Cheri Lucas Rowlands

HGTV knows the formula for successful programming. Here are six reads that explore why the popular home improvement network can dish out exactly what its audience wants.

Roald Dahl, the whimsical and wicked mind behind Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, and other famous children’s literature, would have turned 100 on September 13, 2016. Here are seven stories about the man behind these tales.

These reads explore walls and fences as physical borders, but also things we’ve built in our minds.

Five stories about people trying to live amid Venezuela’s instability and chaos, from a manufacturing entrepreneur jailed over toilet paper in his factory’s restrooms to an American attorney killed in a violent robbery.

For your April 20th, here are eight reads on cannabis, from one writer’s journey into America’s first legal pot festival in Colorado to a profile on a scientist researching safe pesticide use in Washington State.

These seven reads reveal Iyer as a perpetual wanderer of both place and time: navigating spaces in flux or forgotten, meditating on finding one’s place in an ever-shifting world, and, as part of this journey, exploring that which is deep within us.

Rivers are forces of nature, but over time, humans have learned to harness their power and change their course — often for the worse. Here are four stories on how humans have changed local and regional river systems, and the disastrous and sometimes deadly consequences.

Here are pieces I’ve enjoyed, new and old, about the art and business of book cover design.

From the now-ubiquitous hashtag (or octothorpe, hash, pound, or whatever you like to call it) to the loved, hated, and misunderstood semicolon, punctuation marks not only help us shape our stories, but also have their own origins and histories and have become part of the narratives of our lives. Here are picks about six punctuation marks, from the comma to the asterisk.

As the Japanese children’s book author Tarō Gomi once wrote: “everyone poops.” But we don’t talk about this openly or often enough. In fact, talking and reading about poop might make you want to hold your nose — but it’ll also open your eyes. Here are eight pieces about shit, from a DIY mixture a woman used to treat her life-threatening infection, to prehistoric poo that brings us one step closer to understanding the origins of life after the dinosaur age.