“At Bombay Beach, a half-ruined former vacation town on the edge of the Salton Sea, absurdist philosophers, artists, and everyday townsfolk have undertaken a postapocalyptic experiment in radical living.”
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A Year in Reading: Restraint as Wisdom
We live in a culture built on ignoring limits—of land, of bodies, of attention—and these stories kept returning me to that truth.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Recommending stories by Alice Hines, Maggie Harrison Dupré, Katie Engelhart, Pooja Bhatia, and Tom Lamont.
A Vigilante Murder in Grand Marais
How a shocking crime divided a small Minnesota town.
Holograms of the Holocaust (and Our Top 5)
“Over many decades, my grandmother gave responses to thousands of questions, wrote tens of thousands of words, and spoke for hours and hours while tapes rolled. She would be, in other words, the perfect candidate for AI reanimation.” In my household, the transition from summer to fall has been tough. Lately, to help my daughter […]
Hope in the Desert and the Week’s Top 5
“Talking with them I realized how many people, like me, had run away from hard conversations. How we did it on purpose, and sometimes without realizing. How people who needed to talk waited for invitations to spit out the hard stuff, and how good it felt when they did.” Happy Friday, y’all. Summer is drawing […]
Abandoned Music Dreams and The Week’s Top 5
“It felt like a homecoming but in retrospect seems more like a goodbye: a last great musical act before leaving that period of my life. It felt romantic, anyway, to record in a barn. We set the drums next to the tractor, tried to coax the chickens into cooing for the microphone, and had a […]
Best of 2022: Reported Essays
Our list of some of the great reported essays published this year includes reads on grief, veganism, the geology of Mexico City, and British real estate.
Best of 2024: All Our Number Five Story Picks
Every story that appeared in the number five slot in our Weekly Top 5, all in one place.
Exilium Vita Est: The Island Home of Victor Hugo
Emma Jacobs takes us on an illustrated journey of Hugo’s writing life in exile on Guernsey, where he completed Les Misérables.


