It took me four months to open the email my mom sent me with my uncle Bryan’s medical history. By the time I read through the 132 pages, divided into three carefully scanned PDF files, he had been dead almost half a year. I wondered why it had taken me so long. There were the usual excuses — I was busy, working, things came up. I had avoided it because I knew it would be hard, emotional. The bigger truth is I wanted Bryan’s story to be straightforward, and I was worried that what I would find in his medical records would not be.

María de Jesús Ramos Cárdenas didn’t know what she was doing when she arrived at the helicopter pad in Ciudad del Carmen, an island city along Mexico’s gulf coast, in September 1988. She didn’t know much about the offshore oil industry. But she was tired of using her medical degree only haphazardly — giving consults when and where she could, often door-to-door, while also cooking food, sewing clothes, cutting hair, and painting nails in between to pay the bills. Things had been better during the past few months; she was thrilled to have finally gotten a chance to put her degree to use more regularly, working on the island at a hospital run by Pemex, Mexico’s national oil company.

If you were Donald Trump’s ambassador to Mexico, you might be forgiven for lying low. Instead, in early September 2019, Christopher Landau, the newly appointed U.S. ambassador to Mexico, posed a challenge to Mexican Twitter users. His counterpart in Greece, he wrote, had almost 150,000 followers in a country with a population of 10 million, whereas the @USAmbMex account only had 40,000 followers in a country of 130 million. “This is an outrage! … Mexico has to be #1!” he tweeted in Spanish.

The decision to stop sending volunteers to give classes in California prisons was a difficult one for Ernst Fenelon Jr., the senior program coordinator of the Prison Education Project.Fenelon, who was incarcerated in California from 1991 to 2005, understood what stopping classes would mean for the project’s students inside: isolation, uncertainty, and a lack of positive activities to fill their time. Though he was worried about participants’ physical health, Fenelon told me, “I was also concerned for the mental health safety of those incarcerated, in the sense of keeping their hope alive, keeping them connected to positive programming.”

Late last month, a group of migrants in an immigration detention center in the Mexican town of Tenosique lit mattresses on fire to protest conditions in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic: overcrowding, the inability to carry out preventive measures like social distancing and sanitation, a lack of medical services and information, and potentially indefinite periods of confinement. One person, a migrant from Guatemala, died as a result of smoke inhalation, and 14 others were injured.

As Ignacio Pedroza travelled the more than 350 miles from Pelican Bay State Prison to his home near Oakland, he was paying close attention to the roadside signs—particularly the ones that advertised prices for gas or food. Things were more expensive than they had been when he went to prison 12 years earlier. In his pocket, Pedroza had $200 in a debit card the state of California had given him upon release. He was busy making calculations in his head, trying to figure out what that money was actually good for.

Niccole Wetherell and Paul Gillpatrick were engaged in 2012. The state of Nebraska has prevented their wedding ever since​. Wetherell is serving a life sentence for first-degree murder, housed in a prison about 50 miles away from her fiance, Gillpatrick, who is serving a 55-to-90-year sentence for second-degree murder. The pair, who met in 1998, have come to accept they cannot marry in person. Instead, they want to wed via video conference, and they want an end to a prison policy that forbids Nebraska inmates from marrying each other except in “special circumstances.” Wetherell and Gillpatrick argue they have a “fundamental right to marry.” In June, U.S. District Judge Robert Rossiter ​affirmed​ that right. The case is now in appeal. But the legal precedent Rossiter cited has a quirky history that involves an infamous co-ed prison, an impromptu wedding, a soon-to-follow divorce and a U.S. Supreme Court decision.

It started as a way to trace family history. It evolved into a tool to help solve decades-old cold cases. Now, for apparently the first time, a genealogy database is expected to lead to charges being dropped against an Idaho man convicted in a decades-old rape and murder case. There is “clear and convincing evidence” that Christopher Tapp, who served 20 years in prison, was wrongfully convicted in the 1996 killing of 18-year-old Angie Dodge, Bonneville County Prosecutor Daniel Clark wrote in a court filing last week.