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The Last Face Death Row Inmates See死囚看到的最后一张脸
Brenna Ehrlich’s profile of the Reverend Jeff Hood is thick with tension from the opening sentence. Hood, “half metal roadie with his bald head and long, ZZ Top beard and quirky glasses, half classic priest,” ministers to men on death row. We meet him before dawn on the day that Emmanuel Littlejohn might be put to death at Oklahoma State Penitentiary, 30 years after he killed a man in a convenience store robbery. Littlejohn is one of Hood’s “guys,” men who are guilty of murder, rape, and sometimes both, men that Hood ministers to anyway, because he believes that everyone is worthy of love and compassion despite what they’ve done in life. Not all of the repulsive behavior in this piece is committed by the men behind bars: Hood has received death threats for his work, including from a 70-year-old man in a pickup truck while Hood was mowing his front lawn. Then there’s the torture committed by the state. The Pardon and Parole board had granted Littlejohn clemency weeks before his execution date, which put his life into the hands of Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt. Stitt, who could mandate Littlejohn’s reprieve or death with a single phone call, was said to be praying on the decision—a performance that was still underway when they came to measure Littlejohn’s arms and legs for the straps and gauge his veins for the needle. (Is there anything more cruel than to dangle mercy in front of a man, just because you can?) This is an emotional read. But when you stick it out to the end as Hood does, you’ll find it to be a true testament to faith, hope, and love. —KS
Best of 2025
A Year in Reading: When the Going Gets Tough一年的阅读：当事情变得艰难时
These are the stories I couldn't stop thinking about—the ones that ask us to sit with darkness and still find reasons to keep going.
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He Supported the US War in Afghanistan. Now He May Be Deported to the Taliban.
John Woodrow Cox · The Washington Post · October 14, 2025 · 4,630 words · 官方页
It’s hard to watch videos of ICE agents snatching people in broad daylight across the US. They surface again and again in all of my feeds, each one blurring into the next. Most of the time, I can’t finish them. It’s easier to look away. Which is exactly why we need more pieces like this one: a thoughtful, deeply reported narrative that makes immigration and mass deportation feel less abstract. For The Washington Post, John Woodrow Cox writes about “H,” an Afghan man who supported the US during the war in Afghanistan. After arriving here through the humanitarian parole program, he applied for asylum and built a life—and raised two US-born kids—with his wife. But the Trump administration has since terminated the protections that allow Afghans like H to stay, with one Homeland Security staffer calling him an “unvetted alien from a high threat country.” H is anything but. He and his wife are law-abiding, hardworking, and educated: He took accounting classes, became a bookkeeper, and immersed himself in American culture, singing “Wheels on the Bus” in English to his kids and learning the language with the help of subtitles on Lost episodes. “He celebrated Thanksgiving with new friends, adopted the Chicago Bears, savored the buffet at Golden Corral,” writes Cox. “He imagined taking the naturalization oath and raising his family in the suburbs. He believed in Donald Trump.” Small yet vivid details like these make H’s journey impossible to ignore. Homeland Security claims that sending Afghans like H back to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan would pose no danger, but H believes that deportation means death for him and his family. For safety reasons, Cox withholds identifying details, but through interviews with H, his family, and their network of friends and colleagues, he builds a portrait of a man defined by hard work and faith—someone who still believes in the American dream, even as America turns him away. —CLR
Best of 2025
Best of 2025: All Our Number One Story Picks2025 年精选：我们精选的所有第一名故事
Every story we selected for the number one slot in our weekly newsletter, all in one place.
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The Hobo Handbook耶利米·大卫的《流浪汉手册》
When I was in my 20s, someone passed me a map to the steam tunnels that run beneath the University of Virginia, complete with “anecdotal demonstration” of how to access locked buildings. The map had come under scrutiny from the school; a student had recently fallen from the top of the Physics Building to his death. In most respects, I was, and still am, a cautious person. Still, I felt a pull. I never used the map, but I took some satisfaction from exploring its contents and nursing the idea that I might quietly transport myself somewhere rarely traveled. Jeremiah David knows of what I speak, having frequently tested the limits of a similar, albeit more storied, desire: hopping trains. In New Orleans, he briefly takes hold of a freight car and, keeping pace, considers “what it would feel like to pull myself up on the fly.” In Oregon, he climbs aboard a stopped car one night. “I lay there in the dark for hours before stumbling home at first light,” David writes. “The train hissed and sputtered but never moved an inch.” A friend finally hands David a copy of the Crew Change Guide, an underground text that promises “best practices and guidelines for hopping freight trains anywhere in the U.S. and Canada” and whose extremely pre-Internet history David relays with the care of a true devotee. “The Guide signified more than information to me; it signified the courage to act on it,” he writes. “I knew that no guide, no matter how detailed or digestible, could substitute for experience. But I returned to it again and again over the following days, craving some conclusive invitation.” David’s fascinating literary history is a thoughtful evaluation of his own longings, and a reminder that the most enchanting reads often feel like invitations. —BF
Evolution and Guinea Pig Toes
Zachary B. Hancock · Nautilus · June 12, 2025 · 3,483 words · 官方页
It was the title that first pulled me in; who doesn’t want to know more about guinea pig toes? What followed was a surprisingly elegant introduction to a lesser-known evolutionary theory, wrapped in the curious biography of Sewall Wright, a geneticist with a lifelong fixation on guinea pigs. I’ve occasionally wondered: Why don’t we see fish wandering around on little legs, on their way to becoming something grander? Wright put it more scientifically: How do organisms evolve beneficial traits when the steps in between might be maladaptive? In the early 1900s, guinea pigs were the lab animal of choice, and Wright—then a graduate student at Harvard’s Bussey Institute—found himself managing a colony housed in a gothic mansion in Boston. (Yes, it’s hard not to picture them in cloaks and top hats.) It was there that he encountered guinea pigs with an extra toe and began to formulate his answer. Hancock walks us through Wright’s “shifting balance theory,” which suggests that in small populations, genetic drift can help species leap across valleys of lower fitness toward new adaptive peaks. It’s a complex idea, but Hancock is a skilled guide, helping us through with a clever Lego-brick metaphor and a timely parallel to the evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant. This thoughtful and fast-paced read is both accessible and delightful—an invitation to think differently about how change happens (and feel a touch smarter while doing it). —CW
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A Year in Reading: Inward Journeys一年的阅读：内心之旅
Navigating a world in flux demands some understanding of who you really are, and some of my favorite pieces from this year speak to that need.
A Year in Reading: Backrooms, Backcountry, and Back Home一年的阅读：幕后、边远地区和家乡
From two side of the world—these are the stories shining a light on the overlooked corners often holding the pieces together.
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North Korea Stole Your Job送货工人的反抗
I’ve worked remotely for almost 15 years, well before logging in from the kitchen or couch became mainstream. There’s a lot you can glean about your coworkers just by being online with them over time. You build rapport, deep respect, and above all, trust. That’s why Bobbie Johnson’s Wired piece about how North Korea used American shills to put fake workers inside over 300 US companies yanked my neck on a chain. Christina Chapman was a shill. Once a worker landed a job, she housed and maintained the fake’s laptop, received their pay, took a cut, and wired the rest of the money to North Korea. Before the law caught up to her, she ran a laptop farm from her Arizona home with dozens of computers linked to different workers. Several people in the US have been charged, and these cases are winding their way through the courts. But where did it all begin? In North Korea, all roads lead to the country’s dictator, Kim Jong Un. Kim is a gaming enthusiast secretly educated in Switzerland, and he made investing in IT a top priority after taking over from his father in 2011. Computer science courses now run in schools, and the most promising students are taught hacking techniques and foreign languages. They’re allowed a glimmer of freedom in access to the actual internet so that they can excel as operatives for the state. Johnson surveys the history of North Korean hacking success, and the surprising (and sad) communal conditions under which operatives work today, all to pad Kim’s pocket. This piece puts you on the edge of your seat for the audacity of the cybercrime alone. It takes a hilarious turn when Johnson rides along with a recruiter, coming face to face with more than one North Korean operative applying for, and in one case, spectacularly failing to land a lucrative American job. It’s a scene you won’t want to miss. —KS
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How the Irish Pub Became One of the Emerald Isle’s Greatest Exports
Liza Weisstuch · Smithsonian Magazine · March 17, 2024 · 2,283 words · 官方页
On Monday, St. Patrick’s Day, our local Irish pub was heaving by 9 a.m., a queue snaking out the door into the drizzle. The pub is called Dubh Linn Gate, and I once went there for the big day myself. To get a spot, you have to be there by breakfast (a pint of Guinness). I vaguely remember a lot of green and fiddles, then needing to go home before lunch for a little lie-down. The crowd was diverse, but with only a few genuine Irish revelers, for the Dubh Linn Gate is not in Dublin but in Canada—one of thousands of Irish pubs dotted around the world. You’ve probably got an Irish pub in your hometown. You’ve probably been. The Irish pub is cozy and inviting: mahogany bars, stained glass, intimate booths. No canteen-style sports bar here. It’s a town staple I took for granted until Liza Weisstuch’s piece enlightened me on the work it takes to replicate this Irish charm. Many of these establishments have one man to thank for their old-world ambiance: Mel McNally, whose Dublin-based Irish Pub Company has designed upward of 2,000 pubs in more than 100 countries around the globe. In a genius move, McNally studied Irish pubs for two years as an architecture school student in the ’70s. His “homework” included visiting 200 pubs around Ireland. Once a pub expert, McNally realized that while Ireland may have plenty of them, the rest of the world did not, and he was the man to help. His company takes designing Irish pubs very seriously, as Weisstuch explains: “You can’t sell the history and lore and memories intrinsic in a community’s longstanding institution. But you can sell the craftsmanship inextricably linked to a nation’s cultural legacy.” McNally tells Weisstuch he “recorded the essence of what makes a pub a pub,” which is anchored by the bar, or “altar of service,” as McNally calls it. (The bar being visible from anywhere in the pub is a non-negotiable aspect of the company’s designs.) Up to 80 people are involved in a single project, with everything made in Ireland and shipped abroad. Weisstuch takes her reporting on this detailed Irish export seriously, and both she and McNally turn a lovely phrase in their explanations. They left me with great respect for the effort that goes into creating the Irish “essence.” Next time I am in the Dubh Linn Gate, I will raise my pint to the bar—you can’t miss it, it’s positioned center stage. —CW
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Diary of a Spreadsheet
As the Eaton and Palisades wildfires tore through Southern California, destroying neighborhoods and displacing tens of thousands of people, landlords moved swiftly to capitalize on disaster. In this n+1 essay, tenant organizer Chelsea Kirk writes from inside that moment: “A two-bedroom apartment on Montana Avenue was listed for $3,595 on January 7. By the next day, the price had jumped 25 percent to $4,495. By January 9, it climbed another 33 percent, reaching $5,995.” Watching Zillow rental prices surge in real time, Kirk created an open-access Google spreadsheet to track and collect instances of price gouging. The spreadsheet went viral, the number of listings exploded, and what began as one individual’s spontaneous response quickly evolved into a larger act of resistance. Kirk mobilized a network of activists, coders, urban planners, and people who simply wanted to help. “The spreadsheet taps into the anger of people who may never set foot in a tenant union meeting, but who still feel the urgency,” writes Kirk. “This crisis is reaching people who haven’t been part of the fight before.” Despite thousands of documented cases, officials have done almost nothing to protect tenants or hold exploitative landlords and realtors accountable. (Only 14 violators have been charged so far, which is less than 1 percent of total cases.) Meanwhile, the rent gouging continues. But Kirk’s essay is more than an indictment of government inaction and landlord greed; it’s a testament to the power of collective action in a time of layered crises. “What landlords fear is that we might imagine something better: a world where housing isn’t a commodity at all, a world without landlords,” she writes. This is a vision of what’s possible when ordinary people start to imagine something different—and work together to make it real. —CLR
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Ocean of Influence: Inside the Celebrity Boat Trip That Was All Over Your Feeds
I must have the wrong algorithm working on my feeds, because I somehow missed “the mother of all influencer trips” that unfolded aboard the Luminara, a floating behemoth in The Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection. Luckily, Joe Hagan did not. His Vanity Fair dispatch drops us onto a cruise designed to make superyachting feel more accessible (for those who are merely very rich, not astronomically rich). Spending 48 hours alongside a hundred A-listers, Hagan quickly finds himself in a fever dream: Kate Hudson and Dakota Johnson sip daiquiris in the pool, Shaun White stretches on a lounger, and Leonardo DiCaprio wanders about in the background, vaping. Meanwhile, the conversation meanders from Martha Stewart’s frustration at it no longer being acceptable to drive her top-of-the-range, self-driving Tesla, to a defense of the Sánchez-Bezos wedding as “a normal, plain-Jane affair.” As someone whose own boating pinnacle tops out at precariously balancing a dog and a hamper of curling sandwiches on an aluminum dinghy, I found the sheer level of pampering fascinating—like Below Deck on steroids. But what Hagan captures is not just the luxury, but the unfiltered absurdity of it all: a forgotten vial of LSD, 3 a.m. light shows no one watches, drunk entourages. The access Vanity Fair is granted is shocking, and it’s no surprise the cruise organizer later tries (unsuccessfully) to smother the story. But beneath the spectacle runs a sharp portrait of wealth so insulated it verges on parody. (Yes, some of The White Lotus cast are there.) Part guilty pleasure, part sly cultural critique. You, like Hagan, will step off this ship a little dazed. —CW
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Fried Fish & Family Affairs
Sarah Golibart Gorman · The Bitter Southerner · April 30, 2025 · 3,489 words · 官方页
No matter how many states you’ve lived in, no matter how much of the country you’ve seen, the United States is so vast and varied as to remain stubbornly unknowable. (Sorry, Alexis de Tocqueville.) Case in point: the Eastern Shore of Virginia, where Sarah Golibart Gorman spent her adolescence. It’s a place that feels distinct even from the other two states that share its peninsula—linguistically, culinarily, culturally. (The “from here” vs. “come here” divide is so strong that one transplant who had a child on the Shore is told “just because the cat has kittens in an oven, you don’t call them biscuits.”) When Golibart Gorman and her brothers come back to the Shore to help pack up their parents’ house, she tries black drum fish ribs for the first time in her life, at which point the piece shifts from a bucolic remembrance to something more viscerally satisfying. “Perfectly salty, reflective of the bay and the ocean from which it came, the drum was a taste of home I tried to memorize,” she writes, “allowing its briny flakiness to anchor me.” She unpacks drum’s importance to the region, its unappetizing exterior and its unforgettable interior, its unerring ability to bring a family together. You don’t just read this piece; you feel it. You wonder how it is that you’ve never been to this place, tasted its bounty, felt that particular satiety that comes from sharing such a meal with loved ones. And you add one more name to the list of places you want to visit. —PR
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The Death of an Asylum Seeker and the Shelter Crisis in Peel
When I read news articles about Trump’s moves to end asylum and suspend the refugee resettlement program in the US, it’s often hard to see what that looks like on an individual and human level. Many stories on migration and immigration feel abstract, full of numbers and figures, describing people en masse. “It’s easy to forget that every single person migrating has a story,” Longreads writer Caitlin Dwyer once told me. For The Local, Fatima Syed offers a wide view of the shelter crisis in Peel, a suburban municipality in the greater Toronto area. But at the center of this feature is a powerful story of one woman, Delphina Ngigi. Shunned and attacked for being bisexual, she left Kenya—and her four children—and made the journey to Canada. For decades, the Peel region had a “no turn away” policy, but that approach has become unsustainable. Since 2023, Peel’s shelters have been unable to keep up with the surge of asylum seekers such as Delphina, a situation made worse by a severe housing crisis. (One Ontario organization providing transitional shelters saw a 700-percent increase in requests during the pandemic, almost half of whom were asylum seekers.) Delphina arrived in Canada in February 2024, hoping to declare asylum and find a bed at a shelter in Mississauga—only to die waiting for one, on just her fourth day in the country. The Peel municipality’s response to the influx of asylum seekers has saved lives, turning hotels into crisis shelters and providing social work, health care, and community support. It wants to help. But, as Delphina’s death shows, this Band-Aid approach isn’t enough. Syed writes a heartbreaking, necessary read of one woman seeking refuge, while deftly reporting on the compassionate people and organizations on the ground who want to create a real system, and real solutions, to help those like Delphina who land on their doorsteps. —CLR
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A Total Breakdown of All the Easter Eggs
I miss critics who critique. I realize I’m not the only person to say this in recent years (far from it), but there’s a mealiness these days that flattens much of arts criticism into an equivocating wasteland. And then there’s A.S. Hamrah. Give me someone who cooks up a sentence like the following and I don’t care whether I agree with them or not: “Let me be the first and only critic to point out that Reagan, a three-year-old biopic on the life of the fortieth president of the United States that’s just getting released now—a film directed by a man whose other movies include Casper Meets Wendy, Bratz, and Field of Lost Shoes—is a better movie than Deadpool & Wolverine.” That’s not from this piece; it’s from a summer movie roundup he wrote for n+1 last year. My point is, when most critics have seemingly lost their teeth, Hamrah is still willing to tear into a film’s haunches*—or a film industry’s haunches, as he does here in dismantling the “movie theaters are dead” narrative that’s become even more entrenched with Netflix’s imminent acquisition of Warner Bros. No one escapes his bite. Not the boomers (personified by Bill Maher and, in a double-whammy for the ages, compared to Immortan Joe) who declare movies done; not the conservatives who dismiss film as a culture-war tactic; not the A-list actors who blithely assert that no one has the attention span for movies; and certainly not the studios themselves, who assiduously ignore the boom that’s keeping indie theaters alive while also pumping out a sequel-heavy diet of leftovers. “The confluence of digital projection, streaming channels, AI, and the alleged death of criticism often makes it seem like we are dealing with the destruction of a worldview,” he writes. “I believe that this is indeed the goal of the corporations that control the studios and publishers. I don’t think it means that people don’t want to read criticism. What they don’t want to read are writers who are afraid of their editors, who curry favor with Hollywood, and who want to be influencers.” There, in a single sentence, is the issue. And there, in the same sentence, is why there’s always going to be a place for criticism that’s thoughtful, incisive, and yes, maybe even a little bit crotchety. If you’re looking for concessions, the popcorn stand is that way. —PR
Haines Man Finds Father海恩斯男子在苏格兰找到失散多年的父亲 - Chilkat Valley News
Being shown a picture in a magazine and being told it’s your long-lost father? That’s the kind of plotline that belongs in a soap opera. But in Mike Thompson’s case, it’s plausible. Thompson’s mother claimed she met his dad at a New York party in the ’60s: a suave, well-dressed model who drove fancy cars. Despite her mailing him a GQ clipping, Thompson remained doubtful. Growing up the “only son of a nurse in Anchorage,” as Will Steinfield writes, makes it hard to imagine your dad as a jet-setting James Bond type. Besides, Thompson was too busy leading his own life to chase down his father. While subtle in his comparisons, Steinfield still shows Thompson to be as impressive—if a touch less glamorous—as the man from the magazine. Entering Thompson’s home, Steinfield notes: “Through the entryway is a wall of certificates and mementos from Thompson’s service, as a park ranger, fighter pilot, and air marshal, all hung plumb and level.” It’s Thompson’s calm, level-headed demeanor that grounds this larger-than-life story. When a relative reaches out through Ancestry.com, Thompson takes months to respond with a phone number. Eventually, he learns of his half-brother. He also learns of Stephen Winn: a former model who had been to New York and drove fancy cars. Thompson then flies across the world from freezing Anchorage to freezing Scotland, where Winn lived. I’ll let you find out what happens next. Steinfield’s writing is accessible and smooth, never weighed down by sentimentality or excessive detail, light with clarity. At a tight 3,000 words, this piece of reporting brings decades-spanning revelations to life and wraps them in the quiet dignity of a man who built his own life, regardless of who his dad was. —CW
