A quarter-century ago, after a deadly terrorist attack raised fiery explosions from the World Trade Center buildings, the US Department of Homeland Security introduced a color-coded advisory system, under which orange signified “High Risk of Terrorist Activities.” For many people, including Dushko Petrovich Córdova, “this ambient, lingering orange signaled that emergency was continuous, a new way of living.” Ours is a world of prison jumpsuits and Home Depot, leaders with an affinity for fake tans and “aptitude for the orange of perpetual crisis,” public health maps of infection rates painted various shades of orange to mark severity, a sky dyed orange by wildfire smoke. We are inundated by the color; it feels, at times, inescapable. Is it really? Follow Córdova to the brilliant end of this stunner.

Once, in the late ’90s, a few years before the dawn of the orange era, I found myself in Montreal for a friend’s wedding. There was a wildfire nearby, and I remember trying to capture the eerie effect of the atmosphere turning orange with the disposable cameras that had been handed out to all the guests. The resulting pictures looked underexposed and nothing more, the otherworldly orange haze rendered mostly regular gray.

So, decades later, in 2023, when photos of smoke from yet another Canadian wildfire began to appear on social media, I was surprised by how well digital photography had captured what had proved so elusive in the late disposable-camera era. The best civilian shot I saw was of the scenery through a window. The cool interior lighting framed the orangeness outside, in the same way that you might frame a sunset, except that instead of a bright band of orange light at the horizon, this orange was everywhere, pressing at all the edges of the window frame and probably trying to get in through the cracks. In another image I saw a gray cat sitting on a windowsill, apparently unperturbed by the wide expanse of horror just behind it.

Steve Rose investigates a catastrophic pollution incident at Furnace Brook, a fishing lake in East Sussex, where thousands of fish suddenly died and the local ecosystem collapsed. Neighbours suspect pollution from nearby Morgans Farm, and Rose examines whether their concerns are justified. In doing so, he uncovers broader national problems with water pollution, illegal waste dumping, and the limited power and resources councils and regulators have to tackle them.

He headed about half a mile up the valley to a tributary joining the stream from a neighbouring property named Morgans Farm. “You could clearly see the water upstream [of the tributary] was totally normal, a sandy colour with clay silt in it, and what was below it had gone a blue-black colour. You could see dead brook trout, wild eels, and there was a dead crow or raven, which may well have eaten something poisonous from the river.” In some places, he says, there was a thick layer of blue-grey scum on the water, which he later learned is sometimes called “bacterial cheese”. “There’s so much nutrient [sic] in the water that it allows for a bacterial colonisation explosion.” The bacteria take up all the oxygen, which causes most of the fish, especially the older, larger ones, to die.

The beloved video game Tetris has a fascinating, complicated history. While the Tetris Company (TTC) claims exclusive rights to the geometric pieces at the heart of the game, known as tetrominoes, history shows that the Russian engineer and game designer duo behind TTC did not, in fact, own them. In this excerpt of Soviet Blocks: The Bizarre Puzzle of How Tetris Embraced Western Values, Julien Mailland traces Tetris’s journey from the Soviet Union to the West, and shows how the game is a lens through which to view two very different systems.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, Belikov and Patjinov — who by then had teamed up with Nintendo’s fixer Henk Rogers — sued each other over the rights to the game in federal court in New York. Pajitnov had very little going for him. The USSR did not recognize software copyright, or any private property for that matter other than for household pots and pans. Further, he developed the game on his work computer during work hours, which under U.S. legal principles would make it his employer’s property.

Mark Johnson | The Atavist Magazine | September 2026 | 2,048 words (7 minutes)

This is an excerpt from issue no. 180, “The Family Plan.”

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At first she told no one. Not her twin sister. Not her mother. Not even her father the scientist.

Six-year-old Jenna Smith knew better than to pee when she was in the bath. But on that night in 1992, in her family’s home in Iowa City, the water felt so comfortable against her skin that she didn’t want to get out of the tub. It seemed like such a small thing. Who would know?

Seconds later the water around her waist turned reddish pink. Blood? It had to be. Jenna wondered if she’d hurt herself. “I was six years old sitting in a bathtub, watching a few seconds of my world stop making sense,” she would recall years later.

She kept the blood a secret because she didn’t want to admit that she’d peed in the bath. But when it was still in her urine the next time she used the toilet, she went to her mother. Concerned, her mom called her dad, Richard Smith, and he took Jenna to the emergency room.

Richard was an ear, nose, and throat doctor in the University of Iowa’s school of medicine, a researcher who would become one of the world’s authorities on the genetics of hearing loss. His wife, Lynne Lanning, had worked as both a lawyer and a nurse. They had four young children: twins Jenna and Jessica, who were identical, and two boys, Luke and Rion.

At the ER, doctors ran tests on Jenna, but they couldn’t identify the cause of the blood. In the days that followed the bleeding intensified. At her parents’ urging, Jenna collected samples of her urine in Dixie cups for further testing. The doctors remained stumped, however, and after a while Jenna found the whole thing more annoying than worrisome.

