Palmeros harvest medjool dates by hand by leaping into the crown of a tree “full of thorns sharp enough to puncture a tire—or, say, a human limb.” For Offrange, Ashley Stimpson introduces us to the workers who carry on a proud, 6,000-year-old farming tradition that’s in danger of dying out, just as date sales take off in the United States. (Photos by Siri Kaur.)

As far as harrowing job descriptions go, the palmero is up there with trapeze artist and surgeon. Must like heights, must work well in punishing heat, must feel comfortable yielding lethally sharp hand tools. In addition to brute labor, the job also requires an aptitude for botanical minutiae: the pungency of a ripening spadix, the dusky translucency of a perfectly ready date.

Palmeros spend most of their year in the top of the palm trees, which are dioecious plants, meaning male and female reproductive organs grow on separate trees. While the wind can carry pollen from tree to tree, it results in an unpredictable and uneven yield. Around 4000 BC in the Persian Gulf, our ancestors got wise and started cultivating the date palm by hand, kicking off a tradition Medina and Patino still carry out today.

Forrest Welborn had nothing to do with the Yogurt Shop Murders, the grisly killing of four young women in Austin, Texas, in 1991. His buddy, Maurice Pierce, had been under pressure to confess by investigators who wanted a collar for the crime. Eventually, Pierce caved under questioning. He implicated himself and his best friend, Forrest, along with two others, in a crime they did not commit. For Texas Monthly, Michael Hall covers the case and its horrific aftermath.

Both boys were taken to a juvenile detention center, and at around midnight, Maurice was transferred to the police station. A couple of hours later, his questioning began, directed by Senior Sergeant Hector Polanco, a fifteen-year veteran with a reputation for getting confessions. Polanco was known to walk into an interrogation room and announce that his nickname was “El Diablo”; he would threaten the death penalty and grab a man’s arm and show just where the needle would go.

Maurice was terrified. He later told his girlfriend, Kim, that Polanco had claimed that his pistol was the murder weapon—and showed him graphic photos of the dead girls. “They were throwing them in his face, saying, ‘This is how the girls look now,’ ” Kim told me. (Polanco later denied doing either of these things.) In a statement Maurice wrote later that afternoon, after several hours of questioning by Polanco, he admitted to having the gun the night of the murders but insisted he didn’t have anything to do with the crime. Instead, he claimed that Forrest had borrowed the gun, had been acting oddly (“I think he was on some kind of drugs. . . . He was jumping around and acting crazy”), and had boasted that he and a friend had shot the girls in the back of the store and started a fire with their bodies. Maurice said Forrest told him, “I enjoyed watching them burn.”