This Month In Books: ‘One Degree Is About the Uncanny’ By Dana Snitzky Commentary This month’s books newsletter is suspended in a state of anticipation.
‘I Went Quiet…and That Allowed Me To Understand’: The Life of a Molecatcher By Tobias Carroll Feature Marc Hamer discusses life, death, and the lost art of catching a mole.
The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Orchids By Katy Kelleher Feature Sometimes a flower is just a flower, and sometimes it’s a powerful vehicle for giving free rein to our worst colonialist and misogynist impulses.
It’s Time To Talk About Solar Geoengineering By Longreads Feature We need to start talking about seemingly drastic approaches to the climate crisis, such as sun-dimming aerosols, right now — or we risk losing democratic control of the process.
Fire Sale: Finance and Fascism in the Amazon Rainforest By Will Meyer Commentary From global capital to YouTube, carbon credits to indigenous land defenders in their own words, Will Meyer has compiled a reading list on who lit the match and how the fire might be stopped.
Grow Up By Soraya Roberts Feature Being an adult at the end of the world means listening to children tell the truths grown-ups refuse to actually hear.
Climate Messaging: A Case for Negativity By Rebecca McCarthy Feature Nell Zink, Joy Williams, and a different kind of climate skepticism.
Communiqué from an Exurban Satellite Clinic of a Cancer Pavilion Named after a Financier By Longreads Feature Anne Boyer encounters a familiar system — that grand and easy-to-mistake-for-everything system — at the cancer pavilion.
Truly Seeing the River: An Interview with Writer Boyce Upholt By Aaron Gilbreath Feature Writing about the culture and beauty of the Mississippi Delta requires seeing the mighty river as more than a line of water.
Prayers to Lucia By Heather Quinn Feature When a high-risk pregnancy jeopardizes their eyesight, Heather Quinn explores the expectations of motherhood and finds common ground with a patron saint.
How Google Discovered the Value of Surveillance By Longreads Feature In 2002, still reeling from the dot-com crash, Google realized they’d been harvesting a very valuable raw material — your behavior.
Betting the Farm on the Drought By Longreads Feature Farmers like sixth-generation Illinois farmer Ethan Cox can’t wait for policymakers to protect them from climate change. To survive, they have to adapt their operations now, if they can.
Greenland’s Deepening Ecological Grief By Krista Stevens Highlight “We no longer understand it here. We don’t trust it.”
What Does It Mean To Be Moved? By Jennifer Wilson Feature We can all remember a time when the wind touched us when we needed touching, pushed us along when we were unsure.
On a Wild Patch of Mississippi Soil By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight Camping a wooded island along the lower Mississippi River introduces one writer to a land of legend and wildness.
Mountains, Transcending By Ailsa Ross Feature “Ever since I was five years old,” wrote opera singer–turned–Buddhist lama Alexandra David-Néel, “I craved to go beyond the garden gate, to follow the road that passed it by, and to set out for the Unknown.”
Here’s What Put Thousands of Californians in the Path of a Blaze By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight Forest mismanagement, political corruption, and PG&E’s corporate culture created a highly combustible situation.
A Once and Future Beef By Will Meyer Feature Beef is a major culprit of the climate crisis, but if you want to consider beef’s future, then look to its past. The industry’s tactics have not changed as much as you might think.
The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Mirrors By Katy Kelleher Feature Mirrors are sparkly and shiny and hypnotic. They’ve fascinated us for thousands of years. And they might show us a lot more about our society’s misplaced priorities than we care to see.
What Is Elizabeth Rush Reading? : Books on Antarctic Adventure, Ice, Motherhood By Dana Snitzky Commentary “I sometimes wonder if this continent of ice is begging for a different kind of story to be told about it.”
Why Bugs Deserve Our Respect By Jessica Gross Feature Fruit flies helped us win six Nobel prizes in medicine. Architects have been inspired by termite hills. Ecologist Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson explains why bugs are so essential to the world we live in.
‘Nothing Kept Me Up At Night the Way the Gorgon Stare Did.’ By Sam Jaffe Goldstein Feature The Gorgon Stare, a military drone-surveillance technology that can track multiple moving targets at once, is coming to a city near you.
Yentl Syndrome: A Deadly Data Bias Against Women By Longreads Feature The science of medicine is based on male bodies, but researchers are beginning to realize how vastly the symptoms of disease differ between the sexes — and how much danger women are in.
‘The Underland Is a Deeply Human Realm’: Getting Down with Robert Macfarlane By Tobias Carroll Feature “I thought the underland would be — of all the landscape forms that have drawn me to explore them — the most uninhabited. This proved wildly incorrect.”
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.
