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Ben Goldfarb questions the responsibilities of dog owners in an essay focusing on the impact of unleashed dogs on shorebirds. Goldfarb brings this somewhat niche topic to life with a mixture of reporting and personal experience.
We drove to an ocean beach that some literal-minded city father had named Ocean Beach. I walked Kit onto the damp sand and watched her scrape at the stuff, as though trying to find its bottom. I unclipped her leash and Kit began to saunter, then run, one step ahead of the frothy surf, like a sandpiper. The wind pinned her floppy ears against her head, and she flung herself down to roll ecstatically in some dead washed-up thing. She looked happy; she looked free; she looked right.
Gabriella Paiella pays homage to the ultimate “Dad movie,” Master and Commander, a staggering 20 years after its release. Made in a different era of Hollywood, this fun essay also reflects on how the movie experience has changed over the decades.
Any nostalgia stirred up by Master and Commander is also nostalgia for a different era of Hollywood. This sort of richly detailed, big-budget historical epic rarely gets a chance in today’s movie landscape. And even if the action isn’t the point, the battles absolutely kick ass, using practical effects that would probably be weightless CGI these days.
The Delphi murders is a case that every true crime commentator has jumped on; analyzing the eerie footage of the suspect captured by Liberty German on her phone before her tragic murder. Huge public interest has done little to find definitive answers for the murdered girls; instead operating as a catalyst for this vast amount of content. Aja Romano details this disturbing case, thus adding to the glut of information, but Romano at least uses this poster case of the true crime genre to question the ethics of this growing industry.
Nine days after the murders, police released an audio recording of Bridge Guy, now officially named a suspect, saying, “Down the hill.”
This was arguably the moment when Delphi stopped being solely a hometown tragedy and entered the annals of true crime fame — when the eerie disembodied audio, complete with the pixellated image of the killer, swept across media outlets nationwide, galvanizing interest in the tragic story of two young friends who died brutally, side by side.
Professor Paco Calvo believes that plant behavior is the key to understanding how human minds work. Plant lover Amanda Gefter clearly sees the logic in his work and delights in explaining it to us in this fascinating piece.
Artificial neural networks have led to breakthroughs in machine learning and big data, but they still seemed, to Calvo, a far cry from living intelligence. Programmers train the neural networks, telling them when they’re right and when they’re wrong, whereas living systems figure things out for themselves, and with small amounts of data to boot. A computer has to see, say, a million pictures of cats before it can recognize one, and even then all it takes to trip up the algorithm is a shadow. Meanwhile, you show a 2-year-old human one cat, cast all the shadows you want, and the toddler will recognize that kitty.
Sophie Elmhirst takes an insightful look into the unique therapy options for the super-rich. Like many people, loneliness and a lack of connection lie at the root of their problems, but, as Elmhirst alludes to in this essay, if even rehab treats them differently from other people can they really hope to find what they need?
But beyond the desire for privacy, extreme wealth has an oddly separating effect. “If you put a billionaire in a group setting, even with well-off middle-class people, they will not be able to relate to each other,” Gerber told me. They are not like the rest of us, these people; their lives and minds have been transformed by their fortunes.
What inspires people to contribute to a site for nothing? Stephen Luries goes on a mission to find the people determined to give credit where credit is due — and the automation getting ready to topple them.
Adams, now 88, has since written almost 7,000 plot summaries for films listed on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). In total, he’s contributed more than 890,000 pieces of information about film and TV, a chunk of which came straight from the files he hauled from Eastland. “If data was weighable,” he told me, “the IMDb owes a small ton of thank you kindly, sirs to Preston Smith and Victor Cornelius. I was only the messenger.”
It’s been twenty-five years since the film Titanic dominated the cultural horizon, yet apparently, we are still asking the same questions — about both the disaster and the film. What angle did the ship sink at? Could both Rose and Jack have fit on that door? Megan Garber takes an understandably jaded look at why we still want to know.
Time may heal all wounds, but Hollywood helps things along. For many Americans, Titanic now refers less to those 1,535 people than to just two: Jack and Rose. James Cameron’s semi-fictional film about the disaster—for a long while, the highest-grossing movie of all time—has taken on a memetic familiarity.
Overcoming battles with mental health to become an incredible cliff diver, Gary Hunt also appears to be a lovely person, as Xan Rice demonstrates in this endearing portrait of an unusual athlete — one unruffled by sponsors, other competitors, or great heights.
Just watching the divers walk along the platform made my heart pound. Some made the sign of the cross on their chest, or slapped their thighs to psych themselves up. Every now and then a diver would step back from the edge just before they were supposed to jump, disturbed by a gust of wind or a moment of apprehension.
