In Pacific Standard, Nabeelah Jaffer looks at mental illness in mothers who commit neonaticide. Every so often, a grisly story pops up in the news about a woman killing her own child just after giving birth. More often than not, these women report strong feelings of denial about their pregnancies, saying that they were not aware—or only partially able to comprehend—that they were carrying. (“There was no rapport between my body and my mind,” one says.) Rather than going to great lengths to hide the newborns’ bodies, the women often put them in odd places where they are easily found by others—a laundry basket, the kitchen freezer. In the press, the women who commit these killings are usually portrayed as utter monsters; Jaffer asks whether they should be treated not as hardened perpetrators of premeditated murder but as victims of psychosis.

In The California Sunday Magazine, Ashley Powers visits Short Creek, Arizona, an area dominated by Mormon fundamentalists formerly led by Warren Jeffs. (Jeffs still wields considerable power in the area, but he does so from prison, where’s he’s serving a sentence for sexually assaulting his underage “spiritual wives.”) Powers follows the story of Ron Cooke, who grew up in the F.L.D.S. Church but left the community and moved away as an adult. After a workplace injury left him disabled, his family persuaded him to move back to the Short Creek area with his wife, Jinjer. Once they were there, however, the couple found themselves the victims of severe ostracization, not only by their F.L.D.S. neighbors but by the municipality, which refused to connect their utilities for many months. Their story reveals the workings of a community in which even the secular authorities are under the thrall of a cult leader.

Lisa Belkin takes on the painful and complicated issue of failed adoptions in “Giving Away ‘Anatoly Z,’ ” for Yahoo! News. Anatoly is the name given, in the piece, to a Russian child adopted by American parents. As sometimes happens in adoption cases in which the child has experienced extreme trauma in a previous home, Anatoly (and his sister, “Alexa,” whom the family adopted at the same time) began exhibiting severe behavioral issues, becoming increasingly violent. Feeling unable to handle both children anymore, the adoptive parents decided to find a new home for Anatoly. This practice, known as rehoming, is often unregulated, and is widely condemned. When Anatoly’s family decided to give him up, however, his adoptive mother contacted a woman named Cyndi Peck, who runs an organization called Second Chance Adoption and believes that there should be wider acknowledgement that some adoptions don’t work out—and that “there is a legal, safe, loving way to do what is best for the child.”