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The Geological Sublime地质学的崇高，作者：刘易斯·海德
Frequent readers of our curation have probably sussed out that different editors have different pet topics. Every Friday, one Longreads spouse tries to match each Top 5 pick to an editor, just from reading the headlines. (Results vary.) I have my own, but reading Lewis Hyde’s piece this week added another to the list: deep time. The fact that change happens on a scale that humans simply can’t register continues to light up the wonder center in my brain. In the past, this has happened with a 2023 Lachlan Summers Aeon story about how Mexico City residents are “stranded” in time; now, it’s Hyde’s exploration of how Charles Lyell first envisioned deep time, and how Charles Darwin rested his most famous theory on it. Species evolve, as Carolyn reminded us recently, in fits and starts, in a way that’s nearly impossible for humans to witness. Increasingly, though, that work is being undone on a scale that’s tragically perceptible. “Eleven thousand years of survival versus a few decades of decline: it may not be clear how we are to reckon with spans of time so utterly out of proportion with one another,” Hyde writes, “but that is now the task at hand as more species decline or go extinct.” Frankly, I wrestled with whether to include any quote from the piece in this blurb, since it just makes me want to share a half-dozen others. I read this story with my jaw half-open, as I always do when a writer manages to communicate science’s most incomprehensible truths. It’s the kind of writing that sends me to the bookstore, that gets my note-taking hand twitching, that makes my brain feel hungry for more. It might just do the same for you. —PR
The Boy Who Came Back: The Near-Death, and Changed Life, of My Son Max
Archie Bland · The Guardian · May 24, 2025 · 7,053 words · 官方页
At seven weeks old, Max stopped breathing. His father, Guardian journalist Archie Bland, recounts what followed with harrowing clarity: performing CPR on his infant son, the frantic ambulance ride, an insect crawling “along a fluorescent light,” each detail etched into his trauma-heightened memory. Two years on, Max lives with cerebral palsy, the result of oxygen deprivation during a likely SIDS event. Bland writes not just to honor his son—“already a thousand times more interesting than anyone I’ve ever met”—but to hold a mirror up to himself. He examines the quiet entitlement of his life before (“As a white man named Archibald, I always suspected I was missing something about the impact of privilege”) and the raw rage he feels parenting a disabled child in a world full of “absolute doughnuts,” people who compare Max’s condition to a child’s squint or ask no questions at all. Bland’s writing is funny, furious, and brutally honest. “I understand things about myself and the world now that I can’t wish I didn’t know,” he writes, no longer a “genial ignoramus.” Max himself brings so much joy, and Bland wants us to know him not for what he lacks but for everything he is. After reading, listen to Bland’s interview on Today in Focus. You’ll hear Max laugh, and it’s beautiful. —CW
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There Are Two Types of Dishwasher People
A few years ago, I replaced my trusty old black Bosch dishwasher, seduced by a newer, sleeker silver model. I hate it. The new dishwasher may look pretty, but the damn dishes never seem to come out clean. A dishwasher without substance, I thought. But after reading Ellen Cushing’s delightfully sardonic piece on how to load a dishwasher, I’m forced to admit: Maybe I’m part of the problem. A chaotic dish-dumper by nature, I’ve long been the source of sharp intakes of breath from friends brave enough to crack the door and peer into the abyss. And according to fellow dish-dumper Cushing, we may need to refine our systems (or start one). Or maybe we’ve been misled: As she notes, the internet is clogged with dishwasher-loading advice, commentary, and anxiety. This humble source of domestic angst was clearly crying out for an investigation, and in Cushing’s hands, the quest for dishwasher-loading truth becomes highly entertaining. It turns out I had absolutely no idea how dishwashers actually work. I’ve also been wasting time faffing about pre-rinsing plates, when, as Cushing explains, today’s “enzymatic detergent” is “like a little Pac-Man, eating dirt and making room for the soap to do its job.” Life-changing. Maybe you, too, will read Cushing’s piece and quietly make a few tweaks to your own dishwasher game. Or, maybe, you’ll quickly forward this on to your partner. Whether household harmony or continued dishwasher wars lie in your future, may your glasses always come out spot-free. —CW
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The Languages Lost To Climate Change
Imagine a language so beautiful and precise that there’s a word to describe “a female reindeer that has lost its calf of the same year but is accompanied by the previous year’s calf.” For the Sámi, Europe’s only recognized Indigenous community, that word is čearpmat-eadni. As Webster Ayuso says, the Sámi also have terms for specific types of snow, “everything from åppås, untouched winter snow without tracks; to habllek, a light, airy dust-like snow; and tjaevi, flakes that stick together and are hard to dig.” Given a warming planet under climate change, will habllek still occur? If that term is used less and less, could it possibly disappear from the Sámi lexicon, and with it, a richer experience of the world? Could preserving languages be one way to help fight climate change and encourage conservation? I learned a lot reading Julia Webster Ayuso’s piece for Noēma. Here, language and science intertwine like twin strands of DNA, and like DNA, they hold the key to preserving life on this planet. The number of languages spoken in the world is dwindling due to shrinking populations, climate change migration, and of course, colonization. “More than half of the world’s 8 billion people speak one of just 25 languages,” she writes. “Most of the remaining 7,139 languages have only a few speakers.” But Webster Ayuso suggests that the environment benefits when language and culture propagate. She cites as one example Hawaiian, which by 1980 was spoken by only 1,500 people. (Colonizers had routinely shamed and punished Hawaiian speakers, and the language languished.) Education programs for young people helped pull that back from the brink; by 2016, the number of Hawaiian speakers had grown by a factor of 10. This revival parallels the lot of the honu, or green sea turtle, “a powerful symbol of Hawaiian culture”: As the Hawaiian language found a new foothold, honu nesting populations grew by five percent annually. Now if only the whole planet wasn’t at such a steep, ongoing, collective loss for words. —KS
Radioactive Man
Last year, Harper’s ran a feature about people grappling with systemic, sometimes incapacitating maladies. The afflicted blame the invisible toxins of modernity—electromagnetic frequencies, chemicals, additives—but society sees them as hypochondriacs or crackpots. Maddy Crowell’s piece in the newest issue of Harper’s acts as a bookend of sorts to that story: another case of hardship compounded by dismissal. Frank Vera III worked at George Air Force Base in the 1970s, where he interacted with what we now know are carcinogenic substances; he also claims to have been exposed to radioactive waste, and began exhibiting symptoms that ended his military career. Yet no one would validate his tale, or his suffering. Decades later, Vera began posting on Facebook, where he attracted a tribe of others who worked at the same base and claimed similar health troubles. Enter Crowell—a curious reporter who, to Vera, represented something more like a savior. As Crowell begins to investigate the alleged phenomenon, she finds herself examining the meta-phenomenon of conspiratorial thinking. Vera’s medical troubles are undeniable; so is the fact that the US military has worked with toxic materials. However, Vera’s crusade had also led him onto shakier ground, and his passion was now mixed with paranoia. “The more we spoke, the more confused I became,” Crowell writes. “Many of his most impassioned beliefs seemed wildly incoherent. But Frank’s emotional and physical pain was undeniable. He cried several times. And even if he lacked a smoking gun, he had enough evidence to indicate that the Air Force wasn’t being totally forthright about whatever had been going on at George.” There are no easy answers here. There’s plenty of stonewalling, though, and bureaucracy that seems designed to thwart accountability. So, perhaps unsurprisingly, Crowell is unable to bring her investigation to a satisfying end. But that’s also the only possible outcome here, if you think about it. After all, it’s only wrong if you get caught. And the more power you have, the unlikelier that is. —PR
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A ‘Jeopardy!’ Win 24 Years in the Making
Ringer writer Claire McNear has consistently owned the Jeopardy! news beat since Alex Trebek’s 2020 death, including hastening the departure of initial replacement Mike Richards. But it’s stories like this one that really explain the game show’s foothold in the cultural firmament. More than two decades ago, a man named Harvey “H-Bomb” Silikovitz auditioned for Jeopardy! He failed the test. Over the years, he auditioned nine more times. Those times, he passed the test. But he still never got on the show. He became friendly with the producers. He became a well-known personality in the larger trivia subculture, which is a thing that exists. He developed Parkinson’s disease. Finally, last fall, he was invited to be a contestant. And in his first episode, which aired earlier this week, he won. (Alas, that would be his only victory; he was vanquished by a nuclear engineer the next night.) On its own, that’s a mildly heartwarming story. Buoyed by McNear’s reporting, though, it’s a fascinating look behind the buzzer. Jeopardy! has somehow only become more popular in the post-Trebek era—more than 65,000 people have taken the online test in the past year alone—and by now is a subculture of its own, beloved by alumni and spectators alike. McNear navigates its intricacies with a breezy assurance, less an anthropologist than a confidant. When you have that many people fighting to get on, simply getting to the lectern is a victory of its own. The winding nature of H-Bomb’s journey makes it all the sweeter. —PR
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The Doctor, the Biohacker, and the Quest to Treat Their Long COVID
Five years after COVID-19 first upended the world, as many as 20 million Americans and at least 400 million people worldwide are battling long COVID, a debilitating and misunderstood condition with few answers and no cure. Erika Hayasaki follows two men—Matthew Light, a pulmonologist, and Levi Henry, a CrossFit enthusiast—who, despite their different approaches to medicine, find themselves in the same boat. They continue to search for something, anything, that might make them feel like themselves again. Light’s shortness of breath persisted for months after getting COVID. “To be a pulmonologist struggling to breathe,” writes Hayasaki, “felt like a special kind of hell.” He developed chronic fatigue syndrome, and after a year of living with his symptoms, he asked himself: “Who is supposed to take care of long COVID patients?” He decided to be that doctor. He now leads a support group at UCHealth Medical Center of the Rockies in Colorado, where a growing community meets to commiserate and learn about potential new treatments without judgment. “They turn to each other,” writes Hayasaki, “because who better to turn to? Science does not yet have the answers.” Levi Henry, the former CrossFitter, had tried a number of experimental therapies—hyperbaric oxygen therapy, red light panels, lymphatic drainage massage, ice baths—before finding Light’s support group. Some treatments seem promising; a low dose of naltrexone has helped Light, for example, but others are risky and unproven. For both men, the search for relief is a kind of survival. In a world that’s moved on from the pandemic, and a new Trump administration decimating everything in its path, their support group is a space to share knowledge, and a lifeline. Hayasaki captures their frustration and resilience with nuance, showing what it’s really like to navigate an illness that remains a mystery. —CLR
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Why Children’s Books?
Shortly after parenthood recalibrated my life, I visited the children’s section of our local library for the first time. My initial confusion—Who hid all the modern art books in the kids’ section?—quickly gave way to giddiness as I pulled more picture books from the shelves. There was subversion here, both sly and overt! There was economy of emotion! Conceptual rigor! The library’s most accessible section, I realized, was also its most powerful. “Children’s literature can be a form of distillation: of what it means to hope, to fear, to yearn, distilled down and down into a piece of concentrated meaning,” Katherine Rundell writes for The London Review of Books. It also holds the promise of an egalitarian space: “We can all meet on the pages of A.A. Milne in a way that we cannot on the pages of Jacques Derrida.” Rundell offers a brisk and entertaining history of English-language children’s books, from “conduct manuals focused on nose-picking” through Tolstoy’s stories for younger readers. (“There is a lion who tears apart a puppy, a tree cut down ‘screaming in unbearable pain,’ a dead bird, a dead hare, another dead bird.”) As labor and suffrage movements gained strength, however, children’s books became less concerned with simplistic manner lessons; instead, Rundell observes, “they began offering visions of how various good and evil might be.” She draws on the mighty Ursula Le Guin for urgency: “In an America where our reality may seem degraded to posturing patriotism and self-righteous brutality, imaginative literature continues to question what heroism is, to examine the roots of power and to offer moral alternatives.” And there are so many alternatives to consider, if one only looks. —BF
Cloning Came to Polo. Then Things Got Truly Uncivilized
Until a week ago, my entire understanding of polo came from reading Jilly Cooper’s Polo—multiple times, no shame. In Cooper’s world, the sport is soaked in glamour, drama, and obscene wealth. Tight jodhpurs, loose morals, and fabulous beasts (both human and equine) abound. I assumed liberties had been taken. Then I read Matt Reynolds’s piece in Wired, and I stand corrected. Not averse to a bit of Cooper-esque flair himself, Reynolds introduces our hero, polo god Adolfo Cambiaso, as “a horse whisperer, a sex symbol, or a marvel of longevity,” with a “handsome face and cleft chin sun-beaten and stubbled, his dark hair matted with sweat.” Along with that chiseled jawline, Cambiaso also happens to own a little bay mare named Cuartetera—possibly the greatest polo pony that ever lived. But Cuartetera can’t play every chukka. Enter Texas oilman Alan Meeker, who struck a deal with Cambiaso to clone his best horses, including Cuartetera, via the pet cloning lab ViaGen. The final plan? To produce and sell foals of the clones. The catch? The golden rule of their agreement was that the Cuartetera clones themselves must never be sold. Her bloodline was just too precious. (Hence the surreal moment at the 2016 Argentine Open, when Cambiaso rode six different Cuarteteras to victory.) All was fine and dandy until, in a dastardly yet predictable plot twist, Meeker sold clones anyway—in a secret deal struck aboard a superyacht, obviously. Legal battles ensued, and Reynolds gleefully guides us through every betrayal, backstab, and bruised ego. The stakes are high, the horses are glorious, the men are brooding, and the science is bonkers. Every player on the field is fascinating, and you’ll be hooked until the last Cuartetera gallops off into the sunset. So saddle up! —CW
The Human Stain Remover: What Britain’s Greatest Extreme Cleaner Learned From 25 Years on the Job
Tom Lamont · The Guardian · September 25, 2025 · 4,538 words · 官方页
For the past couple of months, I have been living with my mother’s ancient dog, Barney. Sadly, what Barney has gained in years, he has lost in personal hygiene. In his fading mind, carpets are now pee zones, and the contents of bins are better off festooned decoratively around the house. Life with Barney has sent me down a rabbit hole of frantic googling, late-night YouTube tutorials on stain removal, and desperate experiments with baking soda and vinegar. It turns out I should have just asked Ben Giles, a.k.a. “the human stain remover.” As Tom Lamont discovers in this piece for The Guardian, Giles is “a self-taught stain savant, a walking database of remedies.” His cleaning business, Ultima, would take on any mess—from dead whales to drug paraphernalia, murder scenes to hoarders. Giles even started a training academy in the 2010s, teaching about 600 cleaners, whom he could then call upon for extra help. It’s a fascinating insight into an industry more often kept firmly under wraps. We all know there must be extreme cleaning jobs, but our collective subconscious chooses not to dwell. The mess our bodies can produce is far too human—or perhaps far too animal-like—to be fully acknowledged. But Lamont does not shy away. Prepare for relentless, visceral descriptions. Prepare for maggots, stench, and every bodily fluid imaginable. Lamont’s lack of squeamishness reflects his subject: a man for whom this has all become commonplace. Yet there are occasional hints at the emotional cost of witnessing so much of “life’s disorderly processes.” Giles has gained an understanding “that is both privileged and discouraging.” A part of a hidden corner of modern life that is extraordinary, gross, and profoundly human. Turns out dog pee is no big deal. —CW
You Have No Idea How Hard It Is to Be a Reenactor
Caity Weaver · The Atlantic · October 8, 2025 · 7,197 words · 官方页
I once participated in a reenactment of the Battle of Waynesboro, a Civil War skirmish, for a story about the ways in which people make history visible in the present. The verisimilitude was all over the place; the past assailed the present, and vice versa, in odd ways. I saw a father tell his child, “I don’t want to hear anything about Hooters,” while, nearby, a teenager played “John Brown’s Body” on a fife. Throughout, I felt my distance from the most committed performers, and wondered whether I could glean anything meaningful from their historical theater. It’s not easy: Reenactments are a natural draw for participatory journalists, and the genre can feel well-worn. (This year has already seen thoughtful pieces on a performance of the Scopes Monkey Trial and the gamification of the US Capitol insurrection.) Of course, not all participatory journalists are Caity Weaver, survivor of TGI Friday’s “Endless Appetizers” promo and undaunted seeker of Tom Cruise’s secret lair. For “The Unfinished Revolution,” a new Atlantic series, Weaver embeds with reenactors for two early Revolutionary War battles, and savors every detail. A handsome Benedict Arnold is hoisted by his men, who bathe his leg in olive oil and struggle to remove his boots. A “Patriot civilian” whispers to Weaver that “a lot of the Brits are swingers.” It’s easy to admire Weaver’s eye for the absurd, and it’s a pleasure to share her gaze, which she gamely trains on herself, cataloguing potential musket mishaps and assessing her elaborate outfit as “a shapeless mound of fabrics crowned by my plain stupid face.” But what I most admire is her deep affection for the messiness of humanity. Here, she reveals its place at the heart of history’s slow progress. —BF
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At Jackie Robinson’s High School, Altadena Rebuilds After Fire
Alyssa Roenigk · ESPN · June 20, 2025 · 4,016 words · 官方页
My husband’s cousin and her family lost their home in the Eaton Fire. Nothing was salvageable. While I was putting together a care package for them, I would look at an item in a store and wonder, “Do they already have this?” Then I’d remember: They don’t have anything. This happened again and again, as my brain struggled to grasp the fact and meaning of total loss. Here, Alyssa Roenigk spends time with students at Altadena’s John Muir High School, where unthinkable loss is nearly endemic: One in four kids at Muir lost their homes or were displaced by the fire. Roenigk gracefully timestamps sections of her piece with the number of days since the fire began, echoing the way many Altadenans now think: “Dates are no longer defined by a calendar but instead by how much time has passed since that fateful Tuesday.” Nine days after the fire, Muir senior Jasmine Collins is living in a motel with her mother and siblings; all of their worldly possessions now fit into their truck. Fifty days after the fire, someone breaks into the truck and steals everything. This is one of many details Roenigk musters to remind her readers that disaster has a long, painful, and unpredictable tail. “Money from online fundraisers is drying up,” she writes. “Donation centers are packing up and closing. The rebuilding process is slow.” People are leaving Altadena, too, including some whose families have been there for generations. Those who remain must adjust to a new normal. “If we’re choosing to stay,” one of Roenigk’s subjects says, “then we’re going to have to embrace that it’s never going to be the same again.” There is beauty, of course, in rising from the ashes. But Roenigk’s story shows that there is also beauty in making space for grief. In a memorable scene, Jasmine’s water polo coach asks how she’s doing after a game that takes place just 16 days after the fire: “Jasmine looks up. ‘I . . . ’ She stops. Her eyes fill with tears. She smiles and forms a heart with her hands.” —SD
The Murder, the Museum, and the Monument
Kori Suzuki · High Country News · April 1, 2025 · 6,075 words · 官方页
