“But we’re at the beginning of a new technological era—and the easiest way to mismanage a technology is to misunderstand it.”
The New Yorker
Posted inEditor's Pick
How One Mother’s Love for Her Gay Son Started a Revolution
“’You don’t love him in spite of something,’ she later declared on national television, her face free of shadow or blur. ‘You love him.’”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Dystopian Underworld of South Africa’s Illegal Gold Mines
“When the country’s mining industry collapsed, a criminal economy grew in its place, with thousands of men climbing into some of the deepest shafts in the world, searching for leftover gold.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Nick Cave on the Fragility of Life
“The singer-songwriter believes that we are deeply flawed, impermanent creatures who can sometimes do extraordinary things.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Will the Ozempic Era Change How We Think About Being Fat and Thin?
“A popular, growing class of drugs for obesity and diabetes could, in an ideal world, help us see that metabolism and appetite are biological facts, not moral choices.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Hip-Hop at Fifty: An Elegy
“A generation is still dying younger than it should—this time, of ‘natural causes.'”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Little-Known World of Caterpillars
“An entomologist races to find them before they disappear.”
Posted inTop 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week’s top stories by Elizabeth Whitman, David Grann, Jack Stilgoe, Gloria Liu, and Tony Rehagen.
Posted inEditor's Pick
A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder
“The only impartial witness was the sun.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web
“OpenAI’s chatbot offers paraphrases, whereas Google offers quotes. Which do we prefer?”