“Trains are still a part of my blood, my birthright. Through them I embrace my own kind of mobility and ambition, those two valued traits in my family line, if not quite manifested in the direction I’m heading.”
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Posted inTop 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Recommending stories from Emily Bazelon, Eva Holland, Kevin Pang, Jessica Traynor, and David Pierce.
Posted inTop 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
As January draws to a close, our favorite stories this week included a stirring critical essay, a paean to the world’s greatest boxed meal, a rethinking of psychedelics’ impact on the planet, a profile of a craftsperson at his peak, and an eye-opener about how humpback whales use air in some unexpected ways. 1. Corky […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
What’s in a Packrat’s Petrified Pee? Just a Few Thousand Years of Secrets.
Jason Bittel’s essay explores the rather wonderful fact that packrats are avid collectors. Even better, their personal museums help researchers piece together mysteries. It’s a heart-warming story. In a study of the Chihuahuan Desert in the American Southwest and northern Mexico, ancient packrats were found to have collected remains of everything from 9,000-year-old pocket gophers […]
Posted inUncategorized
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
“Good teachers teach students how to find the pattern, and how to find the deviance: how to see that different things are actually the same thing, or, sometimes, that what look like the same things are in fact different. I want my students to know what I hope other people are also teaching my children: […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Souvenirs of Climate Catastrophe
“Souvenir: the French for ‘to remember,’ from the Latin subvenire—literally, ‘to come from below.’”
Posted inUncategorized
Rabbit Holes Aplenty and the Week’s Top 5
“What could have fizzled out as a weekend infatuation turned into a full-blown obsession, an online epic quest. After the festival, I decided that a dulcimer was something I really needed, but I never just need things; I also crave learning about them deeply from the people who already know.” Who among us has never fallen into […]
Posted inNewsletter
A Reading List on Succession, Stories About Unnatural Disasters, and This Week’s Top 5
“These people may have all the money in the world, but as the last four seasons have shown us in vivid, lacerating detail, their cold, loveless lives inspire little envy.” Welcome to the weekend! The final episode of Succession airs this Sunday, and to mark the end of this show about TV’s most dysfunctional media-empire […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Disappearing Art of Maintenance
What do you do with a subway car that’s been operating 25 years longer than it was designed to? What do you do with a phone that’s only designed to work for three? In this thoughtful essay, Alex Vuoco suggests that we look to the make-it-last ethos as a course out of the increasingly wasteful […]
Posted inCuration
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Featuring notable stories by Antonia Cundy, Adrian Walker, Evan Allen, Elizabeth Koh, Andrew Ryan, Kristin Nelson, Brendan McCarthy, Frederick Kaufman, Lygia Navarro, and Judith Hannah Weiss.
