9 Features Stories You Can't Miss This Week: Posers, Pre-Teens, And Poets

This week for BuzzFeed News, Amanda Shapiro spotlights social media phenomenon and plus-size model Tess Holliday. Read that and these other great stories from BuzzFeed and around the web.

1. Tess Holliday Is The Biggest Thing Ever To Happen To Modeling — BuzzFeed News

Macey J. Foronda / BuzzFeed News

At size 22, Tess Holliday is the largest model ever signed by a major agency. Can she spin her social media stardom into a career in the high-stakes (and notoriously body-conscious) modeling world? Read it at BuzzFeed News.

2. Nell Zink's Improbable Literary Fame — The New Yorker

Photograph by Gareth Mcconnell

Kathryn Schulz profiles The Wallcreeper author Nell Zink, charting her unconventional path from the margins to the center of the publishing world. "If not precisely an outsider artist, Zink was, for a very long time, an outsider: unknown, unpublished, living deliberately far from the mainstream and looking at it with the sharply angled vision that such a position affords." Read it at The New Yorker.

3. Breaking Baltimore's Blue Wall of Silence — BuzzFeed News

Courtesy Joe Crystal / Thinkstock

Baltimore detective Joe Crystal watched a fellow officer beat up a handcuffed suspect. After he broke ranks and reported the assault, he was run out of town, his career ruined. During his former city’s most chaotic week, he went back with BuzzFeed's Albert Samaha. Read it at BuzzFeed News.

4. Willie Horton Revisited — The Marshall Project

Courtesy of William Horton

In 1988, a sadistic home invasion reshaped the politics of criminal justice, with politicians invoking the convicted man's name—Willie Horton—to push for tougher sentencing policies. Thirty years later, Beth Schwartzapfel and Bill Keller talk to Horton about this legacy. Read it at The Marshall Project.

5. Every Mad Men Episode Ranked, From Good To Perfect — BuzzFeed Entertainment

AMC / Justine Zwiebel / BuzzFeed

Before Sunday's finale, dive into Kate Aurthur's epic ranking of every Mad Men episode ever. "Mad Men’s 10-year sweep of a crucial time in American history has been told through these characters, and it’s been both particular and huge: a story about class striving, women, passing, de facto racial segregation, New York City, the call of the West, American ambition — and so on." Read it at BuzzFeed Entertainment.

6. Why Are Palo Alto's Kids Killing Themselves? — San Francisco Magazine

Photograph by Justin Maxon

"Suicide clusters—defined as a group of three or more suicides in close time or geographic proximity—are exceedingly rare," explains Diana Kapp. Yet, Palo Alto, California has experienced two such clusters in the past five years. Is there a reason this one town continues to suffer these tragedies? Read it at San Francisco Magazine.

7. The Garland, Texas, Shooters' Quiet Path To Violence — BuzzFeed News

Les Stukenberg / The Daily Courier via AP / Brandon Wade / AP / Nadir Soofi via Facebook

The forces that drive a person from rhetoric to violence are often murky and confusing, and that is certainly the case with Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi. Claudia Koerner brings the Garland, Texas shooters' histories and motivations to light. Read it at BuzzFeed News.

8. There Is Only One Direction — New York Magazine

Gluekit

Samantha Hunt writes on motherhood, mortality, and, yes, the boy band. "The day they remove my right ovary, Zayn fails to show up at the world premiere of the new 1D record. The boys make excuses, say it’s a stomach bug. I know it isn’t a stomach bug, but I make excuses also because I want to live." Read it at New York Magazine.

9. The Real Teens of Silicon Valley — The California Sunday Magazine

Photographs by Michael Schmelling

"As the demand for tech labor grows, ambitious teenagers are flooding into San Francisco," writes Nellie Bowles, with some students even dropping out of high school to join Silicon Valley's ranks. In this piece, Bowles profiles some of the youngest members of San Francisco's startup scene. Read it at The California Sunday Magazine.

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