Adolescence can be brutal. High school can be emotional. Race can be complicated. Social media can both spark and fuel fires. So it won’t surprise you that the combination these things could create a hell of a lot of personal and social angst. This is still a shocking story, but one that seems somehow par for our era. “It was a private Instagram account with barely more than a dozen followers. Few people saw it when it was live. Yet its discovery derailed lives, shredded relationships and caused families to flee both the town and its public schools. What happened in Albany happened online, but the repercussions played out everywhere … It was the incident that explained everything and yet also the incident that couldn’t be explained. But I have tried: I spent more than five years reporting on what happened.” Dashka Slater in the NYT Mag (Gift Article) with the wild (and wildly depressing in many ways) story of The Instagram Account That Shattered a California High School.