* Mark I. Pinsky, "My 50-Year Obsession with an Unsolved Mountain Murder."

The crime here is not so much unsolved as uncharged. Pinsky has a theory -- and a confession. But even now, more than 50 years later, the Powers That Be in a small North Carolina county aren't really interested in solving or prosecuting this crime.

* Sandra Upson, "When Will Climate Change Break the Atlantic? Two Scientists Have an Answer."

This is, in part, a profile of two fascinating sibling scientists from Denmark and their controversial theories about when AMOC will run amok. The AMOC is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation -- the warm current that flows north through the ocean, keeping northern Europe much warmer than it would otherwise be. Is the AMOC in trouble? Is it potentially breaking down due to the influx of colder fresh warmer from melting glaciers and climate change? Maybe. Maybe probably. Would places like Denmark or Norway or Scotland continue to be anything like they are today if that happened. Probably not.

[AMOC] helps, for example, the Norwegian city of Tromsø to enjoy temperatures as warm as -1 degree Celsius in late January, while, at the same latitude in Canada, Cambridge Bay often gets down to -34 degrees Celsius (or 30 degrees Fahrenheit and -30 degrees Fahrenheit, respectively). The heat delivery is also why the northern hemisphere is a few degrees warmer than the southern hemisphere and why Earth's warmest latitude is (on average) not the point closest to the sun -- the equator -- but 5 degrees north of it.

But, that warming hole. This spot isn't feeling the full kapow of rising global temperatures because, in recent years, less heat has been arriving from the tropics. Which means the currents must be slowing. By some calculations, the AMOC's flow has weakened by 15 percent since the middle of the 20th century. Looking back further, it is the weakest it has been in a millennium.

* And speaking of climate change and the North Atlantic: "As Greenland's Ice Sheet Melts, an Island Town Rises."

I did not know that "isostatic rebound" was a thing: "As the ice that covers Greenland melts, land freed from its weight gradually rises in a process known by scientists as isostatic rebound. The pressure that once compressed the Earth's crust eases, and Greenland and its collection of coastal islands rises by millimeters each year."

The science there is fascinating, but even more so is this glimpse of life in "the town of Aasiaat, on an island of the same name off the western coast of Greenland."

"Aasiaat is an industrial town rooted in aquaculture that sits roughly 25 miles from the coastline where the Greenland ice sheet meets the sea. Small houses of vibrant colors date back to the colonial era, when buildings were color-coded according to function: red for commercial buildings, yellow for hospitals and blue for fish factories."

Aasiaat is the fifth largest town in Greenland. It has about 3,000 residents. The name Aasiaat means "spiders."

* Michael Harriot, "'Evilest White Woman on Earth': The Criminal Injustice of Terra Morehead."

Seems like a prosecutor having a secret romantic relationship with a judge and brazenly withholding of exculpatory evidence and intimidating defense witnesses would've gotten in some legal trouble herself. But apparently not.

* "Recent reads" means I read these recently, not that they were published recently. This jaw-dropping story from Jeff Stein was published on Salon in 2001: "The Greatest Vendetta on Earth."

It's about Ken Feld, the thin-skinned, paranoid, vindictive gazillionaire owner of Ringling Bros.-Barnum & Bailey and the gaggle of dirty tricksters -- lawyers, private investigators, and the former No. 3 at the CIA -- to ruin the life of a freelance journalist who once wrote an unflattering story about the circus and Feld's father.

It's frightening to read about the lengths that billionaire's will go to when they perceive anyone as a threat. But the whole sordid saga is also somewhat heartening as all of the facts Stein reports here became public due to this viper's nest of criminal millionaires all turning against one another because they couldn't help fighting each other over money and because they all recognized that none of them could trust any of the others.

* J. David McSwane for ProPublica, "Eat What You Kill."

When negotiating his pay, emails show that Weiner leveraged his position as the region's only oncologist, threatening to sue or quit, and he would prevail. With that power, he built a kingdom. In an unusual move, St. Peter's allowed him to take over every facet of his patients' care by naming himself their primary care physician. Because other options for cancer treatment were a long car ride or plane trip away, patients rarely sought a second opinion. Weiner protected his turf, resisting attempts to hire another oncologist or to transfer his patients to other doctors, court records show. As a result, few colleagues were looking over his shoulder. Inside the hospital, some referred to what he created as "his closed system." As one doctor put it to me, if you were Weiner's patient, "he grabbed on to you. He stayed with you for life. No one else would see you until you die."

The "closed system" made Weiner a very wealthy man. It also seems to have created -- and incentivized -- a system in which people who do not have cancer are subjected to (and thus billed for) years of chemotherapy.

And he also may have been running a pill mill:

In the days after Weiner's termination, dozens of his patients came into the hospital asking for refills of oxycodone, morphine and other opioids. The doctors taking over Weiner's caseload couldn't find the prescriptions in St. Peter's electronic system, according to court records, and Weiner's patient files were little help. So they turned to a state database that logs all pharmacy opioid sales and discovered he had been writing prescriptions by hand, which bypassed internal hospital controls. To their shock, they found that many of his patients had been on dangerous levels of narcotics for years. The state agency that oversees that drug registry did not respond to a request for comment.

Often the patients seeking painkillers didn't have cancer and had no documented need for them. Weiner had ordered them as their primary care physician. Many were struggling with addiction. St. Peter's created a document for doctors to track the crisis in real time. Their notes included: "nonsensical" and "one of the worst indications for opioids. I'm still piecing this together ..." and "Many years on methadone. Not clear why."

Oh, and also this: