Lauren Smiley

The car wrecks were staged. The injuries were real. Led by a charismatic rogue, one family bloodied itself to pocket $6 million. (In partnership with Epic magazine.)

And that’s how Rafaela Vasquez—and only Rafaela Vasquez—was indicted for allegedly causing the first pedestrian death by a self-­driving car.

The hair-raising seven-year ride of a ridesharing folk hero Jeffrey Fang through the gig economy.

A false report on Twitter exploded into a call to arms. Then a bus, carrying a family and two dogs, rolled into a remote Northwestern town. A dive into our summer of disinformation and American discontent.

How porch camera culture intersects chaotically with social media, class, and race - and escalated a feud between a package thief and tech-boom San Franciscans.

Karen Navarra was a quiet woman in her 60s who lived alone with cats. She was found beaten to death. The neighbors didn't see anything, but her Fitbit did.

I speak about my Wired feature on gig worker Jeffrey Fang.

What a Silicon Valley couple spends in a month, for the New York Times Magazine's Money Issue.

The tick-tock saga of the failed coronavirus quarantine watched around the world.

The cultural shift of an on-demand world: getting used to getting served.

An 8-part podcast on the family who appeared like the perfect interracial family on Facebook, but had a long trail of abuse that ended off a California cliff.

For years, a mother shielded her family's problems from scrutiny via social media until she intentionally drove them off a California cliff.

The story on an Indian techie killed in a Kansas bar by a white man who screamed "Get out of my country!"

An overseas workers conversing with US seniors - via a puppy avatar.

Farmers are adapting to climate change with new technology. I spoke about my reporting on NPR's Marketplace.