makers of Cell Phone 2. (The film was a sequel to Cell Phone, China’s highest-grossing movie of 2003, which starred Fan as the mistress of a character who bore a striking resemblance to Cui.) Besides, the hiss of gossip always trails stars like Fan. If you were to believe the Hong Kong tabloids, Fan’s brother Chengcheng is actually her illegitimate son. (They are 19 years apart.)
The amateur sleuth who searched for a body – and found one (Jessica Lussenhop for BBC News)
She tried not to get excited when, a few hundred feet from the shore, her sonar picked up a rectangular object on what should have been the blank, featureless lakebed. In the early 1950s, the US Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Missouri River and created Lake Sakakawea, flooding farmland that belonged to the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara tribes, and swallowing towns whole. The anomaly she saw on the screen could be nothing more than an old building foundation or a chimney, she thought.
Memoirs of a Used Car Salesman’s Daughter (Nancy A. Nichols for Longreads)
He dressed the part of a car salesman as well as he played it. At nearly six foot four, he was unmistakable in his lime-green leisure suit and white belt and shoes. His slicked-back silver hair was a perfect match for black shirts paired with white ties and checkerboard sports jackets.
What happens when you put a classroom on wheels and park it in the poorest neighborhoods of San Francisco? (Elizabeth Weil for California Sunday)
It was hard to remember, sitting here, that this was San Francisco, the city that thought of itself as so progressive and yet.… Almost the entire neighborhood was two-story units that looked like barracks, which they basically were. Most of the housing was built in the 1940s as living quarters for naval shipyard workers and appeared to have received no upgrades since. Some of the units were now painted rust; others, a mildew-y shade of yellow. Almost all were crumbling and held together with security bars and plywood nailed across broken windows.
My Quest to Understand What Caused My Children’s Birth Defects (Amy Roost for Human Parts)
Abortion is not always a simple case of wanting or not wanting a child. I desperately wanted the one I was carrying. The complex layers beneath that decision are often overlooked in the contentious debate over abortion, which is another story altogether.
Photo: Steven Lilley