“What can millions of Swifties tell us about human community and pop culture? A KU sociology professor is finding out.”
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The Hidden-Pregnancy Experiment
“We are increasingly trading our privacy for a sense of security. Becoming a parent showed me how tempting, and how dangerous, that exchange can be.”
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, our editors recommend longreads by Janelle Nanos, Paloma Pacheo, Radley Balko, Claire McNear, and Tad Friend.
More Than Just an Object: A Collector’s Reading List
The bowerbird, which lives on the east coast of Australia, has an abiding eye for anything blue. Solitary males travel great distances to bring back all manner of blue objects to decorate their nests. Shells, flowers, plastic bottles, and feathers are all fair game, and bowerbirds have even been known to grind up blue pigments […]
There She Goes: A Reading List on Women Adventurers
The women you’ll find on top of the world.
The Death Artist
Her medium: the cremains of departed loved ones. Her mission: to change your perspective on the end of life.
We Still Don’t Know How to Navigate the Cultural Legacy of Eugenics
From abortion to immigration, a long-debunked scientific movement still casts long, confusing shadows over our most fraught debates.
The Fracking Lottery
“When I moved to Billtown, I worried most about whether fracking tainted groundwater. By the time I left the area, my biggest concern was whether the liberty granted to citizens to lease their land, or to otherwise act in ways that limits others’ access to environmental goods, taints democracy.”
If Following McMillan Cottom and Gay on Twitter Isn’t Enough, Here You Go
More of this sort of thing, thanks.
The Precarity of Everything: On Millennial (Blacks and) Blues
Reniqua Allen — the author of It Was All a Dream: A New Generation Confronts the Broken Promise to Black America — on Black millennials, millennial burnout, and hope in a time of uncertainty.

