Horrific crimes have always attracted attention, but the women who have filled the courtroom are seeking something beyond spectacle.

By Stephanie McCrummen, The Atlantic Photographs by Alexandra Howland

On one of the final days of the trial, dozens of women streamed into the back of a Plymouth, Massachusetts, courtroom, filling two long rows of wooden benches. They stood and watched the judge and jury take their seats. Then they strained for a view as a nurse wheeled in the defendant, Lindsay Clancy, who has admitted to strangling her three young children to death in her suburban Boston home in January 2023, before swallowing prescription pills, slashing her wrists and neck, and throwing herself out of a bedroom window headfirst.

Seeing her there in a wheelchair, one woman crossed herself and whispered, “Please, God.” As an officer gaveled the court into session, others pulled out notebooks, folders, and scraps of paper. “WHY,” Marta Quijano wrote as a prosecutor called a psychiatrist to the stand. “Motivation,” she added, starring the word as the doctor began explaining his opinion that Clancy was not in the throes of psychosis on the night of the killings, as her defense has argued, but deeply suicidal and still capable of knowing right from wrong. In the back row, a woman who had flown in from Cleveland shook her head. She had a true-crime novel in her lap and turned to a blank page at the end. “Stupid experts,” she wrote.

Americans have long been obsessed with murder trials, especially those involving the primal nightmare of mothers who kill their children. The public loves to watch mothers on trial and partake in their judgment. There was Susan Smith, who had drowned her three children in a South Carolina lake and was found guilty of murder in 1995, despite having a history of trauma and sexual abuse. And there was Andrea Yates, who had drowned her five children in a bathtub and was convicted of capital murder in 2002 and then retried in 2006, when she was found not guilty by reason of insanity after witnesses testified that Yates had experienced severe postpartum psychosis and schizophrenia.

The Clancy trial is now part of this sadistic American tradition, but it has also become something else for the women who have been showing up in person. It was not enough for them to watch the proceedings on television, or listen to some lawyer on YouTube, or even stand outside the courthouse wearing pink and waving signs in support of Clancy, as hundreds of women did one day earlier this month. They did not want to be outside rendering judgment; they wanted to be inside, on the third floor, sitting on the wooden benches, as close as possible, in case they could notice some detail, some gesture, some pause or expression or word that might reveal a truth they could recognize from their own experience. Each was there for their own reasons.

A jury of nine women and three men will decide in the coming days whether Clancy, a 36-year-old former labor-and-delivery nurse, is criminally responsible for killing her children or not guilty by reason of insanity. The two prosecutors have argued that the killings were the premeditated decision of an entitled and controlling woman who had been frustrated that she could not master her worsening depression and sought a way out of a life that she no longer wanted. Clancy’s defense attorney, Kevin Reddington, has cast her as a loving mother failed by a fragmented mental-health system even as she repeatedly sought help for intensifying depression, anxiety, and insomnia after giving birth to her third child.

Clancy saw her psychiatrist 14 times, tried 13 different medications, called a suicide hotline, went to an emergency room, tried to enroll in an inpatient program, and confided to her husband that she’d had thoughts of harming her children. Defense experts testified that doctors had missed an underlying bipolar disorder and prescribed pills that made Clancy’s symptoms worse, starting a downward spiral that culminated in a rare condition called postpartum psychosis that can cause hallucinations. Clancy has said that she heard a male voice telling her to kill her children, Cora, Dawson, and Callan, on January 24, 2023.

After being resuscitated following her suicide attempt, which left her paralyzed from the waist down, Clancy was handcuffed, placed under armed guard, and arraigned from her hospital bed. A judge allowed the moment to be livestreamed from the courtroom; a video screen showed her unblinking eyes above a white surgical mask. The trial itself has also been livestreamed, fueling conspiracy theories that have tended to blame the killings on Clancy’s husband or an intruder, attempting to find clarity where there is little, as many women at the trial already understood. At first, only a few showed up. By last Monday, they were waiting in an hour-long line to get into the courthouse, and another that stretched down a bright hallway to the courtroom doors.

