This week’s edition highlights stories by Peter Flax, Abigail Edge, Jesús A. Rodríguez, Henry Wismayer, and Elif Batuman.
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Posted inUncategorized
On the Hollow Highs of Hallmark Holiday Films (and More)
“Filmmakers use a character’s grief to evoke viewers’ sympathy and cravings for a quick fix. The Christmas widower trope exploits these very human tendencies, triggering sadness for the sake of sadness and making the cheap promise of a neat resolution tied up in a pretty bow.” We hope you enjoyed last week’s story, “Christmas on […]
Posted inNewsletter
Hoops, Double Helices, and Our Top 5
“I’m not just crying, I’m truly wailing. I’m one of Homer’s grieving women, I’m Alice in Wonderland crying an actual ocean between hiccups, I’m Diane Keaton weeping then whooping in her Something’s Gotta Give breakup montage. My team, the Lakers, has lost.” I confess: I did not know much about basketball until I worked with Rachel Dlugatch […]
Posted inCuration
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Featuring stories from Paul Kix, Matthieu Aikins, Matt Alt, Elisa Gabbert, and Sophie Elmhirst.
Posted inUncategorized
Pondering Parenthood, Meals for One, and Five Excellent Reads
“When faced with a dilemma I can’t solve, my usual strategy is to read. I order a bunch of books and immerse myself in other people’s experiences. It allows my thoughts to coalesce around a few themes; from there, I can see where I agree and where I diverge. To paraphrase Joan Didion, I read […]
Posted inUncategorized
Spelunking, ET-Hunting, and the Week’s Top 5
“Forgetting is a part of living. This issue of mine is more of an inconvenience and less of a cause for alarm. But an inconvenience it is, and I worry about the future, when my mom is gone, maybe my dad too, and there’s no one to fill in the blanks for me, no more […]
Posted inTop 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week we’re recommending stories by Andrew R. Chow, Jonathan Blake, Maurice Tamman, Laura Gottesdiener, and Stephen Eisenhammer, Drew Anderson, and Ben Buckland.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Plot to Kill the Olympics
“Just as the pandemic inspired political and social change the world over, so, during the course of 2020, did many of the bigger Olympic sports experience a quiet remaking.”
Posted inNewsletter
A Fish Tale (and Our Top 5)
“My treasured memories, I’ve learned, are all subsidized by a massive Fish Industrial Complex—one that has taken a toll on all sorts of insects, invertebrates, frogs, and salamanders.” In the summer of 2014, Alex Brown went on a life-changing backpacking trip in the Colorado wilderness. On that trip, he caught 50 trout, keeping a few […]
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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.” […]
