Our 9 Favorite Feature Stories This Week: Trans Rights, Lance Armstrong, And The Real Nick Cave

This week for BuzzReads, Nicole Pasulka profiles a transgender woman who sued the D.C. police. Read that and these other stories from around BuzzFeed and the web.

1. The Woman Who Helped Change How Police Treat Transgender People — BuzzFeed

BuzzFeed

After D.C. resident Patti Hammond Shaw was arrested, she claimed male officers searched her and locked her up with men who allegedly abused and threatened her. This is how she fought to make sure this won’t happen to others. Read it at BuzzFeed.

2. Lance Armstrong in Purgatory: The Afterlife — Esquire

Photograph by Joe Pugliese for Esquire

John H. Richardson visits with the cyclist — now legendary for reasons off the bike: "Life is good, he insists. He has five happy children. He's learned who his real friends are. And he is learning to not fight all the time. Really. A fringe benefit of crushing defeat is learning to accept things." Read it at Esquire.

3. Cliven Bundy's War — GQ

Jason Bean/Las Vegas Review-Journal / AP Photo

Zach Baron travels to the Nevada desert eight days after a "successful" rebellion against the US government: "Before the republic — that's what I'd been calling it in my head: the Independent Sovereign Republic of Cliven Bundy — this was a disused gravel pit. Now it's a sandy hospitality suite for the men who'd come to fight." Read it at GQ.

4. How College Wrestling Star "Tiger Mandingo" Became An HIV Scapegoat — BuzzFeed

Justine Zwiebel for BuzzFeed

In St. Charles, Missouri, a once popular college wrestler named Michael Johnson was incarcerated for exposing partners to HIV — to much community uproar. Steven Thrasher examines why so many are so eager to turn against him. Read it at BuzzFeed.

5. In Sweden, Being a Prostitute Is Legal, But Paying for One Isn't — BuzzFeed

Chris Ritter / BuzzFeed

The “Nordic model” is becoming ever more influential around the world, Jina Moore reports. But public health officials and some human rights workers wonder if Sweden is making life worse for prostitutes. Read it at BuzzFeed.

6. I Am the Real Nick Cave — New York Times Magazine

Drafthouse Films / Via nytimes.com

John Wray profiles the singular musician, screenwriter, novelist, and occasional actor as he promotes 20,000 Days on Earth, a film about his life. "Perhaps more than any of his contemporaries ... Cave has managed to invent a self-contained, coherent fictional world that both he and his followers can enter at will; a kind of exercise in collaborative mythmaking that seems to deepen with each variation on the theme." Read it at the New York Times Magazine.

7. Swing Away: The Untold Story Of The First Home Run Derby — Fox Sports

Fox Sports North

Twenty years ago, the Major League Baseball All-Star Game featured the first-ever home run derby. Erik Malinowski explains what made it so special: "All that the contest needed to do was live up to the hype. What resulted instead was a fortuitous confluence of events that added up to one of the most remarkable afternoons in baseball history." Read it at Fox Sports.

8. “Speaking up every. Fucking. Time” — Matter

Illustration by Victo Ngai for Matter

Elizabeth Spiers set out to profile Shanley Kane, the 27-year-old co-creator and now sole proprietor of Model View Culture, a media organization focused on diversity in tech. What she found was a surprising challenge. Read it at Matter.

9. She's Still Dying on Facebook — The Atlantic

flickr/Holly Lay / Via theatlantic.com

Five years after her best high school friend died, the result of a long struggle with addiction, Julie Buntin writes movingly about her continued half-life on social media. Read it at The Atlantic.

Sign up for our BuzzReads email, and you'll get feature stories like these in your inbox every Sunday!