Atlas Obscura

“It’s easy to make fun of time capsules, but, as Jarvis details, it’s much harder to fill them with the kind of material that will actually stand the test of time. Often, the things we tuck away for posterity are embarrassing or boring. Sometimes, they’re much worse—racist, bigoted, wrongheaded. Most take that old adage about the winners writing history to its logical conclusion. And they are always, by their very nature, exceedingly presumptuous.”

A look at the failed promise of travel start-up Remote Year, and its world-traveling inaugural class.

One of the rarest religious experiences you can have in America is to join the Plain.

The radical women of early Christianity.

Ghost boy, cannibals, disappearing trucks: A journey into the darkness of New Jersey to uncover the mysteries of Clinton Road.

How a proposed high-profile underground park fits into a changing Lower East Side.

On an abandoned mining site in Scotland, an architectural theorist attempts to bring the mysteries of the cosmos to life on Earth. A new Longreads Exclusive.

It’s not quite as catchy as Ghostbusters, but when a museum or cultural institution is at risk the American Institute for Conservation Collections Emergency Response Team (also known as AIC-CERT) gets called. Andy Wright looks at what it takes to protect a museum’s collection when disaster strikes.

A linguist explains the “California accent,” and why pop punk vocals sounded so whiny.

“Like every other business, clandestine operations have a budget and like every federal agency, that budget is examined by scores of government workers. But how do expenses work if you’re a spy, doing secret work?”