In April 1943, 63-year-old James Wakasa was walking his dog near the edge of the Topaz Relocation Center, a Japanese American incarceration camp in the Utah desert, when he was shot and killed by a soldier in a guard tower. Fellow prisoners erected a stone and concrete monument in Wakasa’s honor. Decades later, Nancy Ukai, a researcher in Berkeley whose parents had also been incarcerated at Topaz, began to learn more about Wakasa’s story, and that the Roosevelt administration had ordered the monument to be destroyed. Two archaeologists read Ukai’s research, visited Topaz, and—to their surprise—stumbled upon the monument, buried in the ground. But what followed wasn’t a triumphant rediscovery, as Kori Suzuki reports, but an example of how heritage and historical memory can be mishandled. The museum entrusted with preserving Topaz excavated the monument without involving any descendants of those imprisoned there. “In the museum’s actions, [Ukai] saw the same patterns of violence emerging,” writes Suzuki, violence in the form of silence and erasure. Suzuki’s storytelling is quiet and clear-eyed, letting the weight of history press through each sentence. More than 80 years later, Topaz descendants still seek answers about the discovery and excavation of the monument, and still fight for dignity and remembrance. This story isn’t just about an unearthed piece of stone—it’s a mirror and a warning, reminding us that the powerful are more often interested in rewriting history than reckoning with it. —CLR
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Abandoned by Trump, a Farmer and a Migrant Search for a Better Future
John Woodrow Cox, Sarah Blaskey, and Matt McClain · The Washington Post · June 21, 2025 · 5,553 words · 官方页
There’s a moment in this piece I’ve been thinking about ever since I read it. Otto Vargas, a farmhand from Guatemala, asks his new boss, JJ Fricken, whether he has other employees who work his land in Colorado. Fricken hears the question through an earbud that translates in real time—the men don’t speak the same language, so this is how they communicate. Fricken points at himself, then at Vargas. “Just you and me,” he says. The scene, evoking both vulnerability and solidarity, is a succinct illustration of the wider story, which details how the two men’s fates came to be intertwined. The federal government had promised Fricken a $200,000 grant to hire a worker from Latin America, who would be given an H-2A visa. “In a place where local, legal help was nearly impossible to keep, the extra worker would give him the freedom to handle more jobs and invest in his own equipment,” the authors explain. “It was an opportunity that could transform his family’s future.” Vargas’s future was on the line too: “He’d prayed that he’d get a job interview, and when he did, he prayed he’d do well, and when he did, he prayed he’d receive an offer, and when he did, he prayed the United States would let him come.” Then the Trump administration, despite boasting about its love for American farmers, froze the grant money. Suddenly, Fricken was in debt, and while Vargas was able to come to Colorado, it wasn’t clear how long his job would last. To survive the administration’s cuts and cruelty, a Trump voter and an immigrant needed each other. What a terrible, beautiful thought. —SD
The Strange Fate of Flight 2069
Kate Mossman · The New Statesman · December 11, 2025 · 6,764 words · 官方页
By the end of the first paragraph of this New Statesman piece, reporter Kate Mossman had my full attention. “The majority of those on Flight 2069 were asleep when Paul Mukonyi folded up his belongings at around 4am UK time, headed up the stairs into the toilet at the front of the plane, then came out and quietly let himself into the cockpit,” she writes. For the next two minutes and 38 seconds, terror and chaos ensued as Mukonyi fought the copilot to control the plane and crash it in an apparent suicide attempt, one which could have taken the lives of 400 other passengers with him. It took four men to subdue the attacker, but this is only the beginning of the story. (I’m reminded of “The Long Fall of One-Eleven Heavy,” Michael Paterniti’s Esquire feature about Swissair 111, which disintegrated upon impact with the sea off the coast of Nova Scotia in 1998, with 229 souls aboard.) Mossman’s central challenge is considerable: How do you tell the story of the disaster that did not happen? How do you maintain momentum in a piece where a safe outcome gets revealed early on? What her piece shares with Paterniti’s is strong pacing and character development. She introduces us to some of the crew and passengers, some of whom were only on the flight because of a missed connection. In vivid prose, Mossman tells this near-disaster through their eyes, ears, and memories. “This is the issue of the flight, as it lives on in the minds of those who survived it: how to measure the price of a disaster averted,” she writes. For me as a reader? I felt this story deep in my gut. —KS
Why Doesn’t Anyone Trust the Media?
Jelani Cobb, Taylor Lorenz, Jack Shafer, and Max Tani · Harper’s Magazine · October 22, 2025 · 6,693 words · 官方页
There’s a video production company in Chicago called Mainstream Media, whose mission is to “help companies nationwide connect to their community with crisp and clear live video.” Mainstream Media is not a news organization, a point its founders have tried to make clear over the years, even adding a disclaimer to their website that reads, “We are not the actual ‘mainstream media.’” And yet, every so often—following bad-faith partisan attacks, for instance—the company receives messages from people angry at swaths of the American press. Misguided though they might be, these critics aren’t alone: Trust in the mass media is at its lowest point in half a century, according to one popular poll. And yet the mere existence of those annual polls reveals something about our perennial anxiety over the press. “Americans have never trusted large national institutions,” Jelani Cobb, dean of the Columbia Journalism School, remarks in this lively Harper’s forum with press critic Jack Shafer and reporters Max Tani and Taylor Lorenz. “In the nineteenth century, we didn’t trust the railroad monopolies; in the early twentieth century, we didn’t trust the newly corporatized banks. Today, when people think of a large, faceless, national institution, it’s more often than not the news media.” Is our loss in trust driven primarily by failures in coverage of Gaza or COVID-19, or about our collective distance from remote institutions that fail to reflect the communities they serve? The four journalists here differ in how they apportion responsibility, as well as how they interpret threats against press freedom in the US and what AI will do to entry-level journalism positions. They also complicate each other’s arguments productively, reminding each other, and us, that the mission of the media is, per Tani, to “meet people where they are.” You mean connect to our communities? Looks like Mainstream Media has the right idea. —BF
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Idle Things
Robert Rubsam · The Baffler · November 10, 2025 · 2,365 words · 官方页
A few miles from where I live, there’s a playground made from the concrete fragments of old buildings. Its pieces were salvaged from local government offices, banks, theaters, and hotels, then invitingly arranged—“like adult-sized toy building blocks,” a nearby plaque offers. Children race between the unseeing stone faces lifted from the Bank of Montreal and balance themselves on hunks of Parliament. It’s a false ruin, fabricated by an artist and lacking deep history; still, I appreciate how it summons thoughts of power, turnover, churn. A real ruin, Robert Rubsam writes, is “time’s product and time’s survivor,” an artifact that “has lost its originating context, yet survived into our own.” For The Baffler, Rubsam ruminates on ruin, sharpening his ideas against those of Jenny Erpenbeck, a writer born in East Berlin whose childhood played out amidst the post-war wreckage. “The ruins lingered,” Rubsam writes, “and in lingering, they taught her the virtue of unproductive places and idle things, of empty spaces, left open for her to wander them and to ask: How did I get here, and how did all of this?” Rubsam’s essay is well-timed, arriving at a moment in which natural and political forces are rewriting many of our landscapes and dismantling our familiar structures, for reasons banal and unconscionable. And while it’s a powerful introduction to Erpenbeck’s writing, it doubles as a prompt to notice, to document. Erpenbeck’s writing is “a kind of bulwark, a catalog of the minor details and inconsequential impressions that make up the course of a private life,” Rubsam writes. “They are her fragments, shored up against forgetting.” Even my false ruins may one day turn to real rubble. —BF
Changing Lanes
That I haven’t bowled a single time in the past 15 years* doesn’t change the fact that a bowling alley’s sounds and smells remain one of the most vivid sense memories still knocking around my temporal lobe. Besides, this isn’t really a piece about bowling. It’s a piece through the eyes of a bowler about how bowling has changed as a social sport, and particularly how it’s changed since the arrival of private equity and its well-documented playbook. We know that league bowling is down nearly 90% from its peak in the late 1970s. We know that neighborhood lanes have closed with ominous regularity. However, bowling’s renaissance, as envisioned by large PE-backed global chains like Bowlero, is loud, luxe, and decidedly anti-league. It’s bowling as an occasional night out rather than the “third place” that it used to be—which means it’s somehow both more expensive and cheaper-feeling. (Learning that pins are increasingly reset by attached cords, dragged back into position like bottom-heavy marionettes, was surprisingly disappointing.) Dave Denison takes us through the landscape as a bowler should: visiting as many New England alleys as he could drive to, and talking to the owners and enthusiasts who have kept the sport alive. There’s some nostalgia here for a bygone era, sure, but Denison also praises the places that are threading the needle, creating a community while also avoiding the cost-cutting of conglomerates. Mostly, though, bowling has been cleaved by profit motive just as so many other industries have, forcing bowlers and lane owners alike into a difficult choice. You can drown while clinging to a fading ideal, or you can jump into a lifeboat that you know is heading somewhere worse. Just make sure that 15-pound ball doesn’t make the decision for you. —PR
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Saving a New Orleans Banksy
Earlier this week, I watched a video of people on a street outside London’s Royal Courts of Justice, moving barriers away from a wall to uncover a Banksy mural. The artwork—depicting a judge using a gavel to strike a protester who holds a blood-spattered sign—is likely a commentary on the recent mass arrests at pro-Palestinian demonstrations. There’s been a lot of online chatter about it: the court’s swift cover-up, the legal implications for altering a listed building, and whether the artwork was genuine, which Banksy confirmed on Instagram. This question of authenticity was fresh in my mind after reading Ivy Knight’s Oxford American piece about Boy on a Life Preserver Swing, one of the murals Banksy left behind in New Orleans in the years after Hurricane Katrina. Knight tells a delightful story about an unlikely trio—a dump truck driver, a real estate developer, and an art conservator—who come together to save the piece. Originally painted on the exterior wall of a biker bar, the mural was defaced with red spray paint, then reduced to rubble when the building was demolished. Ronnie Fredericks, the truck driver, salvaged the cinderblocks and stored them for years until he stumbled upon an opportunity with Sean Cummings, an art-loving hotelier, to bring the work back to life. “Joy” is not a word I usually associate with Banksy, but I felt it while reading Knight’s account of the restoration effort, and the science behind the careful process. (“She tried every removal method in her arsenal,” Knight writes of Elise Grenier, the art conservator challenged with the task, “but she could find no way to remove spray paint from spray paint.”) The trio’s shared curiosity and appreciation for the art is palpable, and as I watched the clip of Londoners removing security barriers to glimpse Banksy’s latest critique, I felt a similar sense of collective awe and empowerment. Together, these interactions with both murals speak to Banksy’s enduring role as a chronicler of human struggle and resilience, and the power of public art, even—or, perhaps, especially—in the face of erasure and suppression. —CLR
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‘I Awoke at ½ Past 7’
Elena Mary · Aeon · November 17, 2025 · 3,683 words · 官方页
I’ve never wanted to optimize my life. I use one simple tool—a digital notepad, Simplenote—to jot down thoughts and track my to dos at work and at home. That’s it. I remember when Apple introduced iCloud and decided that syncing my life would make it easier. (It didn’t.) Or when apps like Instapaper and Read It Later promised to organize my reading queue and instead rewired me to consume rather than enjoy. Nearly 15 years later, this constant push toward productivity is a cultural norm. As historian Elena Mary explains, though, Victorian-era diarists were already doing this long before Big Tech. In her enlightening essay, she shows how people across all classes of UK society used diaries to meticulously record their experiences, organize their days, and measure their achievements during a period obsessed with progress and innovation. “A printed diary held out the promise of total control over time, place and the self,” writes Mary. Diaries of this time could be outlets for introspection, but many were practical tools for planning and self-improvement: “The future could be mapped out, goal-oriented, solution-focused.” Increasingly, diaries were shared with others, which sounds a lot like today’s blogs and social media. It’s no surprise, then, that some of these 19th-century diaries became records of failure, documenting the days when people fell short of their goals. “The Victorians were great innovators, but progress was Janus-faced,” writes Mary. “For every leap forward, a renewed pressure to go further, and faster, to do better, be better. The age of progress was also an age of anxiety.” As someone who has considered ditching her iPhone, I keep wondering what real progress looks like. Maybe it’s not about optimizing at all, but knowing when to opt out. —CLR
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Seth Rogen is the Boss Now塞斯·罗根现在是老板
I’ve written enough celebrity profiles in my life that I’d be happy if I never write another. Judging from how rarely I recommend them here, sometimes I wonder if I’d be happy if I never read another. They rarely feel anything other than transactional; they flatten into the same small arsenal of tropes; it’s always difficult to shake the sense that you’re reading something choreographed, negotiated, artificial. That’s unfair, of course. Curious writers and engaged subjects is never a bad combination, as Dave Holmes’s cover profile of Seth Rogen proves. Rogen’s been a comedy star since he was 16 years old (at least for those of us who fell in love with the short-lived TV series Freaks and Geeks). He’s done this dance a million times. But despite what you may think from his cinematic man-child persona, Seth Rogen is also a thoughtful, decent, deeply creative person who is at home in his skin the way few people are. He cares about what he does. He knows who he is. He lives his life intentionally. He’s made creative and personal choices, all well-chronicled, that I respect. And the time he spends with Holmes makes that clear. There’s no stunty scenework here—no skydiving trips, no “come with me while I get my hands dirty pretending to drive cattle on this massive compound I bought two years ago”—just conversation. Sure, some of that conversation is about weed. (“I feel like [I’m] getting tips on my morning jog from . . . Eliud Kipchoge,” cracks Holmes.) This is Seth Rogen, after all. And in a moment when so much comedy feels like it’s curdling into something belligerent and nasty, we could all use a little bit more of his you-do-you demeanor. —PR
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How a Would-Be Bomber Rebuilt His Life一名未来的轰炸机如何重建他的生活海象
Michelle Shephard has written about Zakaria Amara before: Working for The Toronto Star in 2006, she was the first to report on his arrest as one of the leaders of a terrorism group plotting to blow up downtown Toronto targets and a military base. The story ended for her when Amara was sentenced as a terrorist. Or so she thought. Nearly two decades on, a now-paroled Amara reached out. Initially dubious about his claims of rehabilitation, Shephard takes the time to get to know him over several months; the resulting piece is profound. Shephard discovers Amara to be sincere in his search for redemption, but finds that the police and the prison system played no part in his turnaround. Instead, a few key individuals and Amara’s own reading and writing influenced him. But it is not just Amara that has changed. In reviewing her reporting from 20 years ago, Shephard finds herself discomfited by its sensationalist tone, noting that “[a] right-wing blog calling our coverage a triumph of ‘beat reporting over political correctness’ made me feel queasy.” She returns to Amara’s story with a nuanced perspective on how radicalization has “many factors and stages that can last years before police are involved,” and awareness that deradicalization programs need “an intense one-on-one approach involving mentors who have credibility with vulnerable youths.” It is rare—and brave—to review your work with 20 years of hindsight, and while Shephard claims no regrets in her previous reporting, there’s more than one redemption story here. The same writer and subject, a new insight. —CW
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The Great AI Art Heist
What happens in a world where machines are trained on stolen creativity? In this story for Chicago Magazine, Kelley Engelbrecht introduces us to Kim Van Deun, a fantasy illustrator who, a few years ago, began searching for a way to protect her work from generative AI tools that could produce images of anything in seconds. Her search led her to Ben Zhao, a computer scientist at the University of Chicago’s SAND Lab, where he and his team have developed protective tech—software called Glaze and Nightshade—that confuses and corrupts AI models that scrape and train on images without consent. “Take an image of a cat,” Engelbrecht explains. “Apply Nightshade to the image, and the AI model will see not a cat but something entirely different — perhaps a chair. Do this to enough images of cats, and gradually the model stops seeing cats and sees only chairs.” Engelbrecht’s profile of Zhao and the SAND Lab’s efforts to disrupt Big Tech highlights the bigger rift between AI companies and independent artists, but it also lingers on something more fundamental. At one point, when Engelbrecht asks Heather Zheng, Zhao’s wife and co-leader of the lab, about pushback to their work, she says, “I’d rather see Glaze and Nightshade as a way to tell the young generation that they have agency.” As a mother to an imaginative, artistic 6-year-old, I felt this on a deeper level. Engelbrecht weaves in a few quiet yet telling moments about children and their art, reminding us why it’s crucial for future generations to create from scratch, to build off a blank canvas, and to make something that’s entirely their own. Because even the most powerful algorithms are nothing without human imagination. —CLR
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Frankenstein’s Sheep
A couple of stories about cloned animals have made it into our Top 5 in recent memory—specifically, polo ponies and dogs. But ponies and dogs aren’t exactly rare. What happens when someone uses cloning to propagate a species thousands of miles from its natural home? Even weirder, what happens when they use biotech to de-extinct a species—or create one that doesn’t exist? Enter Montana Mountain King, a Marco Polo argali who was born not in Central Asia, where all the spiral-horned ruminants live, but in (duh) Montana, where rancher Jack Schubarth had implanted cloned argali embryos into his pneumonia-prone sheep. That Schubarth managed this feat of husbandry was a miracle unto itself; had he done it legally, rather than sending his son to smuggle a strip of argali hide back from Kyrgyzstan, he’d likely be a hero of the conservation movement. Instead, he got six months in federal prison. The story of Schubarth and MMK is a fascinating one, even before ketamine and rectal probes make an appearance, but it’s also just the beginning. Alice Hines expands the scope from Schubarth’s operation to a thriving, if ethically ambiguous, animal biohacking industry. One company has seemingly revived the dire wolf and has its sight set on the dodo; another wants to breed unicorns and dragons. (All together, now: What could go wrong?) Throughout, Hines melds story and science with a deft touch, and turns what might otherwise be the tale of a single resourceful rancher into a more troubling look at a future that’s roaring toward us. The bleating edge of science, indeed. —PR
Heavy Metal is Healing Teens on the Blackfeet Nation
B. ‘Toastie’ Oaster · High Country News · November 7, 2025 · 6,282 words · 官方页
Journalist B. ‘Toastie’ Oaster opens their High Country News piece with the words of young Indigenous metalheads on the Blackfeet Nation who have known people who have committed suicide: “Suicide has impacted my old friend group quite a bit.” “I’ve lost friends. I’ve lost family.” “My older brother.” “My sister’s youngest.” Their sobering remarks and the endless pain they hold stopped me in my tracks. Some are still teens. All have found belonging in heavy metal music, release in the fast and the loud. In vivid prose, Oaster reports on the finale of an alternative high school course that dives deep into heavy music and its history, politics, and values. As students discuss the art form, they identify subgenres of metal, deconstruct songs, and respond to what moves them. Some get inspired to start bands. Oaster also covers Fire in the Mountains, a “black metal Coachella” that took place on the Blackfeet Nation over three days in July 2025. Metal can seem violent and harsh to the uninitiated, but that easy assessment overlooks the community behind the music, a safe space where people can work through their troubles in a constructive way. “But something deeper draws metalheads together, perhaps a willingness to inquire on levels the establishment forbids,” writes Oaster. “What most clearly sets it apart from other genres is that it’s so rooted in anger and sadness—or their common ancestors: terror, lack, isolation and despair. Metal, one fan told me, is ‘a strange road to joy.’” Above all, this moving, life-affirming piece reminds us that when the going gets tough, the tough start headbanging. —KS
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Thank You for Finding Me谢谢你找到我
As a teenager, I met a stranger who changed the course of my life. Twenty years later, I went looking for him.