The uncertainty was much harder on her parents. It wasn’t that doctors were misdiagnosing their daughter; they were unable to diagnose her at all. “It was horrible,” Richard said. “Imagine seeing your child and you know something is wrong, and you know the doctors treating her have no clue what to do.” Richard called a pediatric nephrologist he knew in Houston, where the family had lived previously. The nephrologist listed several conditions that could be causing the bleeding and said that, to determine which was to blame, Jenna’s parents should take her to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

In July 1992, Richard, Lynne, and Jenna drove nearly 500 miles to get answers. Doctors in Cincinnati diagnosed Jenna with dense deposit disease, a condition in which proteins clog and damage the kidneys, leading to renal failure in many patients. There was no cure.

The hospital couldn’t tell the family much else—no one could. The disease was exceedingly rare, afflicting between one and three people in a million. Back home, Richard and Lynne spent hours inside the University of Iowa’s quiet medical library, poring over papers in search of information about their daughter’s illness. They could find no evidence that anyone was actively studying the condition.

Although many Americans—roughly one in ten—suffer from a rare disease, the experience can be lonely. Friends and relatives don’t understand the unique miseries such illnesses impose on daily life. Few doctors are likely to have encountered them before. And because there aren’t many patients, drug companies usually don’t invest in research for treatments.

Richard and Lynne feared that their daughter’s life might be tragically brief. Sometimes the mention of weddings would sink Lynne into melancholy; she couldn’t bring herself to watch the movie Father of the Bride. Richard agonized over what to do. His training compelled him to seek answers, but he wanted to be Jenna’s father, not the scientist charged with curing her. He kept his research focused on hearing loss. At first, anyway.

Stories of scientific discovery almost always celebrate individual researchers, consigning the contributions of loved ones, communities, and colleagues to footnotes. There are exceptions―the teams that built the first atomic bomb and deciphered the human genome, for instance. Science also has its share of famous families. Marie and Pierre Curie, along with their daughter Irène and her husband, Frédéric, won five Nobel Prizes between them for discoveries related to radioactivity. For the most part, however, the history of scientific progress has been mythologized as a succession of brilliant, driven individuals—often men—who chose the lab over the dinner table and competition over collaboration.

Some scientists have embraced the role of maverick. “You have to worry about your own work and ignore what everyone else is doing,” the physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman is said to have told a colleague. The decades-long pursuit of a treatment for Jenna’s disease followed a very different path. There was no single hero, no lone scientist seeking glory. The biomedical quest required the efforts of a family and their neighbors in Iowa City, and the work of scientists around the globe. Together they changed an obscure area of medicine.

Richard and Lynne met in 1977, when both were working at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center in Houston—she as a nurse, he as a medical intern. He noticed a run in her nylons and was smitten by her smile. She liked his down-to-earth manner and intelligence, his humor and kindness. They were working in the hospital’s burn unit when he asked her out.

The couple married in 1981, and except for two years in England, they remained in Houston until 1990. That December they moved to Iowa City, where Richard had a job waiting for him leading the pediatric otolaryngology division and running a research lab at the University of Iowa’s medical school. They had been there only a year when Jenna got sick.

Richard and Lynne learned that their daughter’s disease was caused by a malfunction in her complement system. Believed to have evolved long before other parts of our immune infrastructure, the complement system sends proteins to battle foreign invaders. Unlike antibodies, these proteins are not tailored to fight a specific virus or bacteria, but they kick into gear faster when a threat is detected. In people with Jenna’s condition, the complement system is like a runaway train: Proteins become overstimulated and then accumulate in the glomeruli, tiny filters the kidneys use to clear waste from blood.

Blood in the urine is one symptom of the disease. Others include swelling, high blood pressure, inflammation, and fatigue. When Jenna was in the first grade, her body struggled to make growth hormones. Her production of red blood cells slowed, and she grew increasingly tired. During rehearsals for The Nutcracker ballet around Christmas 1993, she’d finish her part and then lie down backstage, completely spent.

Doctors put her on a heavy dose of the steroid prednisone and on blood-pressure medication. The prednisone caused her body to retain water. She woke up each morning with her eyes swollen shut, then waited in bed until the swelling receded. She couldn’t fit into her clothes or shoes. She wore flip-flops and roomy jumpers Lynne sewed for her.

As twins, Jenna and Jessica had always been close. They played together, made up songs and dance moves, explored the woods near their home, and enjoyed pranking friends and family members. “She made a lot of things feel not so heavy,” Jenna said of her sister. Still, she sometimes thought that Jessica “got off scot-free” by not having dense deposit disease. Neither girl liked feeling different from the other. (Years later, Jessica would be diagnosed with type-1 diabetes; Jenna would not.)

The changes to Jenna’s appearance meant the girls were no longer identical. Once, according to Lynne, when a boy at school said that Jenna couldn’t be a twin anymore because of how she looked, Jessica slugged him. Lynne recalled sitting in the principal’s office, politely listening to a lecture—this is not the way we resolve things!—but understanding why Jessica had lashed out. Nothing was so frightening to her daughters as the idea that they’d stop being twins.

