9 Feature Stories You Can't Miss This Week: Adele, Australia, And Alma Maters

The longest serving officer at Australia’s most remote police outpost, Neale McShane is about to retire. But first, one last big weekend watching Birdsville, population 80, become an unlikely — and ill-suited — tourist destination. Read it at BuzzFeed News.

Nathan Heller unravels the perplexing case of Elizabeth Haysom and Jens Soering, two University of Virginia students whose whirlwind romance prompted the gruesome murder of Haysom's parents in 1985. Three decades later, they're both in prison for the crime — but do we really know what happened? Read it at The New Yorker.

As part of the Times' immersive three-part series on child refugees, Susan Dominus chronicles the life of Hana, a 12-year-old girl whose family fled Syria for Lebanon. "'Please don’t tell me your story,' she would say to her friends, 'because if you do, it will make me think of what happened to me.'" Read it at The New York Times Magazine.

Dominic Holden's dispatch from Houston, just before the city's LBGT activists lost the battle to uphold a nondiscrimination law because misguided citizens thought it only applied to one thing: transgender people's access to public restrooms."The LGBT movement has a steeper hill to climb now that it did with marriage equality." Read it at BuzzFeed News.

Brian Kevin attends the centuries-old Icelandic festival of "Thjodhatid," where puffins — the traditional mascot and main meal — are becoming scarce due the affects of climate change. "What’s poignant about a Thjodhatid without smoked puffin is the reminder it provides that climate change doesn’t affect only the natural world...It’s going to mess with our identities." Read it at Audubon.

Charlie Warzel and Brendan Klinkenberg discover how, while the big tech companies release diversity reports, students and mentors at HBCUs are coding their own future. “These are people, not pipes...there’s a difference between not knowing how to find a candidate and that candidate not existing." Read this story, as well as the rest of BuzzFeed's HBCU Issue, here.

Brian Hiatt says "Hello" to the record-breaking singer in her native London, where her life is as private as it is prolific. "People think I hate being famous. And I don't. I'm really frightened of it. I think it's really toxic, and I think it's really easy to be dragged into it." Read it at Rolling Stone.

Linda Rodriguez McRobbie traces the far flung adventures of Clementine Paddleford, a small-town Kentucky woman who became a pioneer of food writing — yet whose name was lost to history. "Paddleford was the first American writer to approach food with as much respect and research as other journalists did with the established serious topics." Read it at Mental Floss.

Jamilah Lemieux reflects on the insecurities that kept her from finding love at her alma mater. "Amazing Howard women come in all shapes and sizes. Maybe if I saw myself in that way when I went there, I, too, could have found myself a Howard man." Read this story, as well as the rest of BuzzFeed's HBCU Issue, here.