“How has someone who is a borderline rapist, murderer, and potential sociopath, endured through all these decades?” 

Pocahontas may seem like a strange vehicle for discussing our gay villains. But Disney gets inventive when they need to circumvent white people’s historical responsibility for genocidal atrocities — and queerness is a useful scapegoat.

Our top editors’ picks in arts and culture writing this year.

Our top picks in science and nature stories for 2020.

Our top picks in food writing for 2020.

Our top picks in Crime Reporting for 2020.

Here’s every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.

“A friend who teaches at another university tells me that a new Yiddish word has been invented: oysgezoomt, ‘over-exposed to Zoom,’ as in ‘Ich bin azoy oysgezoomt!’ (‘I’m so done with Zoom!’)”

To read my “This Week in Books” newsletter in the future, follow me on substack.

Selling products you never see to people you never meet — the world of dropshipping.

“They have washed their hands for you. / And they take the bus home.” —Jericho Brown

“And it will hurt, but we won’t be the ones doing all of the feeling, finally.” -Harmony Holiday

What a country.

I sometimes forget that it’s all the same thing.

Or, the newsletter in which I conclude that time is a flat circle.

“The boundaries between the worlds of families and everyone else in society seem to be getting more and more entrenched, and transgressing them is frowned upon.”

Congratulations to Matthew Salesses, Tim Requarth, Mojgan Ghazirad, Shanna B. Tiayon, Joe Fassler, and The Counter, our partner in co-publishing Fassler’s piece.

“Oh, all the one-way tickets! / I haven’t found anything / more sorrowful than you / in the pockets of the world.”

This week critics have looked to Huysmans, Camus and Jean-Philippe Toussaint for COVID-era inspiration.

In this special bonus episode, reporter Rachel Nuwer walks through exactly how “Tiger King” misleads its viewers, and what its massive popularity means for big cats.

Am I ghoul for buying all these plague books?

“So yes, I admit it. I subscribed to Disney+ on the pretext of occupying my kids, but of course – of course – I actually bought it for myself.”

“Infamously … Goethe dismissed the younger writer as diseased.”

Give me a Bolaño novel that starts with a guy walking into a bar, and then another guy starts telling him a story, and the rest of that novel is just the second guy telling that story.

Witches we need you. Now more than ever. In the time of COVID-19 we can find respite in place-based reverence, plant magic and the divine feminine. So writes Lisa Richardson, who came to witchiness with nothing but white hetero straight-lacedness and a crush on a yoga teacher.

The book that’s been the most help to me during lockdown is a book I’ve never read.

He screamed, and I mean really screamed, to no one and to every one of us who was peeking at him out our windows: “What are we even doing out here!!??”

I will become power-mad and lock my boyfriend inside forever!

As she’s done before, Sara B. Franklin greets the specter of death by defiantly planting a life-sustaining vegetable garden.

Our stories matter. And they are our legacies for future generations. (Plus: some free writing resources.)