About half of those afflicted with Jenna’s disease progressed to kidney failure within a decade of diagnosis; it took her less than a year. She made it through the last day of first grade. Then, as other children departed for summer camp, she went to a clinic. While her classmates practiced archery and did arts and crafts, she learned about the catheter doctors would surgically insert in her body. Through that tube, a machine would pump fluid into her abdomen, where her peritoneum—her abdominal lining—would take over the filtering function kidneys usually perform.

She would take the peritoneal dialysis machine home with her and use it every day for the foreseeable future, possibly for the rest of her life. When a nurse tried to take Lynne aside to show her how to operate it, Jenna stopped her. “I’m the patient,” the seven-year-old insisted. “I’m learning how to run the machine.”

In such moments, Lynne was surprised at the strength she drew from her daughter. She needed it. Her grief could leave her feeling drained. One day she found herself crying into the soil as she gardened.

But Lynne and Richard were determined that sadness would not define their lives. For a long time, they didn’t have a TV in their house—they wanted the family to talk when they were together, and for the children to build forts, learn to sew, be creative. They had painting nights, creating portraits of one another. There were cooking contests, too. Richard and Lynne made sure to spend one-on-one time with each kid. Richard traveled with Luke to Japan, with Rion to the Grand Canyon, with Jessica to Italy, and with Jenna to England. Lynne took trips with the children to Brazil, England, and Guatemala. There were themed birthday celebrations: a James Bond party for Richard, where everyone was armed with Nerf guns, and one for Lynne where Richard dressed as the artist Bob Ross and the guests painted “happy little clouds.” Richard coached the kids’ hockey and soccer teams. He built harps and lyres from scratch, and Lynne played them.

Every day, Richard left for work at 5 a.m., while the children were still in bed. He returned around six at night. The family joked that they could hear him coming from half a mile away in his rust-bucket Isuzu Trooper with the bad muffler and a hole in the passenger footwell. When he wasn’t seeing patients or in surgery, Richard was in the lab. On Saturdays, Luke would go there with him. Sometimes the other kids joined. They liked to refill the communal candy jars and visit the mice used in experiments.

It seemed a wonder to the lab’s staff that Richard squeezed so much into a day. When they began using email to communicate, they received messages from him time-stamped three or four in the morning. “Why don’t you sleep sometime?” a colleague replied once. Indeed, Richard slept little. At night his mind kept running through the mysteries of his daughter’s disease.

Richard had read that it took 10,000 hours—the equivalent of working full-time for about five years—to achieve expertise in a subject. He believed it. In 1995, he began flying to conferences about kidney disease, where he talked to the few doctors who cared for patients like Jenna. Medicine was getting no closer to finding a treatment.

That year the owner of a ranch where Richard and Lynne’s children took riding lessons offered to host a fundraiser for kidney disease research. The family organized Dressage in the Heartland, which featured riding events, fiddle music, and bowls of chili. After raising upwards of $10,000 for the National Kidney Foundation, they held the event again the following year. There are hundreds of kidney ailments, however, and the foundation didn’t allow the money the family raised to be earmarked for the research of dense deposit disease. (The foundation said it now allows monetary gifts to be dedicated to specific conditions.)

Richard and Lynne ran into more disappointment during a visit to the University of Minnesota in early 1997. A specialist they consulted was blunt. “Nobody is looking at this disease,” he told them. “And barring something unforeseen, nothing will be done in the next twenty years.”

It was a four-and-a-half-hour drive back to Iowa City. In the car, Lynne brought up what the doctor had said. Maybe they would have to be that unforeseen something.

When Eric Leas, a public-health scientist, discovered packages of “magic mushroom” gummies for sale in a smoke shop, he wondered: Were these candies even legal? Had they been properly tested, and did anyone actually know what constituted a safe dose? This Aeon piece follows Leas down a rabbit hole as he investigates whether the Amanita muscaria products currently on store shelves are as safe as their candy-like packaging suggests.

I found a product with a very high reported amount of muscimol. It was a gummy product, one in a benign-looking package that did not have childproofing or clear warnings. I began doing the calculation no one wants to do. If a young child ate the entire package, mistaking it for candy, could they die? I took the reported amount of muscimol, the toxicology estimates (the LD50), a conversion used to translate dosing between species, and the average weight of a small child. The result looked bad. Bad enough that I did not quite trust myself. So, I called a friend, Matthieu Rouffet, a medicinal chemist and the dean of science at a local college, who does toxicology calculations more often than I do. I wanted him to tell me I had made an error. Instead, he was alarmed too.

A few years ago, Sebastian Barry—whose collected literary works, drawn from family history and lore, offer “a loser’s history of 20th-century Ireland”—announced that the final novel in his series would tackle the relationship between his parents. “The declaration seemed to set the table for a feast of disclosure,” writes Giles Harvey, who spoke with Barry for more than a year as the novel took shape. But the feast never arrived. The “career-spanning profile” Harvey once suggested to Barry becomes a study of abuse, memory, and revelation—one Barry’s forte, and now, perhaps, his greatest struggle.

Barry and I corresponded for the next year and a half, during which the novel appeared to be on course. Then, in July of last year, he sent me a surprising email. Something had happened in the time since his father died, Barry explained. “Where there was once a great need to proclaim aloud,” he wrote — neglecting to specify just what it was he’d felt the need to proclaim — Barry now found himself in a different state of mind. “A matter I thought so urgent and in need of saying” had come to seem better served by a “strange new beneficent silence.”

