“Yet I still doggy paddle in impostor syndrome. For I am not a biologist or cetologist, nor an oceanographer. I am just a woman with a pen, a profound love for water, and an eye for noticing patterns in the currents, eddies, and swirls of living.” Sometimes words aren’t enough. Or, at least, existing words […]
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The Farmer Trying to Save Italy’s Ancient Olive Trees
“A fast-spreading bacteria could cause an olive-oil apocalypse.”
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, we feature stories from Gordy Megroz, Max Blau and Zaydee Sanchez, Brendan I. Koerner, Lora Eli Smith, and Pat Cassels.
99 Problems: The Ice Cream Truck’s Surprising History
From crime panics to TikTok, summer’s favorite vehicle has driven a bumpy road.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week we have stories from Suzy Hansen, Raksha Vasudevan, Linda Kinstler, Erica Berry, and Dave Denison.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Recommending stories by Pamela Colloff, Jasper Craven, Omer Bartov, Judith Sanders, and Lale Arikoglu.
The Enduring Joy of Maps (and the Week’s Top 5)
“Empty spaces on maps were so terrifying to ancient mapmakers that they filled them with decorations, fictional landscapes, and monsters. We moderns miss the beautiful monsters, but what if they never actually disappeared? What if the monsters were always part of the map, part of mapping itself?” After many months of hearing about how great […]
Fabulous Fungi and Our Top 5 of the Week
“To a reading list on these mind-bending entities at a planetary tipping point, welcome. What you see here are only some fruiting bodies, the rest lies underneath.” I first learned about the parasitic fungus that takes over a bug’s body and commandeers its brain back in 2023, when I picked Zhengyang Wang’s “The Last of […]
A Triumphant Solo Trip and Our Weekly Top 5
“Milan raised me to believe I could do and be anything. To have had that and to have lost it might be worse than never having had it at all.” Welcome to the weekend, friends! To kickstart your reading, let Kristina Kasparian’s fierce new essay whisk you away to Italy. In “Flying Solo,” she returns […]
Taken and Told
A filmmaker was producing a documentary series on the Iran hostage crisis. Then her father went missing overseas.


