“When I listened, I didn’t know if it was something I entered, or something that entered me. If it was within me or if it was me. Do you remember being 16 and loving a song? Of course you do. It felt like that. It felt like everything.” This week, we’re featuring “On (the) Sublime,” […]
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(Alleged) Kings of the Con and the Week’s Top 5
“[T]he most compelling tales of grift aren’t the ones that depend on technology: the bottomless library of fraud-ready photos; the platforms that let anyone claim to be an epidemiologist or electoral fraud whistleblower; the software that can plop your face onto another person’s. No, the tales that captivate us most almost always reveal a person’s longing.” […]
The Scientific Methods of J. Kenji López-Alt
“At 42, López-Alt now has the actual dad status to justify the doofy jokes he inserts into his recipes. When Alicia was born, he left food writing to be a full-time parent. Last year he left pretty much every social media platform except Instagram, where he currently clocks more than 450,000 followers. His career has […]
I Remember the Bookstore
Jason Guriel | On Browsing | November 2022 | 4,361 words (15 minutes) Let’s browse a bookstore—a Platonic one, a composite. Let’s wander an aisle, running our fingertips across a wall of spines. One spine, thick and black, juts out: the recent NYRB Classics reissue of William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions. It’s a block of a book, […]
On Resilience and Our Top 5
“It is hard, I think, to learn as an adult. This is not some profound statement. It just is. But it is not hard because of the fact of it; it is hard because learning anything means learning again how to learn. It’s not that riding a bike is hard; it’s that learning is hard. […]
We Got the Beat
How The Go-Go’s emerged from the Los Angeles punk scene in the late ’70s to become the first and only female band to have a number one album in Beauty and the Beat.
A QAnon Con
“An Internet mob wanted to rescue a 13-year-old girl. Instead, they terrified her, derailed real trafficking investigations, and incited ‘save the children’ violence.”
Stories on Shady Science (and Our Top 5)
“On one hand, it’s critical to root out research fraud and serious errors. On the other hand, highlighting the most dramatic outliers risks creating the impression that science as a whole can’t be trusted.” When I told my 7-year-old daughter that the recent viral clip of bunnies jumping on a trampoline was fake, she looked […]
Why Creative Work Still Matters and the Week’s Top 5
“The implication is that to exist within a community or to practice a craft out of passion and joy is not success. To many, maybe, that is true. But how limited is our potential, our community, our creativity when success is defined like that?” Does anyone remember that this week started out with an extra […]
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Recommending notable stories by J.K. Nickell, Conor Niland, Wendell Brock and Paul Kwilecki, Ally Jarmanning, and Drew Magary.