Kate Manne, a philosophy professor at Cornell University, situates the lawsuit from a former student alleging she was gang-raped at the Chi Phi fraternity in 2024 within a broader, deeply troubling campus “rape culture.” The specific details of Jane Doe’s case are horrific, but Manne also points to shocking statistics and examples showing that sexual misconduct is rife and often taken less seriously than other student infractions. She is critical of Cornell’s response and culture, but emphasizes that, tragically, this normalization of misogyny is widespread across many American campuses. A disturbing, important read.

In a deeply misogynistic society, groups of boys and men routinely bond over humiliating and exploiting women, as Soraya Chemaly has written. And the victim is not only physically and emotionally traumatized following one of the most fundamental imaginable violations: They are likely to be doubted and undermined at every subsequent step of the process. In Jane Doe’s case, the district attorney did not bring any charges after relying on the investigation done by campus police; they didn’t even speak with the men involved. The district attorney just announced that they are reopening the case on the basis of new information contained in the civil lawsuit, and in recognition of the fact that “it can take years of therapy and healing for victims of sexual assaults to fully process and understand what happened to them.”

Recommending notable stories from Caitlin Dickerson, Marci Wilding, Tiffany Huang, Nick Paumgarten, and Chabeli Carrazana.

“Who wouldn’t decide to be their most expansive and radiant self?” Ah, but would you pursue that self through a sheet of tempered glass? In this literal tour de force, Katherine Cusumano shadows wrestlers navigating the independent promoters of the Pacific Northwest, granting sensational access to the lives and ambitions behind elaborate personas you’ve never heard of and will almost certainly search YouTube for. Cusumano is note-perfect on the details, taking obvious delight in the gimmicks of each wrestler’s beloved character and relishing the complexity of the choreography, rehearsed in elaborate code. (“Clothesline, crossbody in the corner, clothesline, Superman, Superman, I’m fired up, whoop, sliced bread, Ricky catches, oh shit, real fast.”) Spectacle abounds, but Cusumano rises above it, way up on the turnbuckle, with a heartening consideration of how we understand our own stories, and what we devote to realizing them.

I found myself drawn to this world, to its freakish feats of acrobatics, to its relentless and obsessive blurring of the boundary between reality and story, and, more than anything, to the supreme, sometimes monastic devotion of its competitors. I had been trying for ages to understand competition, ambition, the scaffolding that holds up good-bad, win-lose, and wrestling confounded these binaries. I started talking to Drexl, an old-timer with one foot out the door of his career, who eventually referred me to Amira, an emerging wrestler with an already impressive résumé, and I thought that was so like wrestling, to proffer such perfect narrative symmetry. They agreed—more readily than I’d expected, given how fiercely professional wrestlers have historically protected the secrets of their work—to let me follow them around. Which is how I ended up behind the curtain.

In this tense, riveting first-person excerpt from his new book This Cursed Beautiful Land: A Russian Story, Evan Gershkovich recounts the harrowing months he spent as a prisoner in Russia, leading up to his eventual release in a complex, multi-country prisoner exchange. Even in the darkness, Gershkovich offers rays of light: care packages from friends, letters by the hundred, and a cautiously blossoming love with a friend in Berlin. We may know the ending, but the details of these days reveal what it takes to get there.

A few hours after my arrival, I heard a cart rolling down the hallway. A guard opened a kormushka — a feeder window in the door about the size of a human head. A man in a chef’s uniform filled my bowl with porridge, placed a piece of rancid-smelling boiled fish on my plate and gave me some weak tea. The reality of my new surroundings slammed into me.

Thoughts ricocheted inside my head. Earlier in the day I’d had a comforting one: they’ve taken me for a swap, I told myself. That’s all this is.

Now, curled up on the bed in my 12ft by 8ft cell, knees pulled to my chest, I thought, what if the FSB really does think I’m a spy and wants to make an example out of me? Maybe they don’t want to swap me at all. Maybe I really will spend 20 years here.

A powerful reflection on the pull of nostalgia, on learning to accept that a past life is gone even as you tentatively reach back for it. Tiffany Huang captures the ache of lost opportunities and regretted paths, of staying a course out of duty and responsibility even as your sense of home erodes. It’s a gorgeous, bittersweet read about what it means to move on long before you’ve fully let go.

You unmasked for the first time, revealing smooth cheeks, a sharp chin, and a long nose. You talked about your book, in progress for several years now, about a Hong Kong man drifting aimlessly around the world. I asked you how you felt about the protests and noted the resignation in your tone. You wanted to write a book about what it meant to be a man from Hong Kong; if Hong Kong disappeared, what would happen to the man? You told me about your family, and it was clear we were not meeting to talk about writing anymore. When you spoke, you chose your words carefully. You didn’t ask me about my boyfriend, only how I felt about returning to America. When I hesitated, you did not ask why, and when I spoke, you listened instead of interrupting me. I didn’t want to leave.

