9 Feature Stories You Can't Miss This Week: Ethics, Entertainers, And Ermahgerd Girl

This week for BuzzFeed News, David Peisner explores the house where comedy legends were made. Read that and these other great stories from BuzzFeed and around the web.

1. The Mostly True Adventures of Standup Comedy's Legendary Frat House — BuzzFeed News

BuzzFeed News

One grand old house overlooking the Sunset Strip played host to a generation of comics — including Sam Kinison, Andrew Dice Clay, and Robin Williams — launching dozens of careers and about as many drug problems. The crash pad of a comedy revolution, remembered, kinda, by the people who survived it. Read it at BuzzFeed News.

2. The Strange Case of Anna Stubblefield — The New York Times Magazine

Photograph by Jonno Rattman for The New York Times

A thought-provoking story by Daniel Engber about a Rutgers University ethics professor who told the family of a man with profound disabilities that she could help him. That is, until she fell in love with him, leading to a contentious and complex legal battle over whether she had taken advantage of a person who has been declared to have the mental capacity of a toddler. Read it at The New York Times Magazine.

3. Women Refugees Fleeing Through Europe Are Told Rape Is Not a Real Issue — BuzzFeed News

Phil Moore

Refugees are facing sexual assault as they traverse central and western Europe — but aid agencies claim this “is definitely not the problem.” Jina Moore reports women's stories — and officials' reactions to them — from Germany, Serbia, and Croatia. Read it at BuzzFeed News.

4. They Found Love, Then They Found Gender — Matter

Photograph by Rhys Harper for Matter

Francesca Mari tells the love story of Johnny and Ashley, a genderqueer couple living in Texas. "If I were now a woman and Johnny was now a man, does that make us straight? Because if there’s anything we don’t want to be, it’s straight." Read it at Matter.

5. This Is the Man in India Who Is Selling States Illegally Imported Execution Drugs — BuzzFeed News

BuzzFeed News

When states ran out of execution drugs, they started paying tens of thousands of dollars to Chris Harris, a salesman in India with no pharmaceutical background. Chris McDaniel and Tasneem Nashrulla investigate how Harris has been able to sell illegally to at least four death penalty states — and why they keep falling for it. Read it at BuzzFeed News.

6. How a Brutal Beating Became the Symbol of Oakland's Gentrification Struggle — BuzzFeed News

Paul Sakuma / AP

Last month, a security guard attacked a poor black man at a Whole Foods in Oakland after he argued with store employees over a problem with his welfare benefits card. In a city wrestling with fast-rising housing costs and demographic change, many black residents tell Joel Anderson the attack has come to represent what they fear: Oakland wants them out. Read it at BuzzFeed News.

7. Lost Girls — Harper's

Harper's

Sarah Dohrmann recounts her time in Morocco before the Arab Spring — and the complex lives of the young women she met there. "Meriem is a prostitute, Taha had told me, but she’s very smart. I said that I didn’t care what she did when she wasn’t tutoring me. And anyway, it was the kind of language not found in books that I most wanted to learn." Read it at Harper's.

8. Stella Abrera Is Just Getting Started — BuzzFeed

Rosalie O'Connor / Via Courtesy of American Ballet Theatre

Matt Ortile discovers how, after 14 years in soloist purgatory and two years of frustrating injuries, Abrera became the first Filipina-American principal dancer in the history of American Ballet Theatre. "Sometimes I’d have bad days when I’d slip down a few rounds and have to claw myself back up to where I was before. I just kept my head down, plodding forward, one little baby step at a time." Read it at BuzzFeed.

9. The Untold Story of the Ermahgerd Girl — Vanity Fair

Courtesy of Maggie Goldenberger for Vanity Fair

Darryn King meets Maggie Goldenberger, the woman whose awkward adolescent photo spawned one of the most ubiquitous memes on the web. "It’s essentially making fun of a nerdy girl for being excited about books. . . So what?" Read it at Vanity Fair.