This week, we feature stories from Tom Scocca, Giles Harvey, Chris Walker, Krithika Varagur, and N.C. Happe.
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Trusting Your Gut and This Week’s Top 5
“I study the pinch pot in my hands. It seems suddenly urgent not to see them seeing me. Heat crawls from my cheeks to my hairline. I hear the furious thrum of blood in my ears. With my fingers I smooth down the walls of my pot. To my utter relief, no more questions follow.” […]
A Tasty Award and Our Top 5
“What I’m saying is, in that already suffused space, I don’t feel the need to perfume the air around me with the sweet scent of the ceremonial Sabbath bread. But here, in Ames, Iowa, there is a hollow, an empty space. A void I need to fill.” Happy weekend! First, we have some exciting news: […]
Futures From Ruins
Bombay Beach was once a vibrant resort town on the Salton Sea until agricultural pollution, drought, and toxic air led to its demise. Today, an art movement and emerging community hope to bring it back. In this Noema essay, writer Johanna Hoffman and photographer Tao Ruspoli show how a town in ruins is experiencing a […]
Learning to Walk Again (and Our Top 5)
“The average U.S. public school has about 550 students. Imagine eight or nine schools in an area roughly the size of Philadelphia where every kid is missing at least one limb. Imagine also that their amputations happened alongside a torrent of other tragedies: the loss of family members, friends, neighbors, schools, houses.” In the latest issue of […]
False Passives
As she travels north through Ethiopia, Anna Badkhen speaks with people who are looking for a way to escape — to cross the Gulf of Aden toward Yemen — and ruminates on the plight of refugees and vulnerable populations around the world. When does a journey begin? When droughts parch the land, or mudslides take entire farms […]
Legendary Treasures, A Feared Journalist, and Our Top 5
“The appeal of the quest transcends material gain or historical significance. Each of these hunts holds at its heart a puzzle to solve—and for some, that puzzle can turn into an obsession, even a fatal one. But the promise remains difficult to resist.” We can’t believe it: December is here! Start off your weekend with […]
How Drew Barrymore Became a Bizarro Fixture of Daytime TV
A sympathetic look at Drew Barrymore’s chaotic world; Rachel Syme’s essay comes with the honesty characteristic of Barrymore herself. The show’s open sentimentality—and copious shed tears—are offset by its crackle of unplanned clumsiness. Bouncing off the walls one moment and breaking down the next, Barrymore seems to be barely holding on as sentiment threatens to […]
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 […]
Return to the Saddle Club: A Reading List on Horse Girls
Celebrating the girls with an equine obsession.


