The renaming of Buffalo, New York’s Fruit Belt neighborhood reveals as much about gentrification as it does the flawed ways tech companies add locations to their maps.

“What is judged extremist today was once the consensus of a powerful cadre of the American elite, well-connected men who eagerly seized on a false doctrine of “race suicide” during the immigration scare of the early 20th century.”

“The inexorable proliferation of oil and sand on the global circuits of trade tells us about the shape-shifting ways of production, colonial forms of exploitation, and our reckless wrecking of the global environmental commons.”

“I call it my asymptote of success,” she tells me, while I wonder what such a word could possibly mean. “An asymptote,” she explains as if she were the coolest college professor ever, “is a curve that comes close to the line. It’s infinitesimally close but never actually crosses the line. That’s sometimes how I feel my life has gone—that I come incredibly close to these things, but that barrier has yet to be crossed. I have understood for a long time that my trajectory was always going to be asymptotic, but my mission is to break the plane.”

How the Pacheco family business pivoted from bread baking to burying bodies in El Salvador, which has the highest murder rate per capita on the planet, “enough for the World Health Organization to classify it as an epidemic.”

Ramsey Orta filmed the killing of Eric Garner. The video traveled far, but it wouldn’t get justice for his dead friend. Instead, the NYPD would exact their revenge through targeted harassment and eventually imprisonment — Orta’s punishment for daring to show the world police brutality.

“Aguachile” literally means “chile water.” Where did the shrimp in this ever-more-popular dish from Mexico’s Sinaloa state come from, and what happened to the original Sinaloan aguachile?

Where there are people, there are rats: they’re smart, hardy, and empathetic, and we can’t really complain about them when it’s our trash that feeds them.

A personal essay in which Sara Fredman thinks about the voices in her life, as she raises young children and reckons with her fading father.

In 2017, the theft of a rare toy, a Boba “Rocket” Fett prototype that was never released for sale, rocked the Star Wars collecting community.