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The Biggest Loser
Baby needs a new pair of shoes! For Slate, Luke Winkie profiles profligate gambler Matt Morrow, aka “Vegas Matt,” a man who broadcasts his betting at the El Cortez Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, to his 1.1 million followers on YouTube. Morrow plays baccarat, slots, and blackjack. By recording it all, win or lose, he’s turned his gambling into a lucrative spectacle that allows viewers to experience his highs and lows vicariously, without risking any of their own “chocolate chips.” (A chocolate chip is worth $10,000, a pittance to Morrow, who routinely risks much higher sums.) Your first question might be: Where does he get his money? Thirty percent comes from sponsorships and merch, while YouTube yields 70 percent. Casinos are notoriously private. They watch your every move but prohibit capturing video lest thieves gain an advantage against the house. Not so the El Cortez. Morrow’s 1,200 YouTube videos have earned him a legion of viewers that follow his every move. The El Cortez makes bank on fans who, inspired by Morrow, want to try their luck. Winkie does a great job of trying to dig past Morrow’s rictus-grin hype to understand what motivates a man to gamble so prolifically and record every moment of it. As you might suspect, it’s not about the buzz of the casino, or even the wins. It’s about fame, about validation from views. “The more I was around Morrow, the more I detected an elemental craving just below those gold chains,” writes Winkie. “And why is the grind worth it? Easy. It has made Vegas Matt a celebrity, which, as I learned, is much more of a thrill for him than the money is.” As much as I enjoyed reading this profile about a guy doing what he wants with his own money, I felt uneasy about the shtick, about Morrow’s parlay-as-performance. After all, if you’ve given away years of your life gambling in Vegas for the empty love of YouTube infamy, do you really have anything more to lose? —KS
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Pirates of the Ayahuasca
Not so long ago, Sarah Miller was Not Doing Well. Like, Not Doing Well at an existential, nearly cellular level. She despaired about the world and its fate, about her own pessimisim, about her role in the world. She also had no idea how to navigate her despair, let alone resolve it, until she decided—with no small amount of misgiving—that ayahuasca was worth a shot. So: off to Peru! In the 1,500 words it takes for Miller to reach the center where she’ll journey to her own center, you get a very clear sense that you are in very good hands. Not only does she wield a gratifyingly caustic sense of humor, but she has the rare gift of bidirectional analysis; she is both intensely self-aware and intensely judgmental, leveling the same withering gaze inward and outward. (Let me be clear: This is a compliment. No one likes everybody. The least you can do is own your reasoning.) And when she arrives, all these traits combine to create a psychedelia of their own. There’s the pre-trip purgation, of course. The seven (seven!) ayahuasca experiences, each of which manages to disappoint or even re-traumatize Miller in some novel way. The other people, who she renders with a keen meanness, or possibly a mean keenness. Yet, none of this feels like punching down, or self-absorption, or any of the other pitfalls that lurk in a piece like this. It’s not that she hates, it’s that she hurts. Does the ayahuasca care? It does not. Instead, it pushes her through the darkness, again and again. “My life was a selfish joke,” she writes of the reality that consumed her during her sixth trip. “My desire to express myself was risible. I had come here to find hope but what I found instead was the definitive end of it.” The theme of the latest issue of n+1 is Harsh Realm, and this very unfunny realization in the midst of a very funny piece makes clear that, for most of us, the harshest realm of all is the doubt that lurks inside us. —PR
Breakdown at the Racetrack
Speight Rasees, a 2-year-old bay filly, suffered a catastrophic breakdown at Woodbine Racetrack in Toronto, Ontario, in November 2024, crashing to the turf in an “awful tangle of limbs.” Jason Hoyte, the jockey, broke his shoulder in the accident, but Speight Rasees was not so lucky: She was euthanized by lethal injection. As Nicholas Hune-Brown reports for The Local, Speight Rasees was one of 10 horses to die after breakdowns at Woodbine in a two-month period in 2024, with several more injured. Proponents say horses receive the care and treatment of elite athletes. Critics charge that the injuries and deaths are proof that the sport needs to end. Given that the Ontario government props up racing with slot machine revenue because wagering alone is not enough to fund purses, the spate of carnage raises hard questions about precisely what the government is subsidizing. “That puts horse racing in a position that’s uncomfortable to defend,” writes Hune-Brown. “Each day at the track, hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money are paid out to the owners of racehorses, a large percentage of which is government subsidy.” Horses break down and death is inevitable in racing. Hune-Brown worked at the track as a teen and, while reporting, even placed a $2 bet on a horse called Little Teddy. Despite rising to his feet “unconsciously along with the rest of the roaring crowd, a puppet on a string as the horses pounded their way down the homestretch,” Hune-Brown wears no rose-colored glasses of nostalgia. This piece is deeply sourced. He spoke to industry workers, horse owners, animal welfare activists, and Michael Copeland, CEO of Woodbine Entertainment Group. Hune-Brown urges us to take the reins, to take a close look at the horse racing industry and ask some questions: Who’s winning and who’s losing, and most importantly, why does Ontario choose to pay the price? —KS
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The Bad Thing坏事
Sometimes the most haunting part of trauma isn’t what happened—it’s wondering what could have happened if you hadn’t trusted your gut.
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The Cat’s Meat Man猫的肉人
Somewhere in my drafts folder sits a long blog post about how I don’t know anything about history. (Apologies to Sam Cooke.) Little things, sure—I’ll never forget the year the Battle of Hastings was fought, for some reason—but my grasp of “world history” is absolutely shameful. I’ve thought more about this recently, and I think my issue is that too much history writing is boring. You know what’s not boring? Kathryn Hughes’s piece about the “itinerant offal vendors” who crisscrissed Victorian London, selling horsemeat to cat owners. At one point, she writes, there were 1,000 pushcarts traversing the city, feeding 300,000 cats. These were men bound by a code: They respected each other’s turf, and were up with the sun “threading the chunks onto wooden skewers, to make up anything from a ha’penny snack to a three-penny feast.” Hughes surveys the phenomenon with agility and verve, skipping from true crime (early speculation that Jack the Ripper may have been a cat’s meat man) to the spectacle of a 1901 grand banquet held for these hardworking friends of felines. What really brings this piece to life, though, is the wealth of archival materials that accompies it: photos, magazine illustrations, and postcards that span more than a century. This is history not as a dry excavation, but as a living, meowing, offal-reeking tour of the past. I may not know anything about World War I, but at least now I can horrify friends with tales of horse kebabs and the men who peddled them. —PR
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Who Killed the Mercy Man?
On one hand, the word “folklore” will never lose its ability to make me feel like a bored, fidgety kid. It sounds like field trips to one-room schoolhouses. But on the other hand, the word also thrums with enormous power—the same power that makes the blues the most potent artform born on American soil. The Mississippi Delta isn’t terminus in this case, but origin: The stories and tropes that made their way into the music proliferated through this country’s very sensibility, and through every other mode of expression that it spawned. And with that much embedded folklore, there’s always another discovery lurking, another path to tread from song to song, another history to uncover. Eric McHenry’s investigation for The American Scholar exercises that sonic sleuthing in journalistic form, following the character of “the Mercy Man” back through the decades all the way to its seeming genesis. It’s a fascinating investigation, whether or not you’re familiar with Alan Lomax’s famed field recordings or even the blues at all. McHenry dives into the levee camp holler, a plaintive song form born when Black men of the late 19th and early 20th century joined work crews controlled by viciously racist contractors and featuring conditions that seemed nearly indistinguishable from slavery itself. After tracing various renditions of a story in which a contractor known as Mr. Charlie kills an animal welfare officer, McHenry finally finds a 1909 incident that seems to explain everything; from there, he re-expands his search, adding vital texture to the event and sketching a stunning depiction of what inequality really looked like at the time. (Spoiler: It looks like a whole lot of Mr. Charlies.) This is a story about American history, but it’s also a story about how we cope with the unspeakable, and about how art can grow from the abject. And if you’re anything like me, it’ll remind you that the word “folklore” isn’t so boring after all. —PR
Inside ‘Teflon Joe’s’: Why Your Favorite Grocery Store Is Not What You Think
A few months ago, I took my daughter to Pretend City, a children’s museum in Southern California that’s laid out like a miniature town. You can imagine the chaos inside such a space, with children running around pretending to be adults that have things to do and places to be. The grocery store is such a place, and in this kid-sized city, it manifests as a big and boldly branded Trader Joe’s, with colorful wall ads and adorably packaged products. As my daughter enthusiastically selected fake food off the shelves, I had a realization. While I haven’t shopped at Trader Joe’s in ages, I’ve continued to view the brand fondly and positively, ever since shopping there in my 20s. Lured by the inexpensive prices, convenient options, and “exotic” food aisle, Trader Joe’s made shopping and cooking accessible, even fun, when I was a young adult living on my own in San Francisco for the first time. But as Clint Rainey reports, the company has faced a lot of bad press recently: a series of product recalls, low rankings by environmental and animal welfare watchdog groups, and reports of intellectual property theft and workplace misconduct. In this Fast Company read—the first in a three–part series about the company’s brand identity and business practices—Rainey digs into why Trader Joe’s remains one of America’s favorite supermarkets despite the negative press. I apologize in advance if this story shatters the eco-friendly, good-vibes image of your beloved neighborhood Trader Joe’s. But I won’t hold it against you if you decide to pop in one last time to stock up on those sweet and salty umami rice crunchies—they’re ridiculously irresistible. —CLR
Grave Mistakes: The History and Future of Chile’s ‘Disappeared’
I’ve read some fascinating forensics stories in the past year, and this haunting piece by Fletcher Reveley digs into how Chile has applied the science, unfortunately to disastrous results, in crimes of mass atrocity. For Flor Lazo, the past 50 years have been a “long, long, long, long road in search of the truth.” Her father, two brothers, and two uncles were among the more than 1,000 people who were forcibly disappeared after the 1973 coup, under Augusto Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship. Reveley describes how in the late ’80s, forensic anthropologists began to investigate the regime’s mass graves. A series of scientific errors by the state’s forensic unit, the Servicio Médico Legal, marred the effort, misidentifying victims and delivering bodies to the wrong families. (For years, Lazo visited the grave containing what she believed was her brother Rodolfo’s remains, but after the bones were later exhumed—without her family’s knowledge—she learned that they were not his.) Reveley writes about the devastating affect these grievous mistakes have on victims’ loved ones: “For many of the affected relatives, the impact was seismic, forever altering their relationship to science, the state, and the notion of truth itself.” DNA analysis, remote-sensing technology, and a new initiative under Chile’s current president hold the promise of uncovering the remains of more victims, but as Reveley shows, Lazo and other Chileans continue to grapple with the injustice of these killings and hope for closure that they may never get. This is a meticulously reported account of a dark part of Chilean history, but also the extraordinary journey of families who have shown resilience over a lifetime of suffering. —CLR
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Day 1,509 in the Big Brother House
Gary Grimes · The Fence · January 29, 2025 · 1,856 words · 官方页
For a certain generation, the sound of the MSN Messenger notification is an instant time warp. I am transported back to my dad’s home office, a tiny room dominated by a giant desktop that whirred and groaned as it came to life. In my early teens, I spent hours in that room, playing Lemmings and talking to friends (and crushes) on MSN Messenger. That ding-dong-ding signaling a new message was a pure thrill, and I still feel its echoes today. But when I left the room after being shouted at to free up the phone line, the conversations stayed behind, trapped in a computer now whirring its way through an agonizingly slow shutdown. This was all before smartphones made online conversations perpetual. Gary Grimes knows what I am talking about. A veteran of pre-social media online interactions, Grimes spent his tween years on ThisIsBigBrother.com, or TiBB, “an online forum created in the early 2000s for discussion of the eponymous television phenomenon.” (Big Brother is another nostalgia bomb.) Grimes joyfully brings the disparate groups of the forum to life, explaining its operation “like the lunchroom from Mean Girls.” He is also happy to throw shade at his self-aggrandizing former self, not shying away from any of the cringeworthy teenage memories. The narrative revels in Grimes’s youthful world before bringing you back to the present, where Grimes tracks down his former forum buddies. These online voices from the past now have “jobs, partners, friends, and grown-up responsibilities.” Real things. While that early 2000s forum helped shape them all, it was always something they could leave behind. After all, the computer shut off. —CW
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The New Hotness
Pat Cassels · Slate · September 14, 2025 · 3,531 words · 官方页
Eurovision, a gentle homage to the real-life music competition, is one of my favorite movies. It’s glitzy, exuberant, and (as one might expect of a Will Ferrell vehicle) delightfully bonkers. Clearly, this movie was on Pat Cassels’s mind as he dove headfirst into the world of aufguss, or competitive sauna-ing. He describes the scene as “Eurovision with linens”; one character even invokes Will Ferrell. I was powerless to resist. Aufguss is basically ballet with towels. Sauna masters waft hot air around, adding dramatic flourishes as they shepherd the drafts. The practice first became a competition in Germany, but now Americans are ready to throw their towels into the ring. This is how Cassels finds himself sweating and semi-naked in a trendy Williamsburg bathhouse—or as he puts it, “a great place for an average guy to visit if he wants to feel like a gnarled tree”—for the Aufguss USA Nationals, America’s first Aufguss World Masters event. The winners earn the ultimate prize: facing the Europeans at the world championships in Italy. First up in the lineup, “Fire and Ice,” a brother-and-sister duo “dressed head to toe in dazzling spandex unitards decorated with crystals.” I was thrilled to realize I had a connection to this act—not a deeply personal one, admittedly, but I had seen the sister perform in a jaw-dropping dance-and-puppet show in Las Vegas. And here she was in front of Cassels, flipping and twirling with her brother in a 200-degree sauna. (I was lucky to have seen her at a reasonable temperature, while fully clothed.) Cassels’s spa day only grows stranger, yet he proves an excellent guide to this sense-overloading subculture of sweat and spandex, capturing the spectacle in all its glory while letting his bemusement shine through. Stories like this restore my faith in humanity. I am so glad to have learned that, as a species, we decided to make furiously dancing with towels a competition. Triumphant absurdity. —CW
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The Epic Rise and Fall of a Dark-Web Psychedelics Kingpin
Over the past week, I shared so many stories about psychedelics in a group chat that a friend asked me if I had a new hobby she should know about. I only get high on narrative journalism, maaaaan, and Andy Greenberg’s piece about Akasha Song’s DMT empire is a trip. (It also lasts longer than the average DMT experience, and causes little to no ego death.) Song fell in love with LSD in high school, back when he was named Joseph Clements; 20 years later, he discovered the mind-altering joys of dimethyltryptamine. First he learned to make the drug, extracting it from a tree bark that’s legal to buy. Then he started selling it to friends. Then he found the dark web and started selling more. A lot more. His operation grew. He laundered the money through crypto. He moved from Colorado to Texas to Northern California, expanding all the while—until, inevitably, it all came crashing down. Greenberg specializes in this sort of story, having profiled McDonald’s ice-cream machine hackers, swatting teenagers, white-hat hackers, and more, and he’s in characteristically fine form here. It helps that Song landed on his feet, and shared a trove of the detail (and proof) that’s so crucial to that cinematic feel. You’re reading Greenberg’s words, but you’re in Song’s world, from the first tab to the last chat. —PR
Crimes of the Century
Suzy Hansen · New York · June 16, 2025 · 10,071 words · 官方页
Finally. That was my first thought when I finished reading Suzy Hansen’s damning cover story detailing Israel’s violations of international humanitarian law in Gaza. These violations have been repeated and flagrant, and they have been documented by brave Palestinian journalists and civilians, as well as NGOs, UN agencies, and visiting medical providers. Indeed, Hansen’s feature isn’t an investigation, because an investigation wasn’t necessary—mountains of evidence of Israel’s crimes were readily available. What took so long for a writer at a legacy media publication in the West to muster that evidence and say what is so plainly true? Hansen has an answer, because her essential piece is also about the international complicity that has allowed Israel to kill, terrorize, and humiliate its targets unchecked. Chief among Israel’s aiders and abettors was the Biden administration, building on a post-9/11 legacy of normalizing humanitarian abuses; its successor is no better. “As the theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel said, in a free society, ‘few are guilty, all are responsible.’ This includes many institutions outside government, like the mainstream media,” Hansen writes. “[W]estern newspapers and networks still faithfully print Israeli talking points, excuses, and outright lies.” The cumulative effect of this rampant cruelty and complicity is, of course, mass suffering, but it also signals the ultimate failure of a body of law established over the last century to prevent exactly that. This failure was not inevitable. Power and prejudice are to blame. Hansen hopes there is something to salvage here, a shared standard of human decency. But I’m doubtful, and I’m not alone. “Elite impunity is the sole remaining area of bipartisan consensus,” Matt Duss, Bernie Sanders’s former foreign-policy chief and the executive vice-president of the Center for International Policy, tells Hansen. “They understand that whatever they do, it’s not going to really hurt them because, you know, Donald Rumsfeld died in his bed.” —SD
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The Last Detail
Of the many self-selecting groups that congregate in New York City, some seem to exist only in collective form. Like chess hustlers. Or Black Israelites. Or, maybe most noticeably, the Guardian Angels: Not once have I spied that red satin jacket and almost-matching beret in the singular. I wasn’t sure if that was my own dumb luck, or if they simply kept the regalia stowed until they met up with their compatriots. Kent Russell’s Harper’s story about the volunteer patrol organization doesn’t explain the phenomenon, but given how enjoyable it is, I doubt you’ll hold it against him. Russell joins the group after living in New York for nearly 20 years, motivated by curiosity but also the sincere desire to contribute. The realization that there was a great essay in it probably didn’t hurt, either. You’re by his side through multiple patrols, each described in the deadpan detail Russell has perfected over the course of books like I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son and In the Land of Good Living: A Journey to the Heart of Florida. I’m predisposed to being annoyed by pieces like this; one person’s fish out of water is another’s white writer on class/culture safari. However, Russell approaches this with care, and while his scenework is often pitched for a laugh, its arm’s-length regard feels like a function of self-consciousness rather than judgment. (Besides, there’s something patently ridiculous about treating the New York of now—a Target on every corner, an influencer filming TikToks on every block—like the New York of the late ’70s.) Look through the group’s bluster and the writer’s self-deprecation, and you’ll see that the two are more similar than they appear. Both love the city they live in. And neither wants to be the only one. —PR
