“A fast-spreading bacteria could cause an olive-oil apocalypse.”
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Posted inUncategorized
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 […]
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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 […]
Posted inTop 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Recommending stories by Pamela Colloff, Jasper Craven, Omer Bartov, Judith Sanders, and Lale Arikoglu.
Posted inFeature
Taken and Told
A filmmaker was producing a documentary series on the Iran hostage crisis. Then her father went missing overseas.
Posted inFeature
‘It’s More Like a Playlist’: Lavinia Spalding on Editing the Best Women’s Travel Writing
The editor of The Best Women’s Travel Writing series on curation, grief and levity, and the stories she hopes to read more of in the future.
Posted inNonfiction
The Worst Air Disaster You’ve Never Heard Of
In the early days of flight, airships were hailed as the future of war. Then disaster struck the USS Akron.
Posted inUncategorized
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 […]
Posted inReading List
Constructions, Concoctions, Conjurations: A Reading List on the Curious World of Conlangs
Making stuff up is harder, stranger, and occasionally more dangerous than it looks. Seven stories that explore the world of constructed languages.
