Automattic

In 1985, Eastern Air Lines Flight 980 crashed into the side of a 21,112-foot mountain in Bolivia. No bodies were recovered at the crash site, and the plane’s black box was never found. More than 30 years later, two friends from Boston organized an expedition to figure out what happened.

“I also think that people assume that women do this casually — that they’ve known they were pregnant for thirty weeks and then were on their way down to the hair salon and they saw the abortion clinic and they decided to just walk in to avoid the inconveniences of motherhood. That also is completely untrue. No […]

On a friend’s porch, someone has left behind a deer skull, beautifully intact, antlers and all, inside a wood crate set up against the wall. I consider the dead skull, the solid antlers, which won’t age for ages, which won’t die. The hollow sockets where eyes once looked for grass, the empty caves where a […]

Majid Hussain keeps having to run. An excerpt from Cast Away: True Stories of Survival from Europe’s Refugee Crisis.

A behind-the-scenes look at a 120-year-old institution as it tries to preserve – and expand – its identity.

Separating fact from fiction in the plan to build an impenetrable barrier along the Mexican-American border.

In 2013, Elon Musk put together a detailed proposal for a futuristic 35-minute San Francisco—L.A. commute. The idea was open-sourced, and enthralled by Musk’s vision, a venture capitalist named Shervin Pishevar started a company to bring a version of the idea to life. Like many Silicon Valley stories, this one would contain speed bumps and […]

I was just a few hours shy of the Earth’s summit and feeling deceptively strong. My blood was turning to sludge; my brain and lungs were slowly swelling as my heart pounded against my chest. I was dying, but I felt inspired. Optimistic even. I was three hundred metres into the Death Zone, yet still […]

Veteran HIV/AIDS reporter and Christodora author Tim Murphy’s devastating recollection of a drug addled love affair he had with an older gay couple in the wake of 9/11.

Unlike many of her white Southern literary contemporaries, the writer Lillian Smith ignored easy magnolia-scented tropes in her work in order to confront the divided, racially charged heart of the American South.