Recommending stories by Pamela Colloff, Jasper Craven, Omer Bartov, Judith Sanders, and Lale Arikoglu.
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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 […]
A Tall Tree Reading List
Let’s go down to the woods today … with a reading list all about trees.
The Unappreciated Blog, Ghost Stories, and our Top 5
“To watch any ghost story set in a city like New York requires this kind of sensitivity, an awareness that every building is haunted, and that these hauntings happen in layers: as much as each generation tries to wipe out the traces of those who’ve come before, those memories are always there.” As we approach […]
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. […]
The (Un-)Happiest Place on Earth and the Week’s Top 5
“I left Trip House at 8:12 on Saturday morning, having not been murdered, and drove to the Magic Kingdom. The woman at the ticket window asked if I’d come to Disney World to celebrate anything special, and I laughed. If I answered that question truthfully — using unmagical words like ‘genital,’ ‘student loan,’ and ‘gentrification’ […]
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 […]
Exploring Public Lands and the Week’s Top 5
“Though we were only a few miles into our walk, already the surprise of my surroundings was overwhelming. The surreal lakebeds. The pink skies. Beauty Peak. The pronghorn. We were left in one of those mindless trances that comes when nature completely engulfs you. No amount of planning or research can prepare you for an […]
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Showcasing stories from Katya Apekina, Jonathan W. Rosen, Robert Sanchez, Eric Levitz, and Natalie Marlin.
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 […]


