“He sold 60 million books and 100 million records. Why was he forgotten?”
Peter Rubin
Posted inEditor's Pick
Mike Conner v. the Pain
“In 2013, a fire-sprinkler engineer fell five stories from the rafters of a church, shattered 108 bones, and almost died. Then began his battle to walk and live again.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Magic of Summer Basketball
“I am someone who grew up in a city without an NBA team.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Disappearing Art of Maintenance
What do you do with a subway car that’s been operating 25 years longer than it was designed to? What do you do with a phone that’s only designed to work for three? In this thoughtful essay, Alex Vuoco suggests that we look to the make-it-last ethos as a course out of the increasingly wasteful […]
Posted inHighlight, Quotes
Reading Doesn’t Have to Mean Keeping Your Books Forever
“The paradox of the library in our time is that it aspires to be vast but is also selective and bounded – a tiny droplet of material in a seemingly limitless sea of content.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Mystery Behind the Crime Wave at 312 Riverside Drive
It sounds like a whodunit, but it’s anything but: One man placing multiple 911 calls every day, reporting crimes in progress at a building that doesn’t exist. The question isn’t who, but why — and David Wilson masterfully unpacks the turmoil living inside the man responsible, and the difficulty of helping him find a lasting stability. In […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Serena Williams Refused to Bend. She Bent Tennis Instead.
A stunner of an ode to Serena, who came into the game on the heels of her older sister, but leaves it having changed it irrevocably. An exacting portrait of an unprecedented competitor. Part of Serena’s genius—competitively, personally—is that she never can quite be anything but herself when she’s desperate. And she’s desperate every time […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Gun Person
There are many different versions of the so-called teacher’s oath. Many of them mention education, support, compassion. None of them mention active-shooter training. Yet, to be a teacher in the United States these days is to confront that very nightmare — as Andrew Scott does in this understated gem. This will be what I take […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Mushrooms That Ate Luke Perry
As good as the headline is, the piece is even better — an essay about the actor’s afterlife plans that doubles as an elegy for privacy, nostalgia, and everything else we carry with us through this world. His heart, inside his chest, inside the mushroom burial shroud, was pressed against the silty soil left behind by […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Degradation Drug
The fact that some prescription medications can lead to impulse-control problems is nothing new. But that doesn’t change how disruptive they are to people’s lives, or the philosophical recalibrations they demand. Carl Elliott’s dive into the world of pramipexole fallout is as fascinating as it is terrifying. The longer Hannah took pramipexole, the worse her […]