“Fifteen teams lifted off from Switzerland in gas ballooning’s most audacious race. Three days later, two of them drifted into Belarusian airspace—but only one would survive.”
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Posted inUncategorized
Musical Rivalries and our Weekly Top 5
“Before hip-hop brought the concept of ‘beef’ into the mainstream, rock and roll’s aggression and excess resulted in many an unfriendly rivalry; decades earlier, the hard life of the traveling jazz musician led to some heady and memorable fallouts. Whether it’s pop stars, country singers, dancehall artists, or Kendrick Lamar and Drake’s recent multi-song war, […]
Posted inUncategorized
A Note of Holiday Thanks, and the Week’s Top 5
We’ll keep it short this week, folks. With our Best Of package marching on, we have our two latest roundups for you: Our favorite profiles of the year, and a look at the best-performing Audience Award winners of 2023. (On that note: As much as we’ve enjoyed adding the Audience Award, we’ve enjoyed the jockeying […]
Posted inReading List
Come One, Come All: A Reading List on Parks
The drama within our public spaces.
Posted inNonfiction, The Atavist Magazine
‘You Can’t Sail Around the World By Yourself’
Susie Goodall wanted to circumnavigate the globe in her sailboat without stopping. She didn’t bargain for what everyone else wanted.
Posted inNonfiction
Best of 2022: Profiles
A great profile accomplishes the nearly impossible by making you feel like you truly know someone you’ve never met. It’s a feat of empathy and insight, the kind of alchemy that turns reporting into rapport. The five examples here span all manner of tone and subject, from victims of gun violence to digital charlatans, but […]
Posted inFeature
Best of 2025: All Our Number Five Story Picks
Every story we selected for the number five slot in our weekly newsletter, in a handy digest.
Posted inReading List
Pawns, Puppet Heads, and Paranoia: An Eccentrics Reading List
“They’re a little eccentric” is a phrase I suspect most of us have heard used to describe a certain kind of memorable person. For me, it evokes my childhood dentist — an elderly man who favored colorful bow ties and humming loudly as he worked, and who once wagged his finger in my face and […]
Posted inStory
Disneyland of the Dead
London’s Highgate Cemetery shows us just how hard it is to keep the dead buried.
Posted inFeature
I Tried to Forget My Whole Life. I’m Glad I Failed.
The hindsight of an adulthood autism diagnosis.
