This edition highlights reading about messages in bottles, public benches, infinity, a series of books about everything, and pay-to-play orchestras.
The New Yorker
Posted inEditor's Pick
Signed, Sealed, Delivered
“What happens when someone throws a message into the sea?”
Posted inEditor's Pick
When Your Digital Life Vanishes
“A broken phone or corrupted drive can mean the loss of work, evidence, art, or the last traces of the dead. But sometimes data-recovery experts can summon lost files from the void.”
Posted inTop 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Deaths in donation bins, the Hardy boys, MAGA slop, billionaire playgrounds, and nostalgia for the complicated.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Our Longing for Inconvenience
“The modern world has made us ill-equipped for the nuisances of past technologies, even as it has fuelled nostalgia for things that might transport us back to calmer times.”
Posted inReading List
Holding Pattern: A Reading List on Waiting . . .
Everyone waits. No one is spared the waiting room, one way or another. Seven stories on an essential human condition.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Car-Crash Conspiracy
“High-speed accidents, crooked lawyers, and poor people desperate for cash—it was the kind of scheme that could have been cooked up only in the Big Easy.”
Posted inTop 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Notable stories on chasing manhood, naming Gaza’s dead, searching the stacks for a rare book, leaving music behind, and opting out.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Camps Promising to Turn You—or Your Son—Into an Alpha Male
“At the Men of War Crucible, you bear-crawl through rivers. At Warrior Week, you dig your own grave. At the Squire Program, your teen-ager can take part, too.”
Posted inTop 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week’s stories include techno, New Zealand, relationships, background music and doodles.