Game designer Jane McGonigal argues that playing games can help us develop skills for life.
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The Wrong Way
On Oct. 3, 2013, 34-year-old Miriam Carey drove through a White House checkpoint while her one-year-old daughter sat in the back of her car. A car chase ensued, and Carey ended up dead. Gonnerman traces the incident, revealing that Miriam had been diagnosed with “postpartum depression with psychosis” and showing how a media circus distorted […]
STAT: My Daughter’s MS Diagnosis and the Question My Doctors Couldn’t Answer
Is there a dietary treatment for multiple sclerosis? And if so, why is the medical establishment ignoring published academic research that started in the 1950s proving it?
The Art of Authenticity: A Conversation with PostSecret’s Frank Warren
For the past ten years Frank Warren has been collecting and publishing other people’s anonymous secrets, sent via postcard, on his blog, PostSecret. The stories behind the postcards span the entire spectrum of human drama, from tales of petty revenge to accounts of abuse and severe depression.
How to Get SuperBetter
Game designer Jane McGonigal argues that playing games can help us develop skills for life.
How a Black German Woman Discovered Her Grandfather Was a Nazi
“The first shock was the sheer discovery of a book about my mother and my family, which had information about me and my identity that had been kept hidden from me,” Teege says. “I knew almost nothing about the life of my biological mother, nor did my adoptive family. I hoped to find answers to questions that had disturbed me and to the depression I had suffered from. The second shock was the information about my grandfather’s deeds.”
Borges and $: The Parable of the Literary Master and the Coin
Thirty years ago, the world lost a great literary mind—the Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. Today, Elizabeth Hyde Stevens revisits the financial conditions that produced this life of pure literature, finding unexpected hope in the darkest period of Borges’ forgotten past.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Our favorite stories of the week, featuring, Seattle Met, London Review of Books, More Intelligent Life, Mother Jones, and Matter.
The Invisible Hand: Who Was Adam Smith?
In a recent essay for Adbusters, Douglas Haddow posited that algorithms are the new “invisible hand” guiding our capitalist system. But before Haddow got to that conclusion, he explored the original idea of the invisible hand, and the man behind the phrase: If we want to interrogate the true nature of these numbers, the wizard […]

