The best of the week’s news:

• “Signature strikes” sounds like a brand of cigarettes, but it’s actually a little-known facet of the U.S.’s drone war, the part that involves killing unidentified people who seem to be up to no good.

• While profiling an ex-convict, photojournalist Sara Naomi Lewkowicz captured harrowing images of her subject beating his girlfriend. Her photo essay is a terrifying depiction of an all-too-common problem, one that is rarely glimpsed and only dimly understood by outsiders.

• Andrew Solomon has won the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction for “Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity.“

• Canine murder mystery: Was a prize-winning Samoyed poisoned?

[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]