David Alm | Longreads | October 1, 2026 | 5,726 words (24 minutes)

I got off Interstate 81 to give my soul a break. The back roads of southwest Virginia wind, crest, and plunge through lush valleys of oak, poplar, birch, and maple trees. It’s easy to lose track of time and distance there. People drive slower. Cows graze in pastures. And there are no placards festooned with Motel 6 and Starbucks logos, flattening the American landscape into a homogeneous blur. Any signs you might see are low to the ground and handmade, protesting a data center, for instance, or thanking Jesus.

I’d gone to this rural pocket of the country for the 90th annual Old Fiddler’s Convention in Galax, an independent city of just under 7,000 near the North Carolina border whose population, for six days in early August, balloons to around four times that. They arrive in RVs and Casitas, camper vans and cars to stake out 20-by-35-foot plots in Felts Park, a 28-acre fairground in the heart of Galax, transforming it into a massive, muddy parking lot sprinkled with portable toilets and a cluster of food trucks, offering loaded potatoes, funnel cake, and blooming onions.

The Old Fiddler’s Convention—or just Galax, as the diehards call it—is the oldest and largest fiddlers’ convention in the world, a place where banjo pickers, guitar players, and other maestros of old-time strings gather to see how they stack up. Founded in 1935, Galax has been canceled only twice since then: once during World War II, due to travel restrictions, and again in 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many Galaxers have been going every year for decades, some for as long as they’ve been alive.

There are scads of rules: If you play clawhammer-style banjo in the bluegrass band competition, you will get disqualified. Same if you play bluegrass-style banjo in the old-time competition. If you break a string while performing, you must stop immediately. Playing time during competition is limited to two minutes and 30 seconds. And, crucially, no electric instruments of any kind are allowed, either on stage or in the tightly packed fairgrounds, where self-described hillbillies, accountants, firefighters, and session musicians pick day and night in blistering, impromptu jams amid the RVs. 

One does not merely attend Galax. It’s not a music festival. There are no headliners, and no full-set performances. There is a single stage, and over the course of six days, contestants take it one after another to play one song for a panel of judges and a smattering of spectators. There are more than a dozen categories, little changed in the past century: old-time fiddle, guitar, dulcimer, folk song. Cash prizes for individual players range from $35 to $285; a campsite and contestant pass together cost $175. “The prestige of being judged a ‘winner at Galax,’ and the respect for one’s musical talent that goes along with it, far outweighs any monetary award,” wrote Fred Burton in the March 1984 issue of Bluegrass Unlimited. 

In the 1980s and ’90s, cars lined up days before the gates to Felts Park opened. The fairgrounds got so full back then that people slept in the horse stables that used to line one end of them. Once, Elizabeth Taylor made a surprise appearance with her then-husband, Virginia Senator John Warner. Rumor has it that members of Old Crow Medicine Show and Leftover Salmon have shown up at Galax, under the radar, just to jam. 

And yet, despite appearing well attended to my virgin eyes, the Old Fiddler’s Convention’s numbers are down from the pre-pandemic years, and way down from peak Galax. Folks say it’s not like it was. Maybe, as one long-time attendee speculated, it’s that more kids are choosing devices and passive consumption over face-to-face activity with other humans, or that more and more young adults are fleeing southwest Virginia due to the gutted coal, tobacco, and manufacturing industries. Or maybe it’s just that people around there are dying faster than they’re being born. Glen Alexander, a 55-year-old fiddler who’s been going to Galax since he was a child, put it bluntly: “We’re all scared to death this is gonna go away.” 

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Tara Linhardt, a professional mandolin player from Leesburg, Virginia, with thick, curly hair and a determined gaze, has been going to Galax since she was in high school, and was happy to advise me on how to survive my first time. Buy what you need locally, she told me; it was cheaper than New York. It will probably rain, so bring mud boots. Find a high patch of ground, because rainwater pools in the low spots. Afternoon jams were open to anyone, but unless I was dead good, I should just observe the nighttime ones, where the “thoroughbreds” play so fast that a newbie like me would only drag it down. 

Tara and her husband, Ian, pulled into Galax late Saturday afternoon, just in time to get a bite before parking their Four Winds RV by the dumpsters behind the Applebee’s at the edge of town. She told me to sleep in my car there, since the church parking lot was already full, and Applebee’s, unlike Hardee’s, doesn’t mind. We’d need to queue up by the gates to Felts Park before seven o’clock Sunday morning to ensure we’d get decent campsites. First-come, first-served. 

I’d arrived earlier that afternoon, hours later than Google Maps had predicted, because I forsook the interstate. The day before, I’d left my home in Brooklyn only to spend two hours driving five miles to reach the Holland Tunnel to New Jersey. I was spat out onto I-78, which at some point blended into I-81, hauling me across Pennsylvania to Staunton, Virginia, where I slept in a former sanatorium. I had recently been laid off from a job I’d held for 13 years, editing reports for a geopolitical risk advisory firm, and needed reprieve. I sought my escape on Route 11. 

In the trunk were a guitar and two banjos, instruments I was determined to spend the week playing in the Blue Ridge Mountains in lieu of applying for jobs and fretting about AI in my Brooklyn apartment. It was the first long road trip I’d taken alone in a quarter-century, and I’d hoped for a reset. Call it a midlife crisis if you want, but I drove cross-country a lot before I moved to New York, always on back roads. America is best seen up close.

