As Valentine’s Day approaches, the staff of The Stranger has been reading an avalanche of submissions for our online-dating horror story essay contest. Rude men, drunk men, and bank-robbing men all feature prominently among the finalists, but the winning story, by Jessi Miles, might be the weirdest first date we’ve ever heard of.
“Finally that awful date has paid off,” Miles joked when we contacted her about winning the cash prize. Read her short essay, as well as those by several other runners-up, here.
The Stranger has investigated many subjects before—brutal murders, political deceit, endangered species—but few journalistic forays have been quite so heart-pounding as Chase Burns’s report on what those gas station “male enhancement” pills do. Do they work? Are they safe? What happens, exactly? Only one way to find out: read this.
