The Most Influential Stories You Can't Miss This Week

Last summer, Neal Falls tried to murder Heather Saul — and police suspect she wasn’t the first escort he targeted. After killing him in self-defense, she was hailed as a vigilante hero, flooded with support, and turned into a symbol of the perils of sex work, but she wasn’t ready for any of it. Read it at BuzzFeed News.

You may not know him by name just yet, but he’s one of the most powerful people alive. Mat Honan learns how Googl's new CEO Sundar Pichai wants to bring the internet to the rest of the world, all while winning back your trust. Read it at BuzzFeed News.

Patricia Lockwood steps outside of her comfort zone in an attempt to decipher Trumpmania. "I was there as a person who thought a great deal about farce, and where it turned into something else." Read it at The New Republic.

Feminists and conservatives, liberals and racists all say they want nothing more than to protect women’s rights. But right now even German law doesn’t do that. Jina Moore reports from Cologne. Read it at BuzzFeed News.

After receiving an unlikely letter from a stranger, Will Stephenson tells the melancholy story of how a once-prolific Beatles collector and friend of Yoko Ono died homeless in Arkansas. "It was one of the hardest things I have ever done, when I had to write to Yoko to tell her of Fred's death." Read it at Arkansas Times.

The Ben Affleck of the late ‘90s was a charm machine: goofy, self-effacing, and deep in a highly public bromance with the equally winning Matt Damon. Within five years, he was a punchline. It took a decade for his career to recover. Today, he’s once again at war with his image. So, Anne Helen Petersen asks: what’s Affleck so ashamed of? Read it at BuzzFeed.

Marisa Meltzer traces the resilient history of fashion's most reviled shoe. "They look like something Frankenstein’s monster would wear if he were an elf." Read it at The Guardian.

Dave McKenna unearths a relic of one of America's most notorious subcultures. “That thing is the Citizen Kane of wasted teenage metalness." Read it at The Concourse.