Bella Ramsey’s journey across a post-apocalyptic landscape — as Ellie, alongside curmudgeonly smuggler Joel (Pedro Pascal) — in The Last of Us, has been a ratings hit on both sides of the Atlantic. Her brilliant performance has silenced some of her online critics, but as Jack King finds out in this insightful profile, the hate she has faced has taken its toll.
So many scenes were ingrained in my mind, from her fiery introduction to the tears that seemed to manifest from nowhere as one particular mid-season episode hit its climactic tragedy, plus many later moments that would be unfair to spoil.
A beautiful, moving, tale about a couple who enabled their son — born with a genetic disorder — to experience as much as he could in the short time that he was given. This will make you want to go outside and truly appreciate it.
Around his first birthday, we learned that Leo loved to be outside. When we took him to the boardwalk along the Saint Croix River and to local state parks, his eyes lit up and the laughter flowed. Time in nature seemed to energize him. That quickly became an evening and weekend routine: family walks, with Leo loving all the sunlight and fresh air he could get.
This is the story of Ayesha, who was sold by her family to an older man — sadly not an uncommon practice in the Sundarbans region where she is from. Mitra offers strong reporting and a genuine insight into the characters involved in this one tale of many.
Their past haunted them, the present drove wedges between them, but Ayesha and Sumaiya agree on what they seek from the future. Both want justice. Before I left their house in June last year, Sumaiya declared that she will grow up and join the police force and course-correct everyone around her.
Streaming services are now awash with documentaries — more often than not with a murder somewhere in the title. What does this boom mean for the industry? Is this even still journalism? In this measured piece, Reeves Wiedeman brings to light the important questions the industry is now —necessarily — asking itself.
One award-winning investigative filmmaker told me she gets regular notes from her agent — documentary directors didn’t used to have agents — about what streamers are looking for, and they weren’t the kinds of films she was used to making. “I’m getting, ‘Did anybody murder your sister, and do you want to make a film about that?’” she said.
This story is quite the spectacle. How can a tale about a family who shoots themselves out of cannons not be? Told methodically, it is a solid account of circus life through the generations.
David Sr. asked his son to come to Madison to fill in for him. David Jr. didn’t hesitate: He packed up his things and drove halfway across the country. Two days later, he was at the business end of a cannon.
Ever question why your rent is so high? Lane Brown did, but instead of just wondering, he went on a mission to find out why. Carrying out meticulous research, he discovers that landlords may not be playing fair. An essay that teaches you not to accept the status quo.
In other words, New York City — which in the first pandemic summer had been declared “dead forever” — was back! As long as you had not personally been ejected from your home, you might have even found it inspiring.
There was only one problem: None of it made any sense.
This gentle essay documents Roxanne Gay’s and her wife, Debbie Millman’s, journey to Antarctica. It’s not a racy tale, just a thoughtful look at what the trip meant to them, told from their perspective. A lovely take on shared contentment.
I took a picture of Debbie, bundled in her bright red parka, eyes covered with goggles, beaming as she held the chunk of ice. There were more penguins. We pulled up to a craggy landing and stepped foot on land to . . . say we stepped foot on Antarctica. We admired the landscape, and I was struck by the fact that this really is one of the last places in the world that is largely unconquered. I found an unexpected comfort in that.
This is a surprisingly poignant essay about growing up with Kraft dinners. Ivana Rihter manages to make a cheap pasta dish sound beautiful, but it’s not about the food, it’s about the memories of family and heritage that it conjures up.
More than twenty years later, the sound of dried pasta tubes sliding across cardboard soothes me like a rain stick. Kraft was the first meal I ever truly loved, the first one I attempted to cook on my own, and the first food I could not live without. There are four boxes tucked into my pantry as I write this.
Ian Dille unravels the story behind a shocking crime with meticulous care. His detailed reporting sheds a light on the close-knit biking world and human relationships at the root of this case, without sensationalism. It’s a gripping read.
It’s easy to buy a weapon in Texas. So one day around the beginning of 2022, Strickland and Armstrong rode their bikes to McBride’s, a family owned gun shop near the University of Texas. Armstrong picked out a 9mm SIG Sauer P365 pistol and held it up to get a feel for its weight.
The search for life on other planets has been based on what we already know. But what if extraterrestrial life does not look like any beings we’re used to on Earth? It may even be unrecognizable to the scientists searching for it. In this essay, Sarah Scoles meets Sarah Stewart Johnson, who has been looking for “aliens” from a different perspective.
Even when scientists do discover biology unfamiliar to them, they tend to relate it to something familiar. For instance, when Antonie van Leeuwenhoek saw single-celled organisms through his microscope’s compound lens in the 17th century, he dubbed them “animalcules,” or little animals, which they are not.
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