“The majority of home water use takes place in the bathroom, so that’s where I started. I scaled back my showers to once a week and only flushed the toilet when the need was overwhelming. I wandered my dark little apartment doing calculations on a loop. How many gallons of water does the Livingston faucet […]
Well, folks, this is it. The last Top 5 newsletter of the year! Whether or not you’re observing any holidays, we hope you enjoy a restorative end to 2024. At the very least, you’ll have the full run of our Best of 2024 package at your disposal—between the stories we discussed in our year-end essays […]
“Both marriage and religion had required exile from ourselves, a systematic suppression of our true identities. It was an adaptation that felt necessary for survival. But as I watched D explore, interrogate, and reinvent womanhood, changing the rules before my eyes, I wondered if I had been wrong.” Happy Friday, even if (in the Northern […]
“Your doctors tell you that you have your whole life to recover, but also that you have a window of just six months when your brain is most primed to relearn everything you’ve forgotten. So, no pressure. Your brain can’t regenerate the neurons it’s lost. Use ’em or lose ’em. You had no idea your […]
“Finally bearing witness to my own life has been significantly more healing than medications or therapy. Every prescribed medication has had unendurable side effects. Therapy gives me brutal anxiety. But that’s okay. I’m finding peace just by envisioning myself through a forgiving lens.” Welcome to the weekend! April is Autism Awareness Month, so this week, […]
“There’s something about losing yourself in a communal experience that’s immensely appealing in this age of virtual meetings and not-so-social media. We want to see the artists we love in person. We want to believe they’re singing directly to us.” Elizabeth Blackwell, a regular commentator on cultural phenomena (check out her Reality TV and Pivotal […]
Recommending stories from Yasmin Tayag, Elliott Woods, David Ramsey, Larissa Diakiw, and A.S. Hamrah.
Featuring stories about celebrity look-alikes, siblings, desert living, philanthrocapitalism, and life inside a legal brothel.
“Forgetting is a part of living. This issue of mine is more of an inconvenience and less of a cause for alarm. But an inconvenience it is, and I worry about the future, when my mom is gone, maybe my dad too, and there’s no one to fill in the blanks for me, no more […]
“It’s our least popular and most enforced rule: we don’t allow people to sleep in the library. We know you’re tired, we know it’s warm, we know it feels safe. But someone who is dying also looks like someone who is sleeping, and we’ve all seen our share of overdoses. Also, if one person is […]
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Tuesdays and Thursdays, we'll send you our latest originals and all our editor's picks—and Fridays, go even deeper with our Top 5 of the Week.
