I read Akiba Solomon for the first time in the early 2000s when she was a senior editor at The Source magazine. While Akiba's penchant for crafting sentences was on par with some of the greatest scribes of that era, it was her ability to structure features, interviews, and investigative pieces that made the fledgling young writer in me so jealous. This underappreciated ability to thoughtfully and imaginatively curate and structure prose is most wonderfully on display in the book she co-edited with Ayana Byrd, Naked: Black Women Bare All About Their Skin, Hair, Hips, Lips, and Other Parts. As the current editorial director of Colorlines, Akiba has written and edited some of the most important pieces in the country around intersectional (in)justice. We are incredibly lucky that she agreed to be a part of our Times Six series.

Citing unnamed officials with knowledge of the investigation, The New York Times reports that the man believed to have intentionally crashed a Germanwings plane earlier this week sought medical treatment for vision problems.

Asked to turn over emails hosted on Hillary Clinton's private server for independent review, lawyer David Kendall told the House Benghazi committee the task was impossible because the relevant data had been permanently deleted, The New York Times reports.

The captain of Germanwings Flight 9525 used an ax in a desperate last-minute attempt to break into the doomed plane's locked cockpit, according to a report in German newspaper Bild and French TV station Métropole 6.

Ellen Pao, the former Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers junior partner who sued the high-powered Silicon Valley venture capital firm for gender discrimination after she was allegedly sexually harassed, targeted for revenge by a former lover, and passed over for a promotion, lost on each the suit's four counts Friday.

More than a year after she was found guilty of murdering her roommate, Amanda Knox's conviction was overturned by Italy's highest court. The former exchange student was convicted twice of killing Meredith Kercher; first in 2009 and, following a dismissal on appeals, in January 2014.

The planned Flatbush condo is set to open in the next few years. Cheers to New New York.

Starting weeks before Islamic militants attacked the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, longtime Clinton family confidante Sidney Blumenthal supplied intelligence to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gathered by a secret network that included a former CIA clandestine service officer, according to hacked emails from Blumenthal's account.

Ten days ago, the University of Houston suspended its Sigma Chi chapter after what the school's president called "disturbing allegations of hazing within the fraternity." Exactly how disturbing could that hazing have been? Well, the rumor going around campus suggests that Sigma Chi was treating its pledges in a way that even a CIA black site might find a bit excessive: by waterboarding them with alcohol.

"Gentrification tends to stop when affluent people stop wanting to move into the city," Megan McArdle says in a fine overview of the intractability of the affordable housing problem. The only real solution, it would seem, is to close the gap between the affluent and everyone else.

New York University, a Manhattan property development firm with a promising education wing, charges students a lot of money to attend. Undergraduate tuition, room, and board is currently estimated at $65,000 per year. What if a student wants to attend, but doesn't have the money? Who will pay? I don't know—the teachers, maybe?

The racist chant that brought down the University of Oklahoma's chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon originated at a leadership cruise the national fraternity organization held four years ago, according to an investigation by the university.

Does your state have a reputation? Is it unique? Does its own flavor, or is it just another drab and indistinguishable land mass? Does it have real character? Well.

San Diego police arrested Linda Lira, an after-school assistant at Lemon Grove Academy, after she allegedly locked herself into a classroom Wednesday with 14 students and began undressing (and redressing) herself.

Thursday's East Village building explosion has left 19 people injured, with four people in critical condition, the New York Times reports. At least two people have been declared missing since the blaze was put out and the damage assessed. The above image, taken by Twitter user @jdx, gives you a sense of the immense damage.

I was destined to attend a historically black college or university (HBCU) once my parents met at Delaware State decades ago. Fate resulted in a childhood characterized by religious viewings of A Different World. Aside from sending me on an early quest for my real-life Denise Huxtable, the Cosby Show spinoff helped frame the black college experience that my parents and their friends had long told me about. This made the decision to attend an HBCU simple, especially after dealing with the "too black, not black enough" paradox of growing up in an all-black neighborhood, attending a predominantly white high school, and not fitting perfectly into either environment.

A software engineer living in Washington state may have no choice but to sell the home he bought last December because, despite repeatedly checking with Comcast before he even considered buying the property, the company just can't (or won't) give him internet service.

Why are hedge funds rushing to rebrand themselves as anything besides "hedge funds?" As one hedge fund manager explains, "Labels can create a lot of emotions."

It's a cliche: the frighteningly out-of-touch congressman, too old and removed from the world to form legislation that could help it. But it's also real life, and watching Rep. John Carter of Texas try to grapple with computer security is funny until it's scary and sad.

Fraternities in America have spent 2015 more or less acting as if the rules of law and decency do not apply to them. Of course, this is not without reason: for much of the last 200 or so years, our fraternities have been granted a unique pass that has treated their singular incubation of poisonous masculinity as a net positive for society.