9 Feature Stories You Can't Miss This Week: Feuds, Failures, And Favorites

This week for BuzzFeed News, Michelle Nijhuis revisits America's long lost pipe dreams. Read that and these other great stories from BuzzFeed and around the web.

1. The Forgotten Project That Could Have Saved America From Drought — BuzzFeed News

Ilustration by Valero Doval for BuzzFeed News

The North American Water and Power Alliance was an audacious proposal in the 1960s to divert water to parched western states. It would have cost hundreds of billions of dollars and pissed off Canada — but what if it had worked? Read it at BuzzFeed News.

2. The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration — The Atlantic

Photograph by Greg Kahn for The Atlantic

In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan published "The Negro Family," a report that was intended to indict America for its discrimination against black people, but unwittingly pathologized black crime instead. Now, fifty years later, Ta-Nehisi Coates unravels the racist and regressive policies that have made America's prison population the largest in the world, with devastating and continued consequences for black families. Read it at The Atlantic.

3. An American Void — The Washington Post

Photographs by Michael Williamson for The Washington Post

Stephanie McCrummen offers a bleak look at life for those — including Joey Meek, who was arrested this week by the FBI — staying in the trailer Dylan Roof called home before murdering nine people at a historical black church in Charleston earlier this summer. "This is the place he drifted into with little resistance, an American void where little is sacred and little is profane." Read it at The Washington Post.

4. The NFL's Most Notorious Underachiever Wants a Doctorate in Psychology — BuzzFeed News

Photograph by Drew Anthony Smith for BuzzFeed News

Lindsey Adler visits the former football player at the University of Texas, his alma mater, where after sixteen years and a tumultuous NFL career, he’s back for a very different purpose. "For most people, being a professional football player is like the pinnacle of their imagined life or actual life. For me, as much as I tried to make it that, it just hasn’t worked. I still want more." Read it at BuzzFeed News.

5. The Old-Fashioned Future of Tiger Beat — BuzzFeed News

Jon Premosh / BuzzFeed News

Anne Helen Petersen on the reboot of Tiger Beat, the magazine which, for 50 years, promised one thing: beautiful teen idols. With such unlikely backers as Kevin Durant and Nick Cannon, its potential comeback hinges on its ability to offer that same thing…in an only slightly updated package. Read it at BuzzFeed News.

6. The Wreck of HMS Erebus: How a Landmark Discovery Triggered a Fight for Canada's History — BuzzFeed News

AP Images (2) / Getty

The HMS Erebus and a sister ship left England in 1845 to find the Northwest Passage. They were never seen again — until a team of Canadian searchers discovered the wreckage in the Arctic last year. Paul Watson explores the dispute that has ensued over the facts of, and credit for, the historic find. Read it at BuzzFeed News.

7. The War of the Hoverboards — BuzzFeed News

Illustration by Alex Eben Meyer for BuzzFeed News

The gliding gadgets are suddenly everywhere and, as Joseph Bernstein observes, someone is bound to make a killing. But will it be the guy who patented them, the guy who imported them from China, or Mark Cuban? Read it at BuzzFeed News.

8. Anthony Bourdain's World Domination — Men's Journal

Photograph by Mark Seliger for Men's Journal

Josh Eells meets the notoriously fiery chef in Malaysia to find out how age, fatherhood, and years of globe trotting on television have cooled him down. "Once you leave the kitchen, the whole world opens up." Read it at Men's Journal.

9. Pee Scams, Kickbacks, and Overdoses Plague South Florida Rehabs — BuzzFeed News

Facebook / Halfway There

Cat Ferguson chronicles the life of twenty-year-old Nicole Cronin, one of the hundreds of people who overdose in Palm Beach County every year. She went to South Florida for help, but instead found a rehab system with weak scientific backing that’s riddled with fraud. Read it at BuzzFeed News.