“I never knew I lived in an oil town until I went looking for the concealed infrastructure of fossil fuel production.”
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Novelist Charles Portis Was a True Original
Every Portis fan has a different favorite passage from his novels, but they agree on one thing: no one wrote like Portis.
Behind F1’s Velvet Curtain
“If you wanted to turn someone into a socialist you could do it in about an hour by taking them for a spin around the paddock of a Formula 1 race.”
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Recommending notable stories by Wyatt Williams, John Leland, Jonathan Weiner, Suzy Hansen, and Max Ufberg.
The Enduring Joy of Maps (and the Week’s Top 5)
“Empty spaces on maps were so terrifying to ancient mapmakers that they filled them with decorations, fictional landscapes, and monsters. We moderns miss the beautiful monsters, but what if they never actually disappeared? What if the monsters were always part of the map, part of mapping itself?” After many months of hearing about how great […]
A Profile of J. Robert Oppenheimer
“‘Operation Joe’ finds our top expert on atomic energy confidently carrying forward his research in the field of pure basic science, where the atomic bomb is only a ‘gadget.'”
Working on the Edge: A Reading List About Extreme Jobs
A livelihood is not a life—yet many risk the latter in order to create the former.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This edition highlights reading about messages in bottles, public benches, infinity, a series of books about everything, and pay-to-play orchestras.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week we have stories from Christopher Johnston and Erin Quinlan, Dan McQuade, Crystal Wilkinson, Simon Akam, and Nicholson Baker.
40 Days in a Jungle and Our Top 5
“The skies were blue that day, and there was a light wind. For around half an hour all was well. But as the Cessna approached Caquetá, a Colombian department that contains one of the densest, wettest, most remote corners of the Amazon, something went wrong.” Pat yourselves on the back: you’ve made it through January. […]


