Finding beauty, human connection, and one’s heritage in the resonant sounds of the dulcimer.
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Madness, Melancholy, or Murder: An Ancient English Farm’s 50-Year-Old Mystery
Andrew Chamings returns to his childhood farmland to investigate the mystifying deaths of the Luxton siblings. What really happened down that dark country lane?
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week we are sharing stories from Janell Ross, Jude Isabella, Arthur Asseraf, Lex Pryor, and Diane Mehta.
Up, Up, and Away to the Week’s Top 5
“Wallace was a fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants sort. A 54-year-old Massachusetts lawyer and real estate developer, he couldn’t afford to fly conservatively. Gas ballooning, similar to jockeyship, favored lightweight pilots, who could stock their baskets with more sand. Compared with his slighter opponents, Wallace’s six-foot-five, 240-pound frame meant that the equivalent of three additional 30-pound bags of sand […]
Svetlana Alexievich Reminds Me of How to Be Human
Sometimes I need to forget I’m an introvert.
A Butcher Shop Visit and Our Top 5
“More tellingly still, on the block in front of me are half a dozen dead pheasants. This is the butchery department, deep in the bowels of Waltham Forest College in North East London, UK, where I am the only female student.” For those who celebrate, Easter weekend can mean a big ol’ roast dinner. Some […]
Strong Mothers, Boundless Lives, and the Week’s Top 5
Have you read Craig Brown’s Hello Goodbye Hello? It’s a blast: “a circle of 101 remarkable meetings,” as the jacket says, with each chapter a pithy, intimate encounter between two figures from history
What Care Looks Like at Every Scale (and Our Top 5)
An exploration of scale, limits, and care—featuring our new essay “By All Measures” and this week’s Top 5 reads.
The Joy of New Words and the Week’s Top 5
“Yet I still doggy paddle in impostor syndrome. For I am not a biologist or cetologist, nor an oceanographer. I am just a woman with a pen, a profound love for water, and an eye for noticing patterns in the currents, eddies, and swirls of living.” Sometimes words aren’t enough. Or, at least, existing words […]
Album as Poem, List as Confession, and Our Top 5
We may often think of poetry as something formal or grand, or meant for the pages of a book. But these two essays remind us that poetry lives in many places.