The Army secretary told Trump about problems in the Army and his friction with Hegseth, then resigned.

By Nancy A. Youssef, Missy Ryan, and Michael Scherer, The Atlantic.

During a White House meeting last week, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll brought his concerns about the future of the Army under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directly to President Trump—a sign of how far tensions between the two Pentagon leaders had escalated, and of the dysfunction inside the building, four people familiar with the conversation told us.

Trump was surprised when Driscoll told him how many generals and other top officers had been fired, pushed out, or passed over for promotion under Hegseth, one of the people said. Driscoll argued that the Army could not transform itself the way it needs to, because of the departure of so many leaders, this person said, adding that Trump expressed concern about the deep cuts to the Army’s senior leadership. Driscoll informed the president of his intention to resign—and by today, Driscoll was on his way out.

Hegseth’s purge of the military has been so dramatic that with Driscoll gone, the military’s largest service is left without a top civilian leader, a Senate-confirmed top general, a confirmed Army general in charge of operations, or a confirmed commander of Army troops in Europe. Because of all the firings across the service over the past year, the Army, with more than 450,000 active-duty soldiers positioned across the globe, has fewer generals than at any point in recent history. Driscoll’s personal appeal to Trump just days before his exit was the most direct articulation of high-level concerns among Pentagon leaders about the strains facing the force—including Hegseth’s intervention in Army personnel decisions and the mounting demands of the Iran war.

The White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said that Driscoll had been “highly effective” in improving soldier readiness and advancing other administration priorities. “The United States Army is more powerful than ever thanks to his work alongside the Commander-in-Chief and Secretary of War,” Kelly wrote in a statement, using the administration’s preferred term for the Department of Defense.

Driscoll’s spokesperson declined to comment, and Driscoll did not respond to a call seeking comment. But a person familiar with his resignation told us that Driscoll had “brought up concerns with the administration surrounding Army transformation and readiness and Hegseth’s blocking those efforts specifically by firing the Generals who were responsible.” Hegseth did not have an immediate response to Driscoll’s departure.

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New York City’s pied-à-terre tax is a reasonable policy.

By Annie Lowrey, The Atlantic.

If you were trying to identify the spiciest policy affecting the fewest Americans, you’d struggle to do better than New York City’s pied-à-terre tax.

This spring, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Governor Kathy Hochul agreed on a plan to target extremely valuable homes. As of this fiscal year, homeowners will have to pay up to 6.5 percent tax on condos and co-ops assessed at more than $1 million; and up to 1.3 percent on multifamily houses assessed at more than $5 million. The out-of-town owners of a $10 million single-family home would pay $80,000 a year, on top of standard property taxes, for instance. Although the new fee is expected to hit only about 11,000 of the city’s 3.7 million housing units, it has dominated nightly newscasts and fronted tabloids (PIED-A-TERROR, HOLD IT RIGHT TERRE!) for weeks. A city-council hearing on the policy stretched for hours, with resident after resident complaining that it was confusing, unfair, invasive, confiscatory.

New Yorkers have every right to criticize the rollout, which left a lot to be desired. Still, this controversy is a tempest in a walk-in closet. The pied-à-terre tax is a sound progressive option for a city with an excruciating housing shortage and obscene wealth inequality. More than that, it is a policy meant to make the city a city—populated by, enjoyed by, and built for people.

Right now New York does not always feel that way. The brutal cost of housing has strained or wholly priced out many artists and care workers, retirees and young parents, blue-collar types and entrepreneurs.

When wealthy families actually live in the units they own, they invest in the city in many ways. They pay income taxes. They buy bacon-egg-and-cheeses at the deli down the block. They volunteer at nonprofits. They eat at restaurants. They put their kids in school. If they don’t live in their units, they pay property taxes without making extensive use of city services. Still, they contribute to rising housing prices without paying income taxes, spending at local businesses, or filling classrooms with children. They turn homes into safety-deposit boxes, “zombifying” their neighborhoods. No vacancies, no residents—it’s not a great scenario for a city as wonderful and in demand as New York.