Laughing With the Pain
Natalie Marlin · Bright Wall / Dark Room · May 30, 2025 · 3,121 words · 官方页
I never set out to watch Jackass, the unlikely media franchise born from the self-inflicted humiliation and ding-dong daredevilry of Johnny Knoxville and his crew of goons. Still, was there a teenager in the early aughts who managed to dodge it entirely? Clips resurfaced at odd hours on MTV; I was never quite sure when I might encounter footage of Steve-O, wild-eyed and jockstrapped, walking a low tightrope over an alligator pit, surrounded by his band of brothers, who were few but always seemed happy. The Jackass cast members have “an abrasive way of expressing their love for one another, but it’s a love language regardless,” writes Natalie Marlin. “To be cared for, in the world of Jackass, is to subject your friends to outlandish feats of human endurance, blows that knock the wind out, staredowns with deadly wildlife, and blunt genital trauma.” Marlin started watching Jackass after she began transitioning, joining a population “more statistically prone to pain than most people who appear in a Jackass film.” In her essay for Bright Wall/Dark Room, she winces and laughs her way through two decades of Jackass content, watching the cast suffer together as they grow older. As she does, she details the pain she has invited into her own life, as well as the comfort she takes from those who have shared a version of it. Between the groin shots and hospital trips, Marlin identifies acts of “community-building, of getting closer to those you love by partaking in the stupidest, most humiliating, most dangerous acts imaginable. You wouldn’t do the kinds of things that happen in a Jackass film in front of just anyone. The most ideal way to endure those kinds of pain is with those you feel the closest to.” For years, a disclaimer ran ahead of Jackass, warning away imitators and declaring that the stunts to follow were “performed by professionals.” The joke, of course, was that they weren’t—at least not at first. But we all become veterans of pain, don’t we? May we all find a small crew of friends to soothe us. —BF
Puzzled
Susannah Pratt | The American Scholar | July 18, 2025 | 2,050 wordsOn the surface, this story is about a jigsaw puzzle, but it’s about much more. For The American Scholar, Susannah Pratt recounts working on a 1,000-piece reproduction of William Morris’s tapestry Tree of Life. Pratt is no puzzle novice. She has a piece-sorting method that has served her well, until she faces the Tree of Life. The puzzle’s patterns and colors are so subtle that they defy quick and easy categorization. When her methodical approach fails, she questions what motivates her to do puzzles in the first place: Are they leisure, or are they productivity cloaked in leisure? Does she enjoy working the puzzle to watch the image appear? Or is it the satisfaction of pieces popping into place, like task boxes getting checked off, that drives her? I love it when a piece stops me short like this one did. Given the topic, that was unexpected. The world is a rough place right now and everything seems to be getting worse by the day. But no matter how bad things get, questioning your motivation is a must. Questioning your approach is a must. Sometimes that introspection might, as in Pratt’s case, reveal the need to pause. “Often, I would simply put the piece back in the pile, realizing that I did not yet understand where it was meant to go,” she writes. This essay is a lovely reminder that when it comes to anything worth doing, it’s often more about the process than the result. —KS
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Asbestos: A Corporate Coverup, a Public Health Catastrophe
Asbestos was banned in the UK in 1999. While the number of asbestos-related deaths—at least 5,000 annually—is expected to fall over time, activists are still sounding the alarm about the asbestos that remains in schools, hospitals, homes, and other older buildings in the UK. For Prospect, Charlotte Bailey traces the history and use of asbestos over the decades. Indispensable during World War II, it was hailed as a “mineral of victory and safety” and a crucial building material for the future. After the war, however, big businesses discovered (and buried) the truth: Asbestos exposure was a health risk for everyone, not just factory workers. One woman who studied patients diagnosed with mesothelioma, an aggressive cancer affecting the lining of organs, discovered they had all been exposed to asbestos, yet none of them had worked in the industry. (“They’d been plumbers, housewives and mechanics, a school building inspector and a teacher.”) For Bailey, these facts hit close to home: Her father also died from mesothelioma, likely a result of his time as an apprentice accountant, during which he also did a lot of manual labor in the building. “I had only the haziest understanding of asbestos as some dangerous substance used in decades past,” she writes. “But as I cared for my father, I learned how it came to be ubiquitous in our infrastructure.” Bailey’s reporting on the industry is thorough and vital, while her retelling of her father’s rapid decline, interwoven in the piece, is heartfelt and powerful. “My father was a character in the epilogue of an old story,” she writes. Asbestos may be considered a problem of the past in the UK, but as Bailey shows, this “killer dust” lingers and continues to impact thousands of lives each year. —CLR
Fortunate Son
In April, as the US marked 50 years since the end of the Vietnam War and a flood of anniversary projects rolled across the journalism plains, Tony Ho Tran was on the Vietnam coast with his parents and brother. This wasn’t a voyage of commemoration, but a long-delayed trip that just happened to coincide with the milestone. Still, coincidence means little when you return to the place that made you and then blew apart. The backdrop of the celebration heightens the usual tensions of a family vacation: Tran’s father goes full Dad Mode by telling everyone he meets in Hanoi that he’d served in the South Vietnamese army; Tran’s mother insists on repeating everything Tran and his brother say to locals, as though their Vietnamese is indecipherable. Ultimately, though, the enormity of the occasion snuffs out any internecine squabbles. Sharing a beer with his dad on Hạ Long Bay, Tran fills in gaps of the man’s life he’d never even known were there, and the travelogue gives way to something altogether more lyrical, something that Tran has been moving toward all along. “Returning, I realize now, was never going to answer any questions or heal us,” he writes. “Returning gives shape to memory. It allows us to feel the ragged trenches of its scars, map the landscape it creates—and that, in turn, changes us. But the past will always be with us: in the stories we tell strangers, the old enemies we welcome back, and the fights we have with those we love.” We are the strangers here, and Tran’s family story—and, particularly, its arresting final image—will stay with you for some time. —PR
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All Hail the Mighty Snail
Dina Gachman · Texas Monthly · July 31, 2025 · 1,508 words · 官方页
Walking down the street this spring, I met two young girls who had found a snail about the size of a golf ball on a green stretch of lawn. They were excited to show their discovery to a complete stranger and so I knelt down to admire their languid new friend. I had never seen such a large snail before. It appeared moist, its shell variegated in tans and browns. Charmed by the snail and their enthusiasm, I exclaimed and marveled, and asked them what they noticed about it. They chattered away, interrupting each other while their mom smiled to herself a few feet away. This chance meeting made my day. Remembering the reason for this wholesome encounter, I was powerless against Dina Gachman’s appreciation of snails and the enthusiastic community behind them for Texas Monthly. This story stars Gary, a milk snail who took a wrong turn and ended up on a jade plant in Jorjana Gietl’s sister’s shop, It’s a Succulent Thang. Gary was outed by an inspector and had to be removed from the plant before sale, though, because milk snails are nonnative to Texas. Gietl decided to take Gary home and learn everything she could about raising snails so that he could have a happily ever after. Now Gietl has more than 100 garden snails that she breeds and sells locally to fellow enthusiasts. There’s plenty to learn about these creatures in this piece. Snails are hermaphrodites and easy to breed! Enthusiasts provide cuttlebone so that snails get the calcium they need to grow and repair their shells! If you listen very, very carefully you can actually hear them eating! This piece might be on the shorter side of the reading we typically recommend, but it’s no less satisfying. It’s a lovely reminder that despite what’s going on in the world, despite the grim news cycle, wonder still exists, if you stop and take the time to look. —KS
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The Human Cost of Jeff Landry’s Drive to Resume Executions杰夫·兰德里推动恢复处决的人力成本 - Bolts
A scene from Lawrence Wright’s recent New Yorker feature has stayed with me: A group of nuns visit Melissa, a death row inmate in Texas, on the day of her scheduled execution, only to find her in a cage—a literal cage, not just the metaphorical one of prison. In Piper French’s story, Chris Duncan, who has been on death row in Louisiana’s Angola prison since 1998, tells French that after years of incarceration, all that remained of him was a “body in a cage”—and that execution might be a mercy. The prison-as-cage metaphor is not new, but in French’s telling, its weight is visceral. Duncan was convicted of murdering his then-girlfriend’s toddler daughter. His case was built on now-debunked bite mark forensics, the expertise of discredited doctors, a jailhouse snitch’s faulty testimony, and a damning video never seen at trial. Add to that Louisiana’s history of prosecutorial misconduct—where more than 80 percent of death sentences were overturned between 1976 and 2015—and Duncan’s case becomes a stark reflection of a deeply flawed system. French details his case with care, while zooming out to track the evolution of the state’s legal system, including reforms in recent years that gave incarcerated people, even those on death row, new avenues to claim innocence. But since taking office last year, Governor Jeff Landry has aggressively worked to reinstate executions, reauthorized electrocution, and legalized the experimental method of suffocation by nitrogen gas. After a 15-year pause, Landry got his wish: This past week, Louisiana resumed executions by killing Jessie Hoffman, a man Duncan had grown close to. French’s reporting is urgent, revealing a justice system that gets it wrong far too often—and a governor more focused on sealing the cage than opening it. —CLR
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Madness, Melancholy, or Murder: An Ancient English Farm’s 50-Year-Old Mystery疯狂、忧郁还是谋杀：英国古代农场 50 年来的谜团
Andrew Chamings returns to his childhood farmland to investigate the mystifying deaths of the Luxton siblings. What really happened down that dark country lane?
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If a Tree Falls
Rosa Lyster · Harper’s Magazine · December 17, 2025 · 6,939 words · 官方页
Living many thousands of miles from England, I had absolutely zero awareness of the crime and aftermath that Rosa Lyster’s Harper’s feature chronicles: the felling of a tree. Not just any tree, though. No, the Sycamore Gap Tree had become something of an icon for the Brits, sitting picturesquely between two steep hills in the country’s northeast, not to mention appearing in the 1991 movie Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. And when it was chopped down in the middle of the night in 2023, those selfsame Brits lost their damn minds. It didn’t take long to sniff out the likely culprits, and two men were soon arrested and brought to trial. As entertaining as the piece is from the very beginning, this is where it shifts into an arch and meticulous courtroom dispatch, with Lyster playing Dominick Dunne to phenomenal effect. Any humor never comes at the tree’s expense, but rather from the many human foibles on display, particularly the defendants’ continual attempts to vindicate themselves. “It is strange to see people tell such brazen and low-effort lies in front of the international media and a High Court judge,” writes Lyster in typically deadpan fashion. (She’s not British, but there’s a distinctly Douglas Adams cant to many of the sentences, which I mean as high praise.) When I finished reading, the same smile plastered on my face that had been there for nearly 7,000 words, I realized how rare it is to come across a truly odd story that still manages to say something about humanity at large. In many ways, it feels like a fable, which Lyster sneakily both acknowledges and architects. But that short-story quality is also its greatest strength. To be unrepentantly weird, without also losing itself in the weirdness, is the kind of needle-thread that you’re lucky to read once a year. How fitting, then—and how serendipitous—that it comes at the very end of 2025. Happy holidays to us all. —PR
The Tickling of the Bulls: A Rodeo at Madison Square Garden
Jasper Nathaniel · The Paris Review · January 13, 2025 · 2,775 words · 官方页
New York City has always felt immune to certain cultural forces, particularly those that require wide-open spaces. As beautiful as its public parks are, they’re not exactly suited to activities beyond running or the odd pedal-boat rental. Hiking requires driving an hour or more. Skiing, the same. The very concept of rodeo sports in the five boroughs—let alone Manhattan—seems as unlikely as putting pineapple on pizza. This impossibility animates Jasper Nathaniel’s visit to a three-day bull-riding event held in Madison Square Garden, elevating it from what might be a gawking safari to an exercise in curiosity. How does this all work? Where do the bulls stay? Who attends the Monster Energy Buck Off at the Garden? (Who sponsors the Monster Energy Buck Off at the Garden does not invite such curiosity.) The result is incredibly entertaining, if not surprising. While the piece can skew toward glib at times, Nathaniel avoids the dreaded Coastal Writer Observes America™ trope by foregrounding his own ignorance. He’s chastened by wranglers; he comes out on the losing end of a handshake with a bull rider. So what if he dutifully recounts some conversations that happen to be hilarious? You ride with the bulls, you get the horns. —PR
Homeward Bound: On Pigeon Racing
Oliver Egger · The Paris Review · November 26, 2025 · 3,603 words · 官方页
“Imagine being blindfolded and loaded in a car, then dropped nearly four hundred miles from your house in a random field in rural Iowa and trying to get home before dark.” That thought experiment, courtesy of Oliver Egger’s piece on the American Racing Pigeon Union (ARPU) Convention Race, instantly dissolved my rosy image of the sport. I’d always pictured pigeon racing as a rather jolly pastime: birds stretching their wings on a nice flight before being proudly welcomed back by their flat-capped owners (known as “fanciers”). While the subject isn’t new, Egger offers a bracing reframing. At the start, the fanciers at the race are instantly suspicious of him. “I had no crate, no pigeons, and was probably thirty years younger than anyone else in the room,” he writes. “That could mean only one thing: undercover animal rights activist.” (Their fears are soothed only after he’s vouched for by a white-mustachioed fancier known as “Crazy Al.”) Egger isn’t an activist, sure, but this piece is still unusually clear-eyed about the welfare of racing pigeons. What is sport to their owners is, for the birds, a life-and-death struggle to get home—past hawks, power lines, bad weather, starvation. Many don’t make it. And what of the winners? If you’re a super-pigeon, navigating hundreds of miles by mechanisms we still don’t fully understand, dodging every hazard, and beating the pack, do you get to retire in glory? Do you get to stay home, put your feet up, watch the sunset with some nice corn while telling the youngsters your war stories? No. In most major races, the fastest birds are automatically sold at auction as breeders, shipped to new lofts, and never allowed to leave because they’d only try to fly back “home.” You have to wonder if they ever stop feeling lost, locked in a place that doesn’t feel like theirs. Egger fills the piece with larger-than-life characters with a palpable love for the sport (and vodka)—it’s a charming read. But the thought that stayed with me was simple: For all our fascination with their homing instinct, maybe the pigeons would have preferred never to leave home at all. —CW
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No Entry
I recently moved inland from the San Francisco Bay Area, and 90-degree-plus days are now the norm. While it’ll take time to get used to the heat, I love how often we’ve gone swimming this summer. For $6 a visit, we can enjoy two massive sparkling pools and a waterslide in a leafy park, supervised by a rotating team of lifeguards. The quick bike ride to this public pool was one reason we bought our house—and it’s made me think a lot about recreational access to water: pools, lakes, beaches, and other places to play and cool off. In this excerpt from her new book, The Pool is Closed: Segregation, Summertime, and the Search for a Place to Swim, Hannah S. Palmer reflects on lost Southern waters, retracing the history of integration in the South and how it led to the abandonment of public pools and other facilities. “When we talk about water, we’re talking about race and class,” she writes. Wondering where her young sons can learn how to swim, Palmer visits public pools in Atlanta and creeks and lakes in the region: “I drove all over Georgia investigating places where people used to swim that faded from the map after integration: pools filled, lakes drained, beaches sliced into private properties.” When white people rebuilt their own private versions of these places, these spaces were lost to everyone else, particularly Black communities. Her reflections on pools ripple outward: What she discovers also applies to parks, schools, libraries, transit. “Life is not so different from what happens when we swim in public,” she writes. This piece is a compelling introduction to her research on water and public space, as well as parenting in a time of environmental crisis. —CLR
Waymo Money, Waymo Problems
Joanne McNeil · New York Review of Architecture · October 1, 2025 · 2,866 words · 官方页
I would be remiss if I didn’t start this blurb by tipping my hat to the editor who wrote this headline. I suspect many readers have already clicked on the link to the story purely because of this pun. Well done, whoever you are. Now to the meat of the thing: A self-driving Waymo taxi recently killed a bodega cat in San Francisco. In my book, that alone is reason enough to get the machines off the street. But I’m a grouch, so don’t listen to me—listen to Joanne McNeil. A resident of the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, McNeil considers Waymo and other robots now populating the city’s corridors in the context of the wider techno-capitalist push to force certain workers out of the US economy. McNeil follows a pink Coco food delivery robot to a ghost kitchen, where “twenty-six restaurants that exist only on DoorDash and Grubhub cook food for takeout customers” and “delivery bags and boxes are waiting . . . in lockers.” The endgame of facilities like this, McNeil posits, is to eliminate delivery drivers (and mom-and-pop restaurants, too). “It’s a setup primed for robots,” she writes, that “further warp[s] the coronavirus class divide: With machines (however remotely assisted) where essential workers used to be, those who WFH are ever more shielded from strangers beneath their tax bracket.” McNeil ties the robots in California’s streets to what’s happening in the state’s fields. She speaks to a Lyft driver originally from Salinas, who explains that agricultural companies in the Central Valley “haven’t been that vocal coming out against the ICE raids because they’re assuming that they’ll be able to automate farmwork.” In other words, they’ve decided it isn’t worth protecting the rights and dignity of people they won’t need to make money in the long term. In fewer words, they’re greedy and soulless. McNeil’s story is an essential tour of several overlapping landscapes—physical, technological, and political—shaped by the robber barons of the 21st century. —SD
“The River House Broke. We Rushed in the River.”
