On volcanoes, earthquakes, and our attraction to disaster.
Search results
We Must Slow Down the Race to God-Like AI
“I’ve invested in more than 50 artificial intelligence start-ups. What I’ve seen worries me.”
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Featuring stories from Sophie Vershbow, Sharon Lerner, Geoffrey Gray, Christopher Solomon, and Abe Beame.
A “Super” Walk of Contradictions (and Our Top 5)
“To my right is one of the largest manmade toxic holes on Earth. To my left, shelves of coal-colored slag piled twenty feet high. And underfoot, ten thousand miles of poisoned shafts swimming with ghosts.” Hello from Berkeley, California. Our family loves to explore the city’s parks, where we can hike through redwood forests in […]
A Water Obsession and Our Weekly Top 5
“The majority of home water use takes place in the bathroom, so that’s where I started. I scaled back my showers to once a week and only flushed the toilet when the need was overwhelming. I wandered my dark little apartment doing calculations on a loop. How many gallons of water does the Livingston faucet […]
Out on the Trail, Deep Online, and the Week’s Top 5
“Eating, even eating junk food—sometimes especially eating junk food—is not just a good idea but potentially the difference between life and death, or at the very least the difference between an enjoyable experience and a grueling one. No one has ever opened up a packet of Oreos on a mountaintop and said, ‘I’m being so bad.’” […]
Parks and Re-Creation (and the Week’s Top 5)
“In spite of my confidence in cooking, I’ve never brought mulukhiyah into my urban kitchen. Eating it without my family’s elbows pressed against mine doesn’t make sense to me. I know I’d feel like an impostor, inserting myself into the sacred and altering it irreparably, as I can’t help but reinvent recipes with my own improvised […]
On 4th and Broadway: Remembering Tower Records
“To this day, I’ve never stopped thinking about that music sanctuary for the twenty years it existed at that location.”