After chatting awhile with Tara, Ian, and a luthier named John Hamlett, who’d also parked his RV behind the Applebee’s, I folded myself into the backseat of my Chevy Trax rental and more or less slept. I awoke at 6 a.m. to a downpour, rain pelting the roof of my car like fingertips on a conga drum. 

The four of us caravaned into town, where we waited until almost 9 a.m. to enter the park. We figured it was due to the rain. In fact, it was because of an issue with the gate itself. My source for this intel was none other than the Galax chief of police, DeWitt Cooper, who was directing traffic into Felts Park that day and hails from the Bronx. I’d see Chief Cooper again a couple days later, at Willie’s Food Truck inside the fairgrounds, where we chatted over catfish and collard greens about his philosophy of policing. “Don’t judge based on appearances and treat people with love,” he told me. 

I chose a plot on the far side of the fairgrounds, near a fence and a row of portable toilets, with Tara, Ian, and John all nearby. Our little commune wouldn’t last; the next day, Four Winds got stuck in the mud and Tara had to summon a Moose—one of the men of Moose Lodge No. 733, a fraternal organization that’s managed the Old Fiddler’s Convention since the beginning—to drag it out with a tractor. They found higher ground by the tennis courts and I stayed put. That night it rained again, and I awoke at 5 a.m. in a half-inch of water that had pooled in my tent overnight, soaking my sleeping bag, pillow, and clothes.

It’s no fun to wake up in a puddle, but when it rains in your tent, or the fairgrounds get so muddy that you watch a young woman lose a Birkenstock forever to the muck, or you start to stink because there’s only one public shower in Felts Park, it all feels incidental to what matters more: There’s pickin’ to do. You hear it all around, all the time. A lone fiddle at dawn, guitars easing into the afternoon, jams that grow in size and volume throughout the day, until night falls and Felts Park erupts in a surround-sound jamboree of syncopated banjos, arpeggiated fiddles, and bass notes so low and driving that they cut through it all at ground level. When it’s not raining, those jam sessions continue through the night, practically until the early morning’s still air is broken anew by someone’s fiddle.

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My first jam came on Day 0, after the rain abated and I’d set up camp. The Old Fiddler’s Convention wouldn’t officially start until Monday night, with the astoundingly good kids’ competitions—the reigning bluegrass fiddle champion herself, Hollace Oakes, was 14 when she won the adult contest last year—but everyone in Felts Park was eager to pick.

Tara wanted to introduce me to Bill and Nancy Sluys, a couple in their early 70s who’ve been going to Galax every summer for some 50 years. We walked to their site, where Bill, a towering figure with a steady voice and a long, white, braided ponytail, emerged from their Airstream to invite anyone who might “wish to partake” to join Nancy and a few others inside. I told Bill I’d thought of bringing edibles to Galax, but the convention website said state laws concerning drugs and alcohol are “strictly enforced,” and Google’s AI bot, Gemini, warned that law enforcement would be crawling Felts Park with K-9 units, even though recreational cannabis is legal in Virginia for adults over 21.

Bill laughed and said that hasn’t been true in more than 40 years, though it used to be, on account of a music festival that happened once, half a century ago, about 15 miles up the road. Stompin 76 featured Bonnie Raitt, John Prine, and other big names from the time. The festival attracted a huge crowd, including a motorcycle gang that allegedly wanted to keep the party going after the festival wrapped, so they rolled into Galax on their hogs, stocked with methamphetamine, moonshine, and guns. Mayhem ensued. The authorities cracked down after that, ostensibly to maintain law and order in fiddleland. By the mid-’80s, they realized that the Old Fiddler’s Convention really was a family affair and let the fiddlers be. 

A group of six or seven people had gathered outside the Airstream by this point, all brandishing instruments. Bill, who grew up on Long Island, assumed his position behind an aluminum upright bass from the 1930s, while Nancy, a fiddler and banjo player roughly half Bill’s height who grew up in Connecticut, emerged from the Airstream with her fiddle. She sat down on a folding chair, called “Soldier’s Joy” in the key of D, and kicked it off at breakneck speed. This was an old-time jam, and “soldier’s joy” was a Civil War-era euphemism for morphine. Galax had begun.

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An old-time jam goes something like this: Anywhere from two to umpteen musicians gather in a circle, knee-to-knee, and someone—usually the fiddler—calls a tune. Before you know it, you’re carried away by a cyclone of fiddles, mandolins, banjos, and guitars, all locked into a swirling rhythm that can, when it’s good, take you to church. 

The tradition dates to the mid-1700s, when Scots-Irish immigrants first settled in Appalachia. Even then, coastal property was for the elite, forcing poorer immigrants inland and south, through the Shenandoah Valley to southwest Virginia, where land was plentiful and cheap. Their music quickly took root. “The Scots brought fiddles and liquor,” Ted McAllister, one of my neighbors in Felts Park, told me. “The Germans brought church music and beer.” 

