Ringer writer Jonathan Tjarks veers from his usual NBA beat to unpack his cancer diagnosis and the shadow it casts over his experience as a son and a father. Unblinking and plainspoken, he somehow manages to strip the emotion out of his writing — but not the emotional impact. I was 12. That’s the age […]
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Posted inTop 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Recommending excellent stories by Charlotte Higgins, Lex Pryor, Michael Hardy, Elissa Altman, and Brad Phillips.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Out Past the Eye-Mark
“An anchor, like ink, fixes in place what floats, what is unmoored: boats, bodies, thoughts…. Anchoring thought in ink is what we call writing.”
Posted inNewsletter
Hoops, Double Helices, and Our Top 5
“I’m not just crying, I’m truly wailing. I’m one of Homer’s grieving women, I’m Alice in Wonderland crying an actual ocean between hiccups, I’m Diane Keaton weeping then whooping in her Something’s Gotta Give breakup montage. My team, the Lakers, has lost.” I confess: I did not know much about basketball until I worked with Rachel Dlugatch […]
Posted inTop 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week we’re highlighting stories from Tom Lamont, Charlotte Alter, Dženana Vucic, John Paul Scotto, and Devin Friedman.
Posted inUncategorized
The Plot Thickens (and the Week’s Top 5)
“Accommodating the dead, like accommodating the living, has always entailed a head-on collision with the awkward reality that we have a finite amount of physical space.” Okay, yes, sure, maybe you weren’t expecting a quote about dead bodies to kick off your Friday morning. But I assure you that our new feature, “Disneyland of the […]
Posted inUncategorized
On Resilience and Our Top 5
“It is hard, I think, to learn as an adult. This is not some profound statement. It just is. But it is not hard because of the fact of it; it is hard because learning anything means learning again how to learn. It’s not that riding a bike is hard; it’s that learning is hard. […]
Posted inUncategorized
The (Un-)Happiest Place on Earth and the Week’s Top 5
“I left Trip House at 8:12 on Saturday morning, having not been murdered, and drove to the Magic Kingdom. The woman at the ticket window asked if I’d come to Disney World to celebrate anything special, and I laughed. If I answered that question truthfully — using unmagical words like ‘genital,’ ‘student loan,’ and ‘gentrification’ […]
Posted inTop 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Recommending notable stories by J.K. Nickell, Conor Niland, Wendell Brock and Paul Kwilecki, Ally Jarmanning, and Drew Magary.
Posted inUncategorized
Fabulous Fungi and Our Top 5 of the Week
“To a reading list on these mind-bending entities at a planetary tipping point, welcome. What you see here are only some fruiting bodies, the rest lies underneath.” I first learned about the parasitic fungus that takes over a bug’s body and commandeers its brain back in 2023, when I picked Zhengyang Wang’s “The Last of […]