Imagine being at your family house on the Guadalupe River in Texas, ready to enjoy some July Fourth summer fun. Now imagine waking in the wee hours to discover that flash flood waters have trapped you in the house. Your elderly dad and your partner are there. Your sister and brother-in-law are there too, along with their two children, a daughter, age 4, and a son, 20 months old. It’s dark. The water is at the deck, which is 20 feet off the ground. The water is moving fast and filled with debris and it’s rising. Window glass shatters as the river invades the house. There is nowhere to evacuate to. You feel the room shift and tilt as the house is lifted off the foundation and seconds later is torn apart. This is the scene Aaron Parsley describes in his harrowing and unforgettable first-person account of the flash flooding in Kerr County, Texas. Parsley’s writing is so taut and tense and immediate that time slowed, and then stopped as I read this piece. This is a story I’ll always remember. It put my heart in my throat as I choked back sobs, bereft for this family and their tragedy. “Alissa managed to keep both kids on the countertop, one hand on each, still trying to reassure them,” he writes. “As the house came undone, she grabbed one in each arm. This is the part that will forever haunt me.” This piece doesn’t concern itself with second-guessing weather forecasts, warnings, or the timeliness of the emergency response. Those facts are important, of course, but here, they’re far beside the point. Given the catastrophic loss Parsley and his family suffered, does anything else really matter? —KS
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Maximalisma
My parents are purging their home of nearly 50 years as they prepare to downsize. Last week, my mom asked me if I wanted her dinnerware; this week, she gifted me her collection of massive terracotta planters. (How could I say no? My dad had already loaded them onto his truck.) I get it: It’s hard to let go of stuff, even things that lack sentimental value. In her essay for The American Scholar, Lisa Russ Spaar reflects on the accumulation of objects, both trash and treasure, and how they’ve helped shape her identity: “I have to admit, at 68, that all of these ‘things’ comfort and inspire me no less than my college dorm room décor helped me, 50 years ago, feel like the person I wanted to be.” Her words inspired me to reflect on my own curated spaces over the years, from my freshman dorm room—walls plastered with underground rave flyers that I’ve since stored in shoeboxes—to my current sun-filled office in my new home, filled with houseplants, miniatures, and art. Spaar shares her great-aunts’ compulsion to hold onto stuff, while also acknowledging a responsibility to pare down so her loved ones won’t have to later. The essay then evolves into a playful exploration of language and collecting. She compares her poems—”short, sonnet-haunted lyrics that juxtapose high and low diction, arcane or gnomish syntax, and contemporary slang”—to cabinets of curiosities: “My little poems—both tidy and lush at once—are perhaps, like Aunt Ruth’s grocery bags or Warhol’s boxes, a way for me to collect disparate things in one place, to create a kind of order or meaning out of what I notice and feel.” Poetry may offer Spaar a kind of balance, a way to know when to hold on and when to let go. While hoarding can feel oppressive, Spaar’s reflections reframe it as something tender and artful: a means of noticing, honoring, and building a life. Reading her piece made me see those planters, and all the things I’ve carried with me, not as clutter, but as parts of a story that I’m still shaping. —CLR
The Worm Hunters of Southern Ontario
If you use nightcrawlers as fishing bait, chances are they came from a field somewhere between Toronto and Windsor, Ontario. For The Local, Inori Roy literally gets down and dirty to learn what it’s like to be a worm picker, someone who harvests nightcrawlers as they emerge from the soil in the wee hours of the morning. What started as a side hustle for young boys trying to earn a few extra dollars in the 1900s is now a C$200 million industry run by generational family businesses who employ mostly immigrants and refugees trying to make their way in Canada. This piece hooked me for a few reasons. Roy was patient; she fished around and was rejected by several worm operations for weak reasons, until she landed a chance to pick for Nick Alafogiannis, owner of A1 Bait. As a reporter, though, she is no fish out of water. She quickly develops a rapport with Alafogiannis and his crew to learn the business from the ground up, an industry threatened by a lack of temporary workers, trade tensions with the US, a downturn in recreational fishing, and of course, climate change. “And in truth, as much as I now have an intense, perhaps overly-romanticized fondness for it, worm harvesting is not an essential industry,” she writes. “The world would move on without it, and it would become a subject of nostalgic memory, a quaint eccentricity from a different time, when people had the luxury of fishing with massive, lively worms hand-selected by workers flown in from the other side of the world.” The next time I go fishing, I’ll be sure to remember Roy and the legion of workers toiling through the night, angling to keep a dying industry afloat. —KS
The Curious Case of the Pygmy Nuthatch杰夫·兰德里推动恢复处决的人力成本 - Bolts
As far as opening sentences go, it’s hard to beat “There is nothing quite like becoming birdpilled.” I don’t even care about birds!* Yet, Forrest Wickman grabbed me immediately. Maybe I’m a sucker for obsessions. Maybe I’m just a sucker for a good hook. Probably both. Thankfully, the other 6,358 words in the story pay off the promise of those first seven. See, in becoming the kind of person who listens to birds basically all the time, Forrest Wickman has also become the kind of person who gets irritated when a bird sound in a movie or TV show doesn’t match the bird shown on screen, or is otherwise impossible. This happens a lot. But nothing is quite as irritating to Forrest Wickman as the bird who proves pivotal to the plot of 2000’s Charlie’s Angels. It’s called a pygmy nuthatch, which it is not; it’s described as being indigenous to a single city in California, which it is also not; and it makes a sound that is neither that of a pygmy nuthatch or the bird it actually is. I’m not even Forrest Wickman, and this bothers me. So Forrest Wickman (whose name I am doomed to write in full) sets off to figure out what the hell happened to create this sorry state of affairs. He talks to the original screenwriter. He talks to one of the script doctors. He talks to the animal trainer who helped cast the imposter. He talks to the sound editor. He talks to a naturalist and journalist who seems to specialize in how Hollywood screws up anything ornithological. He talks to a man who is even crazier about birds than he is. He talks to the developer of a popular birdsong app. Each of these conversations is more entertaining than it has any right to be. Ultimately, he talks to the movie’s director, McG—who, I have to say, destroyed everything I’d ever assumed about McG. McG should be interviewed about weird things more often. Yes, Forrest Wickman discovers exactly what happened with the bird on Charlie’s Angels, and why. And in the process, he writes** one of the most pleasurable stories I’ve read this year. Maybe I’ve been birdpilled too. —PR
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Losing My Dad in Installments
Mariana Serapicos · Electric Literature · April 24, 2025 · 3,935 words · 官方页
My parents, who are in their mid-70s, are preparing to sell the house they’ve lived in for nearly 50 years. I’ve been scanning my mind for the memories we’ve made in that home. In many of them, my dad is tinkering with something—up a ladder, barefoot, hammering on the siding; searching for a tool in the garage; changing the oil in his car. He is a fixer for life, eternally excited about a piece of wood, but these days, I see him resting on the couch a lot more. Reading Mariana Serapicos’s tribute to her own father, it’s hard not to think about my dad getting older. Serapicos’s father got sick when she was a child, diagnosed with ALS at a time when not many people were aware of the disease. Her descriptions of watching his health deteriorate are tough. But her descriptions of his love for his family, and a life of joy despite hardship, are ultimately what I take away from this piece. The first (and last) time she sees her dad in the hospital, they communicate through letters and sentences on a piece of cardboard. “We talked about plain things because everything else was too big, because plainness is the fabric of life,” she writes. This line encapsulates what I love about this essay. She captures everyday details—his Birkenstocks, their days at the pool, the way she danced on his feet and combed his oily hair—that celebrate a hardworking and joyful man who lived fully. Serapicos leaves us with a moving portrait not of decline, but of presence. —CLR
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‘It’s Like a War Zone’: What Happened When Portland Decriminalized Fentanyl“这就像一个战区”：波特兰将芬太尼合法化后发生了什么
In a bid to emulate Portugal and France, where “nuanced approaches prioritizing health care over punishment have curtailed overdoses and public drug use,” Oregon decriminalized possession of small amounts of hard drugs like fentanyl and meth in 2020. The state redirected hundreds of millions of dollars earmarked for enforcement and incarceration toward treatment and harm reduction. It all seemed reasonable in theory, but Mexican drug cartels took full advantage. They flooded the US with fentanyl, which forced the price down, making it accessible for as little as $1 per pill. Then came the pandemic, where isolation, despair, and the cheap, plentiful supply became a horrific combination. “Portland became a honeypot for local and out-of-state addicts to score cheap dope and use it freely,” writes Jason Motlagh for Rolling Stone. After the state repealed decriminalization in 2024, Motlagh visited Portland to witness the aftermath. His careful reporting puts him face to face with people on all sides of the drug crisis: He talks to a hotel owner and the local district attorney; he shadows treatment workers and harm reduction volunteers on their rounds; he witnesses a man brought back from the brink of overdose with four naloxone injections; he gets to know addicts as they cycle through rock bottom and relapse. So how’s it going? Today, naloxone is more readily available on the street. Overdoses are down slightly with a less potent supply. (Some say the cartels are trying to keep their customers alive longer.) While at times this was a very difficult read, it was plain to see that in Portland, there is something other than fentanyl available in large supply—hope. —KS
Hidden in Plain Sight
Carolyn Ariella Sofia · Aeon · October 20, 2025 · 4,013 words · 官方页
A chance meeting in a bookstore changed Carolyn Ariella Sofia’s life. The encounter was with Jerzy Kosiński, the Jewish Polish-American author of The Painted Bird, a harrowing novel about a boy wandering through Eastern European villages during the Second World War. Sofia describes the book with terrified awe: “a desperate note sent in a glass bottle that broke in my hands and made me bleed.” The two eventually go to dinner, where Sofia probes and unsettles Kosiński with her theory that one of his writing strategies is to “hide wartime details in female characters.” He resists exposure. Hiding had been deeply engraved into his psyche during childhood, when he survived the Holocaust by living with a Christian family, and Sofia cannot quite reach him. Their interactions remain taut and uneasy, almost menacing. He reveals little, even as he continues to draw her into a psychological game of cat and mouse. Beyond Kosiński, Sofia examines how the writers Georges Perec and Sarah Kofman divulge the fractured identities of their own war-torn childhoods, when they, too, suffocated their true selves to save their lives. This is no cozy read, but a piercing insight into how the inner turmoil of Holocaust survivors has painfully, gradually, turned into the raw material of their art. Sofia’s deft blend of psychology and literary analysis left me reeling at the complexity of survival, memory, and self-invention. —CW
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The Cat Who Woke Me Up
Sy Safransky · The Sun · September 30, 2025 · 5,012 words · 官方页
I’ve had cats my whole life. Mama Cat, who my parents converted from stray to pet early in their marriage, sometimes slept in my crib when I was an infant. Later there was Callie, adopted when I was 9, who delivered kittens on my bed, under the covers, one night while I slept. When I met my husband, he’d never lived with a cat before, but he knew that my calico, Trouble, and I were a package deal, so he learned to tolerate—and eventually love—her meowing, purring, licking, clawing, and snoring. There were other cats along the way: Maddie, Gracie, Emmie, Pokey. And now, there’s Elaine May, who’s lounging on the floor next to me as I write. Reading Sy Safransky’s beautiful ode to his cat, Cirrus, I thought of my many cats, all of whom “woke me up” in one way or another. Because that’s what pets do, if we let them—they crack us wide open, embolden us, humble us. They test our imaginations, expand our capacity for devotion, confront us with the mysteries of existence. They ask us to stop, see, feel. “Don’t imagine that anything you thought was yours is yours to keep,” Safransky writes of the lessons Cirrus taught him—lessons that are particularly poignant now, 20 years after Safransky first began writing this essay, as he grapples with an Alzheimer’s diagnosis. “Get up and pay your dues for being in a human incarnation. . . . Play hard whenever your playmate will play. Never lose sight of your essential nature. The universe makes a home for you right now in this sixty-year-old body. Honor it as long as you’re in it.” I’ve never read a wiser or more moving piece about our relationship with animals. —SD
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The Coloradans Exercising Their Right To Die—and a Doctor Who Helps Them Find Peace
I recently attended the funeral of my uncle, who suffered a severe cervical fracture after a fall. His health had rapidly deteriorated over the years. After being admitted to the hospital, he was awake and alert, but by the next morning, he was gone. On the day of his burial, I was struck by the orderliness of the military ceremony: the precise folding of the American flag handed to his wife; the Army vets in silent procession, lifting and firing their rifles in unison; the swift, almost ritualistic way a bulldozer covered his casket and smoothed the earth. This planned, meditative efficiency was a stark contrast to the suddenness of his death. It left me thinking about how we die, and what—if anything—we can control when our time comes. Nearly 10 years ago, Colorado voters passed the End of Life Options Act, legalizing medical aid in dying for terminally ill adults who meet specific criteria. Since then, about 1,100 people in the state have chosen this path. For 5280, Robert Sanchez spent the summer learning about this option through Denver Health’s Medical Aid in Dying clinic. Who is eligible? (A person of “sound mind” with six months or less to live.) Where can an “ingestion” take place? (Either a family’s home or the home of someone volunteering their property, since hospitals and hospices don’t permit the practice.) Sanchez was invited to witness families in their most intimate and vulnerable moments. There’s Alan, a man with aggressive lung cancer, who posed for a final family photo before taking his last drink. And there’s Astrid, a woman with ALS who requested to expedite the process to end her suffering. Sanchez captures tough scenes, including a moment when Astrid uses all her strength to reach for the doctor’s syringe to initiate the procedure (a patient must administer the dose themself). Sanchez writes with compassion and curiosity, observing without intrusion, and letting the moments unravel. Through these stories, he invites us to wrestle with this question: “How much control should we have over the terms of our own deaths?” The clinic’s director, a former ER doctor, tells him that “[a]ll stories need to have an ending, and we want our stories to matter.” I keep thinking about my uncle—and how, if given the chance, he would have shaped his own ending. —CLR
Dying for Gold: Who Killed the Miners of Buffelsfontein?
At the risk of sounding idiotically obvious, mining is an extractive process—for those doing the mining as well as the resources being mined. Workers can meet their doom suddenly (collapse, fall, explosion), or after many years (lung disease), but to escape unscathed feels almost miraculous. No such miracles awaited many of the men who flocked to South Africa’s Buffelsfontein mine after it closed in 2013. This was mining minus any illusion of safety; any gold left was deeper underground and farther from entry shafts than ever before, requiring “zama-zamas,” or illegal miners, to live hundreds of meters below the surface for months at a time. And while some zama-zamas came on their own, others arrived under false pretenses or even duress, forced by gangs who controlled the access points. What was already difficult and dangerous became even more so last year, when the South African police began blocking both food supplies going into Buffels and the rope crews who helped zama-zamas get out. Many starved. Many died. Even when people were allowed to leave, they were arrested, with migrants from neighboring countries being held without bail. Liam Taylor’s feature about the tragedy doesn’t shy away from the horrific conditions that led to illegal mining, nor from the fact that blame lay at multiple feet: police, famo gangs, mine owners, the government, and the long shadows of colonialism and apartheid. It’s always sobering to learn of a human-rights disaster. All the more reason that journalism like this—nimble reporting, unaffected prose, and the sole purpose of making sure the world knows—is so crucial. —PR
Best of 2025
Best of 2025: All Our Number Five Story Picks2025 年精选：我们精选的所有第五名故事
Every story we selected for the number five slot in our weekly newsletter, in a handy digest.