Over time, Scottish fiddle tunes evolved, as oral traditions do, and began to mix with the musical traditions of enslaved Africans, who had brought with them gourd instruments that would evolve into the American banjo, along with rhythms the Scots had never heard before. Old-time music, in other words, is the music of diasporas, fed into a blender and then worked into a froth. A lot of traditional folk songs came out of this period, too. One that I learned at Galax, “Going to the West,” tells the story of a young man who leaves the mountains of his birth, “where labor is in vain,” to seek the fertile plains out west. It’s the story of my own Scottish forebears, who settled in South Dakota before moving to what is now suburban Chicago, and later, Florida. 

Bluegrass, by contrast, was born in the 1940s, when Bill Monroe and The Blue Grass Boys took those mountain sounds, combined them with Southern church music and blues, and tightened it all into something you might call an uncle of rock ’n’ roll. There’s a reason that Billy Strings plays to sold-out arenas and pickers from around the world can play classics like “Blue Ridge Cabin Home” at the drop of a one-chord. 

Where bluegrass is punchy and clean, designed for the stage, old-time is ecstatic, designed for participation. Bluegrass jams attract spectators who marvel at the players’ pyrotechnics; old-time jams get people on their feet. At Galax, some folks drag big pieces of plywood around the fairgrounds looking for old-time jams, where they’ll lay the board down at the edge of the circle and dance. Flatfooters they’re called: the percussion section. 

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The New York bluegrass community has a Signal thread, and through it I met Harrison Corthell, a banjo player from Queens who was camping in what he called the “gayborhood” of Felts Park: two tents and a rainbow flag. Corthell offered to introduce me to Tyler Hughes, who was also camping in the gayborhood. Hughes serves as the executive director of the Crooked Road Heritage Music Trail, a nonprofit founded by the Virginia Assembly in 2004 to boost tourism through music. Alsace has the Route des Vins, and Kentucky the Bourbon Trail. Southwest Virginia has the Crooked Road.

I found Hughes Thursday afternoon as he was setting up the Crooked Road’s information booth. Musicians were streaming by for the clawhammer banjo competition, which was set to begin any minute. As we sat on a park bench, I told Hughes that I’d begun to think of its music as the region’s chief international export of the past 100 years. “I think that’s a fair assessment,” he said, but stressed that he resists thinking of Appalachia’s musical traditions like a natural resource such as iron or coal. “We really try to stray away from an over-commodified, over-commercialized vision of southwest Virginia,” Hughes said. 

Musical traditions can be packaged and sold, after all. Last winter, an Appalachian folk musician named Murphy Campbell discovered that her videos on YouTube had been used to create AI clones of her voice and banjo playing. Someone then used Vydia, a music distribution platform, to share those clones via streaming services and to make copyright claims on Campbell’s own videos. Campbell described her ordeal on Instagram, including trying to address the matter with “agents” at those streaming services: “I’m telling robots to take down music robots made,” she said. Her posts went viral, causing Vydia to ultimately withdraw the copyright claims and ban the user responsible, according to reports. “It’s the wild west,” Campbell said in one of her posts. “And it can happen to anyone.”

I asked Hughes what percentage of the people in southern Appalachia play an instrument of some kind. He guessed around 70 percent. I’d heard the same number from Daniel, a 32-year-old banjo player I’d met earlier in the week, who works at a sawmill in Grayson County. “It’s kinda the only thing goin’ on around here,” Daniel said. He explained that when the cotton mill in Grayson County closed in the late 1980s, “everyone” started using meth. Then opioids. Within the next 20 years, drug overdoses had become a leading cause of death in southwest Virginia. Getting together to pick, Daniel said, “helps you through real hard stuff.”

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The guitar I took to Galax is a 1989 Takamine I’ve had since I was 14, when my parents indulged my desire to learn Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix songs on the condition that I take classical guitar lessons. I spent my first day or two in Felts Park carrying it around like a security blanket, but I was there to play the banjo. Upon arrival, I realized that I might have been the worst banjo player in Galax. 

I picked up the instrument in 2024, at age 48, in part because my maternal grandfather played one and I was always curious about it. More than that, I wanted to build a mountain banjo, the rustic kind people in Appalachia made from whatever wood they had nearby, animal skins for heads, and guts for strings. I liked their warm, thuddy sound, totally unlike the piercing banjos of bluegrass with their steel strings and resonator backs. So I learned everything I could about how to build one and called my dad to ask if he’d help. I knew the banjo; he knew wood. 

That summer, we spent a week together in his shop in Illinois, building a fretless eastern Kentucky-style mountain banjo out of walnut and ash. Most people in New York ask what it is; everyone at Galax identified it instantly. I’ve since built seven banjos and acquired three more, all different styles. This spring, I carved a neck from a piece of walnut entirely by hand, no power tools, for a 19th-century-style tackhead, the kind played by enslaved Africans on plantations and by Civil War soldiers around the campfire. It’s not just that I’m fascinated by the instrument. As my actual trades—crafting sentences and teaching others to do the same—are increasingly devalued by technology and a society that no longer reads, building banjos gives me one thing that I can hold onto. 

