“Every smell scientist I spoke to for this story echoed some version of this sentiment: that smell is underappreciated and misunderstood, and most people fail to recognize how integral it is to our experience of pleasure, our emotional lives, and even, on a fundamental level, our identity.”
Editor’s Pick
Posted inEditor's Pick
Russet, the Color of Peasants, Fox Fur, and Penance
“But russet means more than red-like, red-adjacent. It also means rustic, homely, rough. It also evokes mottled, textured, coarse. The word describes a quality of being that can affect people as well as vegetables.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
How America Invented the White Woman Who Just Loves Fall
“For the past decade, the basic white girl who loves fall has become so solidified in the cultural imagination that she may as well be the season’s Easter Bunny.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The COVID Cruise Ship and the Maine Fishing Town
“Eastport tried for years to lure mega cruise ships. Then, amid a global pandemic, it got one, along with a skeleton crew of coronavirus exiles.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Battle to Separate Safa and Marwa
A ground-breaking series of operations in a British hospital separate two sisters fused at the head.
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The Island That Humans Can’t Conquer
“A faraway island in Alaska has had its share of visitors, but none can remain for long on its shores.”
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The Making (and Remaking) of Timothée Chalamet
A profile of a Hollywood “It Boy” as he figures out celebrity stardom during a tumultuous year.
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Dying Inside
4,998 inmates died in U.S. jails without getting their day in court. Reuters investigates the fatalities in America’s biggest jails.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Kindness of Strangers
“Many women arrived here with only the clothes on their backs and the recipes inside their heads. Cooking again, having a kitchen in which to cook, was a sign of rebuilding; cooking the dishes they knew from home was a comfort and a pleasure, and a way to retain some European identity. You anchored your […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Her Name Was Nina
“I never got to nurse my baby girl. I never got to hear her voice or see her smile. I will never cover her feet in bed so she doesn’t get cold…And yet she is literally, physically, forever a part of me.”