The New Yorker

In Brazil, indigenous people and illegal miners are engaged in a fight that may help decide the future of the planet.

Nick Paumgarten recounts what beer-league hockey has given him over the years: occasional bragging rights, countless happy sud-soaked memories, a feeling of camaraderie, and three concussions whose lingering after effects caused him to leave the game.

“Dimitrov and Lasky [the Astro Poets] think of the signs formally, as ‘poetic constraints,’ and imagine them interacting like characters in a novel.

Essayist Lacy M. Johnson attends a funeral in Iceland for “Okjökull” — once a glacier 16 square kilometers in surface, and now “only a small patch of slushy gray ice.” In personifying shrinking masses of ice — key geographical features of the area, and the planet — officials hope to impress upon people the dire extent of climate change, and the need for humans to stop living in ways that threaten all life forms.

While investigating allegations of sexual-assault against Harvey Weinstein, Ronan Farrow was surveilled by an Israeli private-intelligence agency called Black Cube. Agents from Black Cube tried to get close with Farrow and other journalists looking into Weinstein — as well as several women who were planning on coming forward with their stories — in an attempt to suppress the allegations. An excerpt from Farrow’s book, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators.

The move to formalize this inherently speculative project has many scientific advantages, including securing funding. But it requires researchers be less bound to their earthly ways of thinking.

Haruki Murakami reflects on the surprising parallels between his life and the life of his father: “All we can do is breathe the air of the period we live in, carry with us the special burdens of the time, and grow up within those confines. That’s just how things are….We live our lives this way: viewing things that came about through accident and happenstance as the sole possible reality.”

Wiener recalls working for a variety of tech companies earlier this decade, observing the men who ruled Silicon Valley.

So much of the American story—as it actually happened, but also as it is told, and altered, and forgotten, and, eventually, repeated—feels squeezed into the vast contradiction that is the modern Black Hills. Here, sites of theft and genocide have become monuments to patriotism, a symbol of resistance has become a source of revenue, and old stories of broken promises and appropriation recur. A complicated history becomes a cheery tourist attraction. The face of the past comes to look like the faces of those who memorialize it.

Octogenarian documentary filmmaker Zuzana Justman tells the story of her family’s imprisonment at Terezin, a Czech concentration camp also known as Theresienstadt, through the lens of what she didn’t write in the diary she kept then, which she relocated a few years ago.