The Atlantic

“Life could appear in perfect darkness, in blistering heat and a broth of noxious compounds — an environment that would extinguish every known creature on Earth.” Life has been discovered at the deepest depths of the ocean, but is it under threat from mining?

The vast network of roads carved into Brazil’s sensitive ecosystems improve citizens’ quality of life, but it threatens countless species and the country’s biodiversity, few more than the giant anteater. As scientists develop the growing field of road ecology and grapple with ways to protect biodiversity, they face the larger problem: How can humans protect anything when we keep building new roads?

Tom Junod remembers his friendship with Fred Rogers 16 years after Fred’s death and considers how Fred would have responded in today’s world, filled with regular mass violence and a growing lack of civility in political discourse and protest.

From algorithms that set work schedules to the whims of the gig economy, too many workers are deprived of free time that overlaps with friends’ and family’s, and America’s social fabric is fraying. “A calendar is more than the organization of days and months,” Judith Shulevitz writes. “It’s the blueprint for a shared life.”

Noise is never just about sound; it is inseparable from issues of power and powerlessness. It is a violation we can’t control and to which, because of our anatomy, we cannot close ourselves off. “We have all thought of killing our neighbors at some point,” a soft-spoken scientist researching noise abatement told me.

In this excerpt from his book, In Hoffa’s Shadow: A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth, John Goldsmith considers the private costs of the invasive surveillance tactics the US government uses against its own citizens. “It wasn’t just the chilling effect on Chuckie’s freedom of thought, belief, and speech—an effect that stretched back decades, to the 1950s, when he first began to suspect that he was under surveillance. It was also, more painfully, the violence against his intimate spaces and relationships, and the annihilation of the stories he told himself and the world about these spaces and relationships, and thus of his power to define and shape his life.”

Studies show a link between reading and a child’s home environment, but personality, class, and role models all play a complex role, as well as certain factors outside parents’ control.

Sandra Sidi recalls the rampant sexual assault and harassment she and other female colleagues experienced when she worked as a civilian public affairs analyst for the military in Iraq in 2007.

A memoir of giving birth after years with an eating disorder.

A report from the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism examines the large numbers of deaths that have gone uncounted in Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war — deaths of citizens who were targeted for assassination and denied due process.