Hugh Maxwell’s walk transformed 2.6 million acres of wilderness into a grid for sale. A writer followed his trail to survey what remains.
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Her Greatest Hits
“Maybe it’s only when you don’t know what you are listening for that you find what you were waiting all along to discover.”
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Showcasing stories from Megan O’Grady, Alexander Sammon, Alaina Demopoulos, Blair Braverman, and Jack Crosbie.
Suspended Falling: A Reading List on Walking
After seven million years of evolution, walking feels as natural as breathing. But as our environments evolve, so do our ways of walking through them.
Uncanny Testimony
As the last Holocaust survivors approach the end of their lives, an AI scholar grapples with technology that promises to freeze them in time.
Parks and Re-Creation (and the Week’s Top 5)
“In spite of my confidence in cooking, I’ve never brought mulukhiyah into my urban kitchen. Eating it without my family’s elbows pressed against mine doesn’t make sense to me. I know I’d feel like an impostor, inserting myself into the sacred and altering it irreparably, as I can’t help but reinvent recipes with my own improvised […]
A “Super” Walk of Contradictions (and Our Top 5)
“To my right is one of the largest manmade toxic holes on Earth. To my left, shelves of coal-colored slag piled twenty feet high. And underfoot, ten thousand miles of poisoned shafts swimming with ghosts.” Hello from Berkeley, California. Our family loves to explore the city’s parks, where we can hike through redwood forests in […]
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Featuring stories by Jeannette Cooperman, Jackson Arn, Andrew Hui, Myriam Gurba, and Simon Hattenstone.
Eight Limes, No More: The Accidental Poetry of Found Lists
A found list is a rare analog window into someone else’s needs—an accidental autobiography, a blank space to be filled with one’s imagination.
What Neko Case taught me about curation and the week’s Top 5
“When the media covered women in the grunge and alternative scene, it treated them like a genre unto itself. This genre, though, received almost no in-depth profiles or features.” Books are one of the great joys in my life. The other is music. I’ve been following singer songwriter Neko Case since 1997, after picking up […]