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Surrealism Against Fascism
Naomi Klein · Equator · November 26, 2025 · 7,346 words · 官方页
Why does this moment in time feel so uniquely awful? Naomi Klein’s expansive essay about art, philosophy, and political resistance addresses this nagging question, one that I’ve personally struggled to answer through a burst of fury every time I hear someone say, “This too shall pass.” Certainly, the concentration of horrors is part of it. We’re confronted with—and in some cases complicit in—fascism, genocide, and climatological destruction, to name just a few of the catastrophes at hand. And yes, recency bias is a factor. What’s happening now is raw, an open wound. But Klein articulates another crucial aspect. “[Time] doesn’t merely circle,” she writes, “it spirals, returning to places that feel familiar but are fundamentally different, having accumulated all the weight of what came before.” Walter Benjamin, whom Klein references throughout her piece, put it this way: “[History is] one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.” In other words, today feels worse than the past because of the past. What should be the gifts of history have become painful burdens. Hard-won wisdom and knowledge are willfully ignored. Collective pledges to do and be better (“never again”) are perverted to justify new atrocities. How, then, to survive the ever-worsening of the world, the compounding of wreckage? “The interesting thing about spirals,” Klein notes, “is that if they switch directions, they don’t tighten—they broaden, opening like sunflowers, like seashells, like galaxies.” Reversing course means finding shared purpose not just in rejecting cruelty and destruction but in creating their antitheses. Among other people and movements, Klein directs readers to the Surrealists as an example of creative resistance: “We still have much to learn from their efforts—from their endless manifestos, their raucous debates, their sense of play, their solidarities, and their determination to pool their collective powers to meet the scale of their moment in history.” —SD
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How To Build A Thousand-Year-Old Tree
I recently hugged a thousand-year-old yew tree. Part of The Yew Tree Project in England, this tree had a sign next to it that read “Hugging a tree increases the levels of the hormone oxytocin.” (I imagine this tree gets a lot of hugs, so I hugged the sign-bereft neighbor too.) These trees are not conventionally beautiful. Their huge limbs are knotted and furled, curling awkwardly to the ground, as if to prop up their heavy, rotting trunks. Seeing a thousand winters come and go takes its toll, and the air felt heavy with their sighs of age. Trees such as these (over 400 years old) are classified as “ancients.” The UK has more ancient trees than the rest of Europe combined. This isn’t because Brits have been particularly protective of their elderly vegetation. Rather, as Matthew Ponsford explains in this piece for Noēma, it is, at least partly, because kings and queens shut people out from vast swaths of land so they could hunt without having to clap eyes on any bothersome commoners. Sherwood Forest, William the Conqueror’s hunting ground in the 11th century, has about 380 ancient trees. Ponsford visits its most famous: an oak tree named the Major, another potentially thousand-year-old behemoth. Like the yews, this old man is past his prime. As Ponsford contemplates the wizened boughs held up by metal columns like walking sticks, he wonders if he should feel “saddened by the decline of this long-lived beast.” But arborist Rob Harris is quick to reframe Ponsford’s thoughts of the Major as a “withering geriatric.” Ancients have a fundamental role in the forest, one so important that arborists have even begun “veteranization.” This is the process of hitting and cutting holes in young trees to promote the aging seen in their elders. It seems brutal—but rot-filled caverns are fundamental ecosystems for birds and insects, and, as the ancients diminish, ones that are becoming lost. The young, beautiful trees are just not as valuable to the forest without a few life scars. As someone who has always loved trees, I devoured Ponsford’s fascinating insights, but you will be gripped regardless of your forestry inclinations. A solid reminder to always hug the ugly old ones. They are important. —CW
How to Save a Dog
I love a story about an animal on the loose. Rusty the red panda, Betsy the cow, the Bronx zoo cobra—these are just a few of my favorite entries in the genre. Now I can add Scrim the dog to the list. I didn’t experience Scrim’s journey in real time—my preferred way to consume this kind of fare—because I’d just had a baby, but I was thrilled to learn about it in David W. Brown’s sweet, funny, captivating essay. Scrim is a scruffy white rescue terrier in New Orleans who ran away from home not once, but twice. Both times it took an army of do-gooders to track him down. Among them was Brown, who became a Scrim seeker one night while doomscrolling and feeling down. “I don’t know why I went out,” he writes of the moment he decided to act on social media posts reporting Scrim sightings near his home. “I’m not even a dog person. But it was that or reflect on every mistake I’d ever made.” (I laughed out loud at this wholly relatable line.) Alongside other dedicated volunteers, Brown soon found himself more a part of New Orleans, his adopted home, than ever before. “We engaged freely and deeply with anyone, anywhere, because that was the best way to gain intel,” he writes. “Looking for Scrim meant immersing ourselves in the place where we lived, street by street and night after night.” One volunteer gave sanitation kits to unhoused people she met. Brown helped a woman he came across who’d overdosed. Collectively, Scrim’s supporters rescued 300 other animals during their months-long search for the escape artist. I mean it when I say that I needed this piece. The world is a raging dumpster fire, but for a few thousand words, Brown dims the flames. —SD
I Survived Downhill Skiing’s Rowdiest Party
Devon O’Neil · Outside · February 27, 2025 · 2,432 words · 官方页
Outside seems to be on a run of stories about getting worse for wear in a European ski resort. (A much more raucous and free experience than most lawsuit-happy North American resorts.) A few weeks ago, Kassondra Cloos reported on the debauchery of a singles ski trip to Val Thorens, France, and now it’s Devon O’Neil’s turn to slap on some skis (briefly) and down some shots (many). O’Neil is nothing if not committed. There is no fly-in-fly-out reporting here; he is in Kitzbühel, Austria, for six whole days and nights. Six nights spent in a six-bunk room at the SnowBunnys Hostel with snoring Josh, who sounds like “a semi-truck using its engine brake,” and puking Rupert, who loses a battle with some peach schnapps. SnowBunnys may be grim, but O’Neil’s descriptions of sleep deprivation and urine on the toilet floor still gave me twinges of nostalgia: I stayed in many such ski hostels in my early 20s, and damn, it was fun. Nowadays, such a trip would result in a hospital stay, or at best, tears. So big respect for O’Neil, a middle-aged dad who manages to complete this challenge while keeping the moaning to a minimum. One perk of the SnowBunnys Hostel is its location close to the finish line of the Hahnenkamm downhill ski race, or as O’Neil writes, “alpine schussing’s holy grail, where skiers become legends on a twisting elevator shaft of ice called the Streif.” While feigning to cover this event, this piece is more about the sport found off the slopes. From the camaraderie of locals drinking in a tiny mountaintop bar to the legendary post-race shenanigans in the Londoner pub, this is an homage to having a good time. It is also a dissection of a tiny mountain hamlet and the vast array of very different people who descend upon it each year. At one point, O’Neil watches “a young man dig a beer bottle out of the snow, hoping it was full, then toss it back when it wasn’t, next to a mother nursing her baby on the ground.” While the subject matter is unashamedly trivial, this is the humorous cavort I needed this week. So, cheers to European après. I do miss it. —CW
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Ecological Warfare
Nathaniel Rich’s dispatch from the Louisiana Nutria Rodeo is rich with rewards—unless, of course, you’re the invasive, orange-toothed rodent at its heart. A nutria, per Rich, is “approximately the shape of a football” and “about the same weight as a Jack Russell terrier.” In the past 25 years, nutrias have consumed more than 40 square miles of Louisiana, furthering damage done by a century of pipeline development and efforts to control the course of the Mississippi River. “A citizen is not permitted, in the current legal climate, to explode federal levees and dams, or to hunt oil and gas executives,” Rich writes. “So the nutria must pay.” And, boy, does it pay. Rich briskly unfolds the day’s events: a 40-hour hunt to bag as many “swamp rats” as possible, followed by a rodent cook-off and, finally, the Nutria Toss. He spends a portion of the day aboard a fog-shrouded airboat with the former Miss Louisiana, an avid hunter who warns him that things “can get Western real quick.” He details the nutria’s murky origins—which include a Tabasco scion’s runaway farming operation—and its culinary possibilities, from Paul Prudhomme’s popcorn-chicken approach to brined nutria chops. (He samples, too, of course. Nutria “tastes like roast beef, with an afternote of rust.”) At the Nutria Toss, dead rodents fly into the crowd, smacking onlookers. “This is essentially a conservation event,” a climate activist tells Rich. “But that’s not the appeal. The appeal is throwing nutria.” My folks live in nutria country these days, not far from the site of the rodeo, and I’ve already texted them about the event. I don’t wish the swamp rats any harm. Still, I can’t help but wonder how far I could throw one. —BF
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The Heroines Who Take On The Harm承担伤害的女英雄 - 德拉科特评论
When I write editor’s picks and recommendations for our weekly Top 5, I make notes about the piece and collect passages to spark my imagination. I know a story is special when my digital scratchpad fills quickly. This is what happened with Adlai Coleman’s Delacorte Review essay. Coleman goes to West Virginia “looking for harm.” There, he meets Danni Dineen and Donna Coleman, two women working to reduce harm for members of their community. Danni runs the Quick Response Team for the city of Charleston, a group of EMTs and recovery specialists who respond to overdose-related 911 calls, offering life-saving Narcan. Danni has been sober for nearly four years; she was given Narcan 23 times before she got treatment. Both her mother and younger sister died of overdoses. Her older sister overdosed and was placed on life support. Now, life support is exactly what Danni does for a living. When not responding to 911 calls, she’s doing wellness checks and connecting with people while she hands out water, bus passes, and Narcan. She meets people exactly where they are because she’s been there. She doesn’t judge. She keeps trying, knowing that today could be the day that a client quits drugs for good. “Danni spends her days holding doors open and watching people walk by,” writes Coleman. Over in Ripley, a town in Jackson County, Donna is the only employee of the Bo-Mar Drop-In-Center, where help varies widely, but always meets an immediate need. Sometimes it’s a free hot sandwich and a safe place to sit for awhile. Sometimes it’s finding a bed in a treatment facility. Sometimes it’s asking a few questions that show she knows what someone is up to, but that she cares anyway. Donna probes to find out what someone needs now, something that might get them one step closer to recovery. Coleman is a keen observer and clocks his own awkwardness, first at developing rapport with Donna and then at making eye contact with the Bo-Mar clients. “There is quiet appraisal in Donna’s gaze, a gentle detachment, as if she is studying you from a distance. She wears rounded glasses and her eyes are warm without being soft. She speaks deliberately, unafraid of silence,” he writes. Each sentence in this essay is stark, each paragraph pairs devastation with earned optimism. No one in this story is comfortable, especially the reader, but that discomfort is a necessary precursor to change, fueled by what Danni and Donna bring to work every day: hope. —KS
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My Quest to Find the Owner of a Mysterious WWII Japanese Sword
Kevin Chroust · Outside · February 5, 2025 · 9,866 words · 官方页
This piece on returning a Japanese military sword is a passion project. Born out of love for the author’s grandfather, curiosity, and just plain lockdown boredom, it was years in the making—500 years, if you count from when the sword was crafted. Kevin Chroust’s family came into the picture a mere 80 years ago: His grandfather found the sword on an Okinawa beach in the final days of World War II and mailed it back to America. (The competence of the postal service is one of the more shocking elements of this story.) Chroust remembers the sword being brought out as a child, a prop for war stories, but it was only as an adult that he considered the wooden label attached to it, which asked, in part, “your favour to send my sword to my home,” with a name and a town on the other side. Drawn to the plea, Chroust began an internet search to track down the sword’s original owner. It was not a simple process, but after finding relatives of the owner, Chroust started to plan a trip to Japan. He has a delightfully wry tone when discussing the reality of this adventure: “[F]antasy is simple. The imagination can’t be bothered with unromantic minutiae. With weapons laws. Consulates. Viruses. Visas. Visa sponsorships.” But he perseveres until he and the sword are finally on the way to Japan. (Again, great trust is given to the postal system.) I won’t spoil the ending, but there are some beautiful moments. This is a fun detective piece and a fascinating history lesson, but, above all, it is a personal story. A tale of two families, on two sides of a war, then two sides of the world, who are brought together “with acts of kindness on both sides.” —CW
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Wild Clocks
Spring melts seem to happen earlier, and warmer fall months stretch out, shortening the winter season. To a human who abhors the cold, this might seem like a good thing, but for animals and plants, it can alter and perhaps even endanger their life cycles. Consider mammals that emerge from hibernation earlier than usual, before their preferred foods proliferate. Consider plants that may flower too early, before critical pollinators are out and about. As David Farrier explains in this lyrical piece, such mistiming is called a chronoclasm: “a collision of different orders of time.” What’s behind these somewhat scary developments? You guessed it: climate change due to global warming. But this essay is not all doom and gloom—far from it. Farrier’s poetic look at wild intervals is accessible and thoughtful. He gives equal (ahem) time to reasons we can be hopeful about evolving ecological dependencies and partnerships, such as how new tree species might flourish in forests where conditions were once too cold for them. “Time lives in the body, not as the tick of the clock, but as a pulse in the blood,” he writes. “It is a thought, buried deep in nerve, leaf, and gene. . . . As wild clocks fall out of measure, can we recalibrate our sense of time and foster a rhythm by which all life can flourish?” We know we can’t rewind the clock and reset Earth’s climate. It’s refreshing, however, to read a piece that predicts what the future might hold while planting the seeds of hope. —KS
When the Bears Come Back
Anya Groner · Southlands · November 11, 2025 · 3,993 words · 官方页
It happens all the time: I’ll look up randomly while working, only to witness a black bear appear out of the bush and amble across our property. I can’t help but pause after these sightings. For me, it’s a moment of reverence for that wild being, and a reminder to be vigilant in the forest we share, to be sure they get the wide berth they deserve. Wendy Cowan tried to avoid conflict with a bear in the woods of Lunenburg County, Virginia, but unfortunately, things didn’t go as planned. In this piece for Southlands (a new publication!), Anya Groner recounts Cowan’s harrowing bear attack and reckons with the increasing encounters between bears and humans across the United States. This braided essay is a study in building tension; I sat motionless reading it, engrossed in Cowan’s encounter and an aftermath that was bloody in more ways than one. “For a moment, they were the same height, face to face and swaying like a dancing couple,” writes Groner. “Then the bear yawned, and Wendy knew she was in trouble.” Groner follows Cowan around Richmond’s East End, observing the survivor as she shares her story and photographic evidence with the curious. The scene work here brings depth to Cowan as a main character, shading in a painful and lengthy recovery period while highlighting the attack’s lasting—and surprisingly positive—emotional outcomes. Cowan’s made deep and profound connections with those who take a moment to listen to her story and to share their own trauma. She’s found a community of survivors, and for this, she’s grateful to the bear. This piece, while at times a terrifying read, is a stark and beautiful reminder of what happens when we refuse to be defined by the things we cannot control. —KS
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Can Jollibee Beat American Fast Food at Its Own Game?
Yasmin Tayag · The Atlantic · December 9, 2025 · 2,832 words · 官方页
I recently spoke at the funeral of an aunt—my Tita—who was the connective tissue of our extended family. Across the eulogies, a few themes repeated: the joy she sparked at gatherings, her generosity, and our shared love of food, especially the delicious, often fried dishes she helped prepare. Reading Yasmin Tayag’s Atlantic story about Jollibee felt fitting this week. Tayag traces the global rise of the Filipino fast-food chain, especially its expansion in the US, and shows how Filipino food—salty, sweet, sour, and rich with taste and feeling—is both deeply rooted in and constantly transformed by outside influences. This tension feels familiar to me. I remember when the first Jollibee in North America opened in 1998 in Daly City, California, where I was born. I grew up on comfort dishes—my aunt’s extra-crispy fried chicken, my uncle’s pork-rib sinigang, my mom’s adobo—but today my family looks very different from the one I grew up in. It’s expanded and blended: Chinese and British, Indian and Mexican, with new recipes added to the pot (my husband’s quinoa-based arroz caldo comes to mind). Like Filipino food itself, we’ve evolved. Jollibee now has more than 1,800 locations worldwide, with its parent company operating 10,000 stores across 19 Filipino and international brands. (I had no idea it owned The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf and Smashburger.) While Jollibee’s flavors are designed “for the mainstream,” and not everything on the menu is what I personally crave, I still admire its mission to export Filipino warmth and hospitality along with its food. Tayag writes about all of this with care, curiosity, and an obvious affection for what food can carry beyond taste. And if you’re unsure about Filipino spaghetti—unexpectedly sweet for some—try the version at Tipunan in the East Bay, and then thank me later. —CLR
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Richard E. Grant: ‘Love Again? I’m Not Looking For It’
In my early 20s, I spent a few months living in France. My French was embarrassingly poor, and in those days before streaming, my media consumption was limited to the handful of English DVDs I had packed. I watched these films so many times that I can still quote huge chunks. My favorite was Withnail and I, in which Richard E. Grant plays Withnail, an out-of-work, alcoholic actor who proclaims such things as, “We want the finest wines available to humanity, we want them here and we want them now!” Withnail speaks his mind, often disparaging those around him with bitter humor, which is a trait that came to mind as I read Vassi Chamberlain’s interview with an audacious and combative Grant. There is no sycophantic pandering on either side here, which, while a touch uncomfortable, makes for a fascinating read. For every question Chamberlain asks, Grant responds by asking her the same one, including whether she has had therapy. (Chamberlain avoids answering it.) But this is not an avoidance strategy on Grant’s part: He still answers Chamberlain’s questions with searing honesty. When asked about Withnail, he is dismissive: “The last time I saw it was a rough cut in 1987. I offered to return the £20,000 fee because I thought I’d ruined the film.” (A painful blow to this ardent fan.) We also learn that he had an alcoholic, abusive father, and that he was devastated over the death of his wife of 38 years. Grant beautifully speaks about the latter: “The conversation that began in bed in January 1983, ended in bed as we held each other’s hands, still talking, on Thursday the 2nd of September, 2021. . . . Talking is the greatest intimacy of all.” He still writes to his wife every night, telling her about his day and who he has met. Chamberlain bravely, perhaps foolishly, asks him what he will write about her. He replies: “All her girlfriends now look 40 years old but her jawline is hanging around her knees and in ten years she will tie a bow with her dyed hair around her chin in a tight knot and she’ll look like the Queen at Balmoral.” Chamberlain’s response, and her final word: “Ouch.” —CW
How Creativity Became the Reigning Value of Our Time
Creativity is of the utmost importance in Minecraft, a digital fantasia for would-be architects where my 8-year-old son spends time (though not nearly as much as he would like). He studies blueprints for elaborate, blocky structures, and invents his own idiosyncratic ones. A four-story fortress made entirely from TNT? No one will mess with that, he assures me. “Anything you can dream about, you can create,” Jack Black promises, his voice brimming with awe, in A Minecraft Movie, the highest-grossing film of 2025 so far. In contrast, the Nether, Minecraft’s hellish underworld, is “a place with no joy or creativity at all.” I don’t derive much joy from Minecraft, myself. And yet Bryan Gardiner’s conversation with Samuel Franklin, a cultural historian and author of The Cult of Creativity, has me watching my son a bit more closely, wondering at his impulses to shape the space around him. “Like a lot of kids, I grew up thinking that creativity was this inherently good thing,” Franklin tells Gardiner. “Being creative meant you at least had some future in this world, even if it wasn’t clear what that future would entail.” Later, Franklin realized that “what was being sold as the triumph of the creative class wasn’t actually resulting in a more inclusive or creative world order.” While on the shorter end of a Longreads recommendation, Gardiner’s exchange with Franklin is chock-a-block with curiosities from our recent fixation on creativity as a cure-all. After you read, you’ll find yourself searching for details on the psychologists who first elevated concepts of divergent thinking, on the cognitive tests put to Norman Mailer and Louis Kahn to gather data on creativity. You may find yourself looking at a brick, and thinking more expansively about just how much heart you put in your creations. —BF
The Secret Life of Horus
Russell Cobb and Sarah Brandvold · Edify · October 1, 2025 · 2,732 words · 官方页
Horus (a nickname; his real name is long lost) is an Egyptian mummy. He may be cursed. He has definitely been abused. And he’s currently living at the University of Alberta. Russell Cobb and Sarah Brandvold tell Horus’s remarkable afterlife story for Edify with a light touch and a clear moral compass: Horus, before anything else, is a human being. This was a fact conveniently forgotten in the Victorian era, when “owning a mummy was like driving a Rolls-Royce—a mark of refinement and prestige.” Unwrapping parties were all the rage, presumably wedged somewhere between cake and cigars, and “mummy brown,” paint made from, I kid you not, ground-up mummies, was a must-have palette color. Horus escaped the paint pot, but not much else. In 1942, he landed with George Woodrow of Stanmore, England, after his previous owner died (curse alert!). Mrs. Woodrow, less enthused about haunted antiquities, banished him to the shed for 25 years. Eventually, the family emigrated to Canada, where Horus also ended up. But a change of scenery did not improve his fortunes: A couple more deaths (curse alarm!) led to Horus being displayed on a city bus, unwrapped by teenagers, decapitated, sent to an Edmonton hospital, and even used as a political campaign prop (again, not kidding). I’ll let you read the fascinating details, but suffice it to say that ending up at the University of Alberta was a huge improvement. Shed spiders were swapped for a “multidisciplinary team of scientists, medical specialists, Egyptologists and conservation experts,” and Horus has been carefully studied and cared for since his arrival. But should he really be here, either? Like many, I can’t resist Egyptology, and find myself wandering straight to the mummy halls when I visit the British Museum. But as Cobb and Brandvold are so careful to remind us, these aren’t curiosities, they’re people. Horus was a lector priest and scribe, and was likely laid to rest with honor in the ancient city of Memphis, where he remained at peace for two millennia. His last hundred years have been a circus. Maybe it’s time he went home. —CW
What Made Blogging Different?
