The author of Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age and The Immortal King Rao on memorable meals and books about whales.
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The Memory Maker
OpenAI’s Sora allowed you to deepfake yourself. Users started to remember things that never happened.
A Portrait of the Artist as an Amazon Reviewer
“Between 2003 and 2019, Kevin Killian published almost twenty-four hundred reviews on the site. Can they be considered literature?”
Turf War
Seeing alternatives makes you realize how ubiquitous turfgrass is—though anyone who’s ever wrestled with their own Kentucky bluegrass doesn’t need to be reminded.
COVID-19: Dispatches from Sing Sing
“Sing Sing was going into quarantine. Our movement was limited. No gym. Hospital and commissary runs limited to groups of ten. Staggered seating in the mess hall.”
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Notable reads by Marco Giancotti, Jessica Davey-Quantick, Reeves Wiedman, Emily Fox Kaplan, and C Pam Zhang.
Our Top 5: Reads on the Brain, Wildfire, Power, and More
This newsletter is one of our favorite things we work on as a team: a culmination of our curation work and a show of appreciation for all the hardworking writers and journalists out there who entertain, provoke, and inform us each week. Each Top 5 also serves to chronicle what’s happening in our world at […]
Madness, Melancholy, or Murder: An Ancient English Farm’s 50-Year-Old MysteryÂ
Andrew Chamings returns to his childhood farmland to investigate the mystifying deaths of the Luxton siblings. What really happened down that dark country lane?
When Time Costs Too Much
If you are the family breadwinner, how do you calculate the value of time with your children?
Failure To Lawn
On what a dying patch of turfgrass can teach us about water scarcity, ecological repair, and the lies we tell ourselves about success.


