Shovel, Knife, Story, Ax By Erika Howsare Feature When you live with animals, you collect killing stories.
Total Depravity: The Origins of the Drug Epidemic in Appalachia Laid Bare By Longreads Feature In an excerpt from his essay collection, Australian journalist Richard Cooke reports on the American opioid crisis through the astonished eyes of a foreigner visiting steel and coal country.
‘Someone Took Care to Get it Right’: The Birds of the Seven Kingdoms By Krista Stevens Highlight On the delightfully nerdy role of birds and bird calls in Game of Thrones.
From the Sewer to the Syringe By Katie Kosma Highlight Biomedical researchers find remedies for antibiotic-resistant infections in grody places.
High Expectations: LSD, T.C. Boyle’s Women, and Me By Christine Ro Feature “Outside Looking In” dramatizes the discovery of LSD and the cult of personality surrounding Timothy Leary. Our reviewer drops acid and thinks about how, for women, it can be safer to be a downer.
I Entered the World’s Longest, Loneliest Horse Race on a Whim, and I Won By Longreads Feature Somehow, implausibly, against all the odds, I became the youngest person and first woman ever to win the Mongol Derby. What made me so sure I was ready, when I was totally unprepared?
Take Two Stem Cell Injections and Don’t Call Me Until After I Cash Your $10,000 Cheque By Krista Stevens Highlight What don’t these stem cell snake-oil salespeople have? Any science to prove their claims or any scruples about preying on the vulnerable.
The Vital and Surprising Role of Driftwood By Krista Stevens Highlight Driftwood provides the necessary habitat and shelter that feeds a raft of marine life all the way up the food chain.
Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail By Suzanne Roberts Feature During a month hiking Muir’s “Range of Light,” three young women traversed snowy mountain passes, ran out of food, confronted a gendered wilderness, and learned to deal with each other.
Critics: Endgame By Soraya Roberts Feature If there’s no earth, there’s no art. How do you engage in cultural criticism at the end of the world?
The Age of Forever Crises By Linda Kinstler Feature We need to learn how to talk about our irreversible mistakes. Historian Kate Brown says the first step is to resist the Chernobylization of knowledge.
Did One Young Scientist Discover the Paleontology Pot of Gold? By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight Answers to some of paleontology’s most frustrating questions might lay in the dirt in North Dakota, but can the scientist who discovered them be believed?
The Difficult Case for Assisted Plant Migration By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight To protect them from climate change, concerned citizens are moving clones of California’s ancient sequoias to Oregon in a process known as assisted migration, but should they?
What the Death of a Glacier Means for Us By Aaron Gilbreath Commentary The death of an iconic California glacier signals the loss of one scientist’s work, the end of an epoch, and possibly the beginning of a new era of mass extinction.
Against Hustle: Jenny Odell Is Taking Her Time at the End of the World By Rebecca McCarthy Feature The attention economy is killing us and the planet. Artist and writer Jenny Odell talks about why slowing down could be the only way to survive.
The Curious Tale of the Salish Sea Feet By Kea Krause Feature To date, 21 disembodied feet have washed up on the shores of Seattle’s Salish Sea. What at first looked like the work of a serial killer turned out to be something even more unsettling: A message from the ocean about who we are.
When the Climate Change Story Becomes Your Life Story By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight Moving from bustling, expensive Seattle to tiny Ashland, Oregon seemed like an improvement, until the forest fire season began.
Namwali Serpell on Doing the Responsible Thing — Writing an Irresponsible Novel By Tobias Carroll Feature “I joke that this is the great Zambian novel you didn’t know you were waiting for.”
The Terror of Being Awake By Michelle Weber Highlight “I thought, ‘This is it, this is how I’m going to die, right here on the table, and my family will never know what my last few hours were like because no one’s even noticing what’s going on.’”
Into the Wild On an E-Scooter By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight What happens when you ride an e-scooter out of the city limits — until its battery dies?
The Fertility Doctor’s Secret Children By Krista Stevens Highlight Donald Cline justified his deception with choice bible verses, so that makes everything okay.
‘I Cannot Name Any Emotion That Is Uniquely Human.’ By Hope Reese Feature According to primatologist Frans de Waal, we don’t like to admit that animals, especially apes, have emotions just like ours, and science has become better at studying apes’ behaviors than human ones.
The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Pearls By Katy Kelleher Feature Born from irritation and intrusion, luminous and complex, surprisingly durable: pearls are rich with symbolism and saturated with pain.
Baring the Bones of the Lost Country: The Last Paleontologist in Venezuela By Zoe Valery Feature In light of recent events in crisis-ridden Venezuela, its last vertebrate paleontologist puts together key pieces of the baffling puzzle that the country has become in the past couple of decades.
The Problem with Nature Writing By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight The sprawling Los Angeles Metropolitan Area is the best place in America to reassess the way we write and think about the natural world.
Atlantic City Is Really Going Down This Time By Rebecca McCarthy Feature There’s no doubt that Atlantic City is going under. The only question left is: Can an entire city donate its body to science?
Pam Houston on Coming Clean, Climate Change, and ‘Writing Deeply Into the Grasses’ By Kim Steutermann Rogers Feature Pam Houston’s new memoir is an ode to her beloved ranch, but also deals directly with the harrowing moments of childhood abuse that her fictional characters have been living through for years.