Elizabeth Spiers · Talking Points Memo · October 16, 2025 · 1,726 words · 官方页
I once wrote on my blog about my growing fear of missing out online, and how checking Twitter felt like trying to jump onto a moving train. That post, which generated 135 comments, ended up marking the beginning of the end for my blog, and for the kind of personal writing I used to share in public. (The link rot in that post says as much about the web’s evolution as it does about mine.) In this short but resonant piece, Elizabeth Spiers is nostalgic for the early ’00s internet, when thinking in the open could be slow, and we were able to leave our doors open for anyone who visited our online homes—because comments, even disagreements, were respectful. “The sort of considered back and forth I remember from the thoughtful members of the early blogosphere is something that is harder to find now,” she writes. Growing up in rural Alabama in a conservative family, Spiers credits bloggers during that time with challenging her worldview and helping her evolve as a writer and thinker. “I still look for people with early blogger energy,” she writes. I do, too. (This is a perfect spot to plug Phil Gyford’s post on his website about discovering the internet in 1995, which I also picked this week.) We need more of these spaces, now more than ever. And I mean independent blogs and personal websites like Phil’s—not a bunch of people crammed into a Substack mansion. Don’t get me wrong: I appreciate the longform writing people are publishing there, but I miss clicking a link that takes me to someone’s own house, decorated exactly as they want it. Over the years, I’ve tried and failed to revive my neglected blog, but pieces like Spiers’s remind me of what being online could be like again, if only more of us were willing to rebuild those welcoming corners of the web. Maybe the internet we miss isn’t really gone—it’s just waiting for us to come home. —CLR
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The Future Is Too Easy
Dispatches from the Consumer Electronics Show have been a mainstay of the tech media for more than 25 years. Given the lurching evolution of the technology industry, those dispatches have diversified just a bit. All the way back in 2013, John Gruber wrote that “[t]here’s a nihilistic streak in tech journalism that I just don’t see in other fields.” But that streak is also increasingly warranted. What other industry has generated so much money from our attention, emotions, and data? All of this to say that Defector sending David Roth to CES is likely the apotheosis of Nihilistic CES Dispatch—and you’ll devour it gleefully. Once upon a time, Roth’s brand of polemic might have been dismissed as “snark.” It is anything but. Roth is deeply unsettled by the tech industry, and he’s deeply unsettled by CES, but what unsettles him the most about both is their insistence on the inevitability of AI. “The technology currently lavishly fucking up your grocery order in a supervised setting,” he writes, “will soon make you breakfast and drive you to work and help raise your child and manage both your glucose levels and those of your pet. It will know everything about you, and it will also care about you.” That’s just the backdrop. Roth navigates the Las Vegas Convention Center with something like awe. Or horror. Or something in between. CES is a zombie show of sorts: there are products from Kodak and Memorex and Radio Shack, all of which are no longer the original companies but rather conglomerates that now own their trademarks. “‘I once loved Memorex’s VHS tapes, so I will now buy this Memorex e-scooter,’ is on the merits an absurd value proposition, but not much more or less absurd than anything else in that space,” he writes. There are gadgets, obviously, many of which seem to be internet-connected sex toys. But what Roth is really interested in is the mounting evidence that our humanity is being extracted, reproduced, and monetized: “The fantasy and utility of AI, for the unconscionably wealthy and relentlessly wary masters of this space, converge in a high and lonesome abstraction—technology designed less to do every human thing for you than to replace all those human things with itself, and then sell that function back to you as a monthly subscription.” Roth has long been a gifted critic of greed—greed in sports, greed in entertainment, greed in politics. But in this specific moment, when we’ve watched a cadre of Big Tech CEOs paying fealty to a demonstratedly corrupt president, that greed has never felt so threatening. At least someone’s on the ramparts trying to help you see it. —PR
Have We Been Measuring Mountains All Wrong?
Nature has left me awestruck time and time again: whether gazing at the Big Sur coastline from a mountaintop monastery, watching the Colorado River carve a sharp U-turn at Dead Horse Point in Utah, or standing where Kīlauea’s lava meets the sea on Hawaii’s Big Island. A few years ago, Henry Wismayer’s essay on the science of awe made me wonder what, exactly, stirs such emotion. This question reemerged for me as I read Gordy Megroz’s National Geographic profile of Kai Xu, a 23-year-old mountain-loving mathematician who set out to measure this feeling. On a visit to California’s Eastern Sierra region, Xu was wowed by the sight of Mount Tom. At 13,652 feet, it’s far shorter than Mount Everest, the world’s tallest peak at 29,032 feet, but Xu found Mount Tom’s presence just as extraordinary. Are there attributes other than height that make a mountain great? Could awe be quantified? “He had never laid eyes on the Himalaya or the Andes or any of the world’s largest mountains,” writes Megroz, “but he couldn’t have been more impressed if he had.” Xu invented a new formula to calculate grandeur, factoring in a mountain’s height above its surroundings and the steepness of its rise to produce a single number called “jut”—a measure of how dramatically a peak thrusts into the sky. Math lovers will enjoy the story’s nerdy bent, but what stays with me most is Megroz’s ability to balance technical detail with emotional resonance. He never loses sight of the human story—of a bright, curious young man who sees the world in a new way, and challenges us to do the same. —CLR
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Do Our Dogs Have Something to Tell the World?
Last week marked the one-year anniversary of bringing home Bowser. He wasn’t Bowser then; the day my wife and I met him, he had no name at all. Someone from the dog rescue had found him running around a shoreline park in the East Bay, collarless and ID-less, presumably dumped there but still friendly and trusting enough to hop in their car. We waited a month, so he could be reunited with whoever it was, if that was meant to happen, but it didn’t, and he became part of our family. Bowser has changed our lives, as dogs will do. Some of that is just the result of his being a happy, muscly little pug-mutt who walks like a cartoon—when you’re outside with a dog like that, people get happy, and they invariably talk to you—but some of it is just the alchemy of independence and utter dependence of living with a dog. It’s impossible not to anthropomorphize them just a little, to map their moods and foibles to human psychology, to love them even while knowing that their bonding behaviors are more evolution than emotion. Even before we got Bowser, I’d seen TikTok videos of dogs using “talking buttons,” and couldn’t decide if it was miraculous or just well-engineered meme fodder. If a dog like Bunny the sheepadoodle really could tell her human that she had a foxtail in her paw, I reasoned, it made that bond all the more mystical. “These pets weren’t just standing by to serve their human owners,” as Camille Bromley writes of the animals she sees using talking buttons on social media. “They were companions with voices of their own.” Bromley’s fascinating feature can’t render a definitive judgment on dogs’ linguistic facility, since science can’t either, but it still plumbs the question with rigor and verve. She detours into the history of animal language experiments, she speaks to proponents and detractors in the research community, and she renders button-based communication in all caps because it’s just far more enjoyable that way. This is a piece for dog lovers, yes, but it’s really for anyone with a sense of wonder and possibility. (The readers in the story’s comment thread do not have a sense of wonder and possibility.) Besides, even if we never get Bowser a set of talking buttons, I know what he’d use it for. BALL. BALL NOW. BALL PLAY NOW. —PR
The Great French Fry Mystery
Harley Rustad · Toronto Life · August 11, 2025 · 3,564 words · 官方页
His name was Rodolphe, or at least that’s what was written on the 10 A&W bags Harley Rustad’s neighbor found on her porch, discarded, over a period of several days. Who was Rodolphe? Why had he left his mostly eaten french fries at her door, night after night? Was it an inviting space to enjoy a late-night snack? A weird political statement? Some sort of scam? Rustad set up an old baby monitor aimed at the porch in an attempt to spot the perpetrator. Together, he and his neighbor taped a skein of thread across the staircase to the porch to determine whether the perpetrator was animal or human; they sprinkled baking soda on the stoop to capture paw pads or footprints. The following morning revealed a set of decidedly human shoes, and of course, another crumpled bag of half-eaten french fries. Late-night babycam notifications confirmed that the fries were being delivered to the front door and then devoured, first by a raccoon, followed by a squirrel munching on the leftovers. After nine days and nine bags of fries, Rustad and his neighbor decided to head to the source: their closest A&W location, only to learn that while the orders originated there, they’d been placed via Uber Eats, which revealed no further information. “Via our tests, we had figured out the how,” writes Rustad. “And we had solved one who: who had been eating the fries. But other questions remained. Who was ordering them? Who was Rodolphe? And why was someone repeatedly sending orders of french fries to my neighbour in the middle of the night?” I won’t spoil this story by delivering the ending to you. In addition to an intriguing whodunit, Rustad’s story of next-door detective work is, at its heart, a lovely testament to good neighbors in our increasingly myopic world, a piece that celebrates the simple joy of being one and having one. —KS
The Talented Ms. Highsmith
Elena Gosalvez Blanco · The Yale Review · June 9, 2025 · 6,281 words · 官方页
My wife and I lived, for a summer, in the home of a writer I admire. He told us jokes while he made us dinner, a recipe an ex taught him, tossing pieces of rotisserie chicken with arugula, olives, and goat cheese. I drove his pickup to the dump for him, his Public Enemy cassette in the deck, a garbage can filled with his empty bourbon bottles rattling in the back. When he was away, I read his story collections. There were the same pieces of his life, dispersed among his characters: the truck, the Public Enemy, the salad. The distinctions between our life and his stories blurred, sharpening the remainder of our summer together. Another couple moved in after us; later, I saw pieces of their life in a New Yorker story. Patricia Highsmith, the author of The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train, wielded a singular intensity in her life and work. (One critic who resisted her novels feared that “spending too much time in Highsmith’s brain might alter mine irrevocably.”) In 1994, during the final months of Highsmith’s life, Elena Gosalvez Blanco moves to Switzerland to become her live-in assistant. Highsmith controls Blanco’s access to the phone and to friends, and scolds her for using electricity. “I was trapped in her world with her, trembling,” Blanco writes. “I fantasized that she might try to kill me.” From one wing of the U-shaped house, Blanco gazes across a courtyard into Highsmith’s bedroom, aware that Highsmith might just as easily observe her when she chooses. An acquaintance tells Blanco that Highsmith “is just in love with you,” deepening Blanco’s worry: “Like Ripley, Pat could be charming but also dark, possessive, irrational, and impatient.” Blanco’s account of her weeks with Highsmith is suspenseful and precise, a dark portrait of a complex relationship that explores the scrim between life and art. —BF
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Escape from Los Angeles
A mile from our home marks the burn line from a wildfire that ignited on a scorching day in May and consumed 4,000 hectares within hours, urged on by gusting south winds. Pines, poplars, and skinny ash trees are dead standing in that eerie, blackened landscape. The trees and the brush will grow back. Two people on our small peninsula did not make it out in time. This is the worst wildfire season in my province’s history and it’s only the beginning of June. I’ve read and heard many wildfire stories over the years; a US colleague used to live through the summers with a “go” bag packed with essentials and family treasures, should the worst come to pass and threaten their home. I never really understood what that meant until I read The Great Displacement by Jake Bittle, in which he reports on climate change-induced migration, wildfire being one cause. (It’s a terrific, eye-opening book, full of personal stories. You should check it out.) Ever since, I’ve been compelled to read every wildfire story I find. That’s why Katya Apekina’s account of the Palisades and Eaton Fires for Alta Journal caught my attention. The morning of January 7, 2025, dawns like an ordinary Tuesday. The Santa Ana winds feel a little spooky, a little exciting for Apekina, the “L.A. version of a snowstorm.” But then the winds pick up. The fire, which had started 20 miles away, roars closer. The tension in this essay grows and develops like a fully-fledged character as she recounts a surreal scene: her husband reading “a biography of J. Edgar Hoover by candlelight as the fire rages in the windows behind him.” Soon, the air turns acrid with dense smoke. It tastes toxic. People are losing their houses as the fire advances. They are dying. Paper artifacts of lives lived float to earth the following day, having escaped the flames. “Pages from the Bible, or Alcoholics Anonymous literature, or old encyclopedias—thin pages that traveled downwind for several miles—drifted into people’s yards,” she writes in the aftermath, a period in which she questions her future in Los Angeles and how to live, moment to moment, while processing the catastrophe. “I’m in a state of hysterical terror. I want to go home. This is not my home.” As Apekina suggests, it may be time for many of us to reconsider what home really means. If you can make a space for home in your heart, at least you can take it with you when you have to flee. —KS
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A Circling Story
Holly Haworth · Emergence Magazine · October 23, 2025 · 4,093 words · 官方页
Spring, summer, fall, and winter: Amid each, sometimes it’s easy to forget that change is ongoing, if sometimes imperceptible. I try my best to mark seasonal changes: I love hearing “bird radio” get louder as spring unfolds, when robin dads sing evening songs to ward off other males. Their voices go silent in late August, and that sudden void reminds me that fall will soon arrive. In this piece for Emergence Magazine, Holly Haworth notes that the “Japanese have seventy-two microseasons, traditionally, each lasting around five days.” Their names include: “‘bamboo shoots start to sprout,’ ‘praying mantises hatch,’ ‘distant thunder,’ and ‘frogs start singing.’” Haworth’s ode to the seasons reads like a poem. In simple yet vibrant declarative sentences, she reminds us what we stand to gain by getting outside and observing closely. Sometimes paying attention can be draining, but for Haworth, the act energizes and fulfills her as an antidote to climate change. “This is why I have been turning my attention toward the seasons so devotedly these past many years, keeping my field notebooks,” she writes. “[T]o draw myself closer to the earth’s cycles whose disruption is, in fact, the most important story of our time . . .” I read this piece just after Daylight Saving Time ended. With full darkness now at 5 p.m., it’s helped me to welcome the shorter days. It’s a lyrical reminder that fallow periods are so important for the earth and for humans, that fall decay and winter stillness are necessary, if only to help us better appreciate the light when it finally returns. —KS
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My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek
Something happened to me last year that I’ve yet to fully unpack. I was doing sit-ups when, suddenly, the left side of my body was overtaken by tingling. A colorful corona bloomed in my left eye. I found it hard to speak. My wife drove me to the emergency room. There was a cardiology investigation. Then there were others. I got a neurologist, and then a gastroenterologist. I started getting monthly blood tests. Doctors scanned my brain and tested my nerves. Each test showed me to be in good health. And yet symptoms of something have persisted. Where I live, family doctors are hard to come by, so I’ve been required to piece together my own care. My wife provides tremendous emotional support, but we’re not all so fortunate. Where, then, should we look for solace? Viola Zhou’s mother has lived with chronic kidney problems for two decades. As China’s aging population puts increased pressure on the nation’s healthcare infrastructure, Zhou’s mother has seen her marriage fracture and her daughter leave the country. In her isolation, she has turned to DeepSeek, an AI-powered chatbot, for medical guidance, tasking it with interpreting her medical records, changing her diet, and reducing her immunosuppressant dose. She warmly thanks the chatbot, and it responds in kind. Zhou brings her mother’s chat records to specialists, who point out the errors in Dr. DeepSeek’s responses. And yet Zhou’s mother dismisses the shortcomings. “DeepSeek is more humane,” she tells Zhou. “Doctors are more like machines.” These days, there is no shortage of stories about people in crisis who turn to AI for support, sometimes to perilous ends. Zhou’s feature reminds us that such stories are symptoms—of technological limits, isolation, and dysfunctional healthcare systems. —BF
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Do You Believe in Life After Death? These Scientists Study It.
Once, years ago, I tried to gain access to the Division of Perceptual Studies, the parapsychology research office at the University of Virginia. I’d become fascinated by Dr. Ian Stevenson, who founded the division in 1967 and, over decades, collected thousands of stories from people who claimed to recall past lives. Before his own death in 2007, Stevenson bought a combination lock from a local hardware store, set a private code, and locked it. Perhaps one day, freed of his earthly body, he might somehow communicate the code. The lock might snap open; a new light might shine into an old, dark mystery. For a long time, I passed the same hardware store on my walk to work. I tried interviewing Stevenson’s colleagues, who respectfully declined to speak with me; I made an appointment to visit the division’s research library, only to have it revoked. A staff member told me that the press “has trivialized our work here . . . for entertainment purposes, and we are very wary of this sort of thing happening.” Saskia Solomon’s reported feature is a rare, deep glimpse into the work of the Division of Perceptual Studies as it quietly continues—“notably distanced from the university’s leafy main campus,” Solomon notes, “and at least a couple of miles from the medical school.” As one former director tells her, “Nobody knows we’re here.” Solomon’s work is measured throughout, appropriately questioning and quietly attuned to the wonder of the researchers she shadows. Photographs from Matt Eich—of an enclosure to block electromagnetic interference; of a drawer filled with locks—hum with potential. There is always reason for skepticism; still, every story must mean something. —BF