Two Men Allegedly Steal $100,000 in Copper and Tools — and One Pauses Mid-Burglary to Photograph Himself Doing It

The surveillance state need no longer trouble itself to watch anyone; the modern criminal now documents himself, unbidden, for an audience of exactly one — the detective. The hunger to be seen has finally outrun the will to get away.

Source: CBS News Bay Area

A Burglar Reports His Truck Stolen — to the Officers Investigating His Burglary

He trusted the state to recover his stolen property while he was in the very act of stealing someone else's — a man who believes in the rule of law selectively, and always in his own favor.

Source: The Independent

Airport Worker Texts a Coworker 'I Got a Bomb in the Elevator' as a Joke, Is Startled to Be Arrested

The follow-up text — 'it was a joke' — is the whole comedy of the confident man: he assumes the world shares his sense of humor, right up to the instant it takes his fingerprints.

Source: WRAL / WCNC

A Texas Judge Files a False Police Report, Gets an Innocent Man Arrested, and Is Now the One Under Indictment

He spent his career weighing the credibility of other men's stories and concluded that his own required no evidence at all; the robe had persuaded him that his word and the truth were the same object.

Source: Texas Scorecard

A Federal Employee Handed $400,000 to a 'Harvard-Educated' Magnate He Met Online, Whose Exclusive Investment Pool Turned Out to Be Her Checking Account

The delusion was never romance; it was rank. He believed a woman who owned a logistics empire needed his monthly deposits — sustained by the quiet certainty that he, alone among men, had been singled out by the exceptional.

Source: Montgomery Community Media

A Federal Judge Disqualifies the Lawyers on Both Sides of a Lawsuit for Filing Briefs Full of Cases Their Chatbots Invented

The entire adversarial system — two sides paid handsomely to distrust each other's every syllable — could not muster, between them, the ten minutes it takes to confirm that a cited case is not a machine's daydream.

Source: Above the Law / Reuters

A Husband's Affair Is Reported to His Wife by the Family Smart Scale

He remembered to delete the texts and clear the browser and forgot that he had furnished his own house with witnesses — every smart device a potential informant, patiently logging the exact weight of his indiscretion.

Source: Daily Record

A Single Gown Is Flown by Private Jet From Paris to London for One Red-Carpet Appearance

The detail was volunteered, not exposed. The private jet for a frock was meant to impress us — which is the purest strain of the disease: not the excess itself, but the serene assumption that the rest of us would stand and applaud it.

Source: Parade

KeroNgb Returns to the American Quad and Discovers, Once More, That Four Years of Tuition Buys Confidence Without Content

Source: KeroNgb / YouTube