Here’s a Must-Read Tale of Quiet Suburbia

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My quiet little hometown of Irvine has been the site of a truly bizarre little scandal for the past few years. I’ve followed it off and on the entire time, and it’s an object lesson in how a seemingly ordinary couple can go completely off the rails and try to frame a neighbor over a slight so small most people would have forgotten it by the next day.

Anyway, now that it’s basically over, Christopher Goffard of the LA Times has written the definitive series about it. I was going to wait until it was done to recommend it to you, but the damn thing is six parts long. We’re up to part 4 today, so you might as well go ahead and start reading it now. There’s no political lesson here, but it’s one of those riveting tales that’s so creepy and outlandish you don’t want to miss it. It turns out that fictional suburbia is nowhere near as interesting as the real thing.

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Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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