Shortly after my banjo obsession began, I started going to old-time jams in New York City, and later, bluegrass jams. I didn’t—and still don’t—actually listen to old-time or bluegrass music; my tastes trend melancholic. But I missed playing music with other people, something I hadn’t done since college and had begun to crave during the endless, isolated days of the pandemic. In early 2025, I started going to a regular jam session at a bar in Brooklyn called Sunny’s, whose owner has turned it into an institution of roots, bluegrass, and folk music. Some of the best pickers in the tri-state area turn up there each week, along with people like me, there to learn. It took me months to lead a song without blacking out. They call it “jamnesia,” and it’s humiliating. 

After one week among the pickers of southern Appalachia, I got tighter, faster, as if the place itself does some of the teaching. A fiddler friend from New York, who’d been to Galax in the 2010s, was more succinct: “It seeps from the earth.”

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Galax is hardly the first fiddlers’ convention; it’s just the oldest one still left. In the days before the railroad and automobile, let alone the World Wide Web, fiddlers’ conventions brought the people of Appalachia together, allowing songs and picking styles to spread like gossip over those hills. They could get pretty wild, and early-days Galax was no exception. Women and children did not go to Galax back then. It was a place where men gathered to let loose—“outside of the eyes of their preacher and their wives,” Rex McGee, a multi-instrumentalist from North Carolina, told me.

I’d heard of the McGee jams already, where “things get weird,” according to a woman I met Monday morning while I waited in line for the shower. Their camp sits right inside Felts Park, steps from the food trucks, identifiable by a 1974 Ford school bus painted an ominous matte grey. They call it the Muddy Creek Bus, for the band that Glen Alexander’s dad formed in the 1970s and soon became the back-up band for Rex and his brother Ralph’s grandfather, Ralph McGee the First, aka the Old-Timer. The Muddy Creek Boys could party as hard as the Old-Timer; it didn’t hurt that they could pick too. By the 1980s, the real show came after hours. Dozens of people would gather outside the bus to watch the Old-Timer, then in his 80s, fiddle with just about anything he could find: a toothpick, a comb, a “coon dick”—literally a bone from a raccoon’s penis. And it was loud. (For any curious fiddlers out there, you can buy four of these on eBay for $39.95.)

Felts Park is a galaxy of legacy camps like the Muddy Creek Bus. Almost everyone I met told me they’d been going to Galax for 40, 50, even 60 years. Their stories are legion, and they love to tell them: The year it rained so hard that one group holed up in an RV for six days with eight people, an upright bass, and “a little bit of cocaine.” The year a couple of young women got into a fight over a guy, went to fisticuffs in the mud, and ripped each other’s shirts off in front of scores of onlookers—“no one wanted it to stop,” one man recalled with a chuckle. The year several people went mudsliding on the tire tracks, which, for reasons unclear, were composed of raw sewage. 

Jimmy Kidd, an 86-year-old Dobro player who’s been going to Galax since he was 29, regaled me with the time he won the guitar competition, in 1969, by playing the Dobro because there was no Dobro competition then. His daughter, Vicky, told me she met Elizabeth Taylor when she came through Galax, in 1977, when Vicky was 12. Taylor was in a wheelchair, Vicky said, and she wasn’t very nice.

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Leo Lindblom sat on a low stool cradling a mandolin, his sister Lucy beside him. They’d taken the stage in the kids’ mandolin competition on Monday night, and Leo was focused. With flawless timing and dexterity, the 12-year-old picker dazzled the audience, Lucy accompanying him on guitar, for roughly two minutes. Then he rose from the stool, took a bow, and, with Lucy, exited the stage. 

On Thursday, I met Leo, Lucy, and the rest of the Lindbloms—Marina, Jon, and their nine kids, all but one of whose names begins with an L—at their bus in a gravel parking lot just across the road from Felts Park, where it was a little quieter than Galax Central. The Lindbloms first went to Galax in 2021, after discovering bluegrass at a gift shop in North Carolina while on a family vacation five years prior. All nine of the kids responded instantly to the “happy, upbeat” music coming out of the speakers, and mom and dad bought the CD on the spot. 

The kids, who range in age from 12 to 28 and were all homeschooled, each chose an instrument and formed their two bands, Headin’ Home and The Brothers Five. Now, when they’re not home in Bloomingdale, Georgia, they’re on the road playing festivals and gigs across the country. I asked what makes Galax special. Libby said it gives them a rare chance to slow down, to not have to be “on” all the time, and just spend time together. 

As we sat outside their bus, all 11 of them and me, I asked: Why bluegrass? After all, Marina and Jon met at the Eastman School of Music and played in the Savannah Philharmonic for 10 years. They know Tchaikovsky and Brahms just as well as Bill Monroe and the Carter Family. They could teach their kids classical music, or any other kind. “Our goal, in everything we do, is to glorify the Lord,” Marina explained. And with bluegrass, she said, they are able to give people a bit of happiness, a chance to tap their feet and forget about their troubles for a little while. It’s an act of service. 

Then I turned to Leo, the youngest, who was perched on Lucy’s lap, and asked what he likes about playing music that, surely, most kids his age don’t know anything about. “Everything,” he said, before checking my presumption: All the kids he knows play bluegrass or old-time, he said. He’s met them all through places like Galax. 

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I’d registered for the clawhammer banjo competition a month before Galax opened its gates, but by the evening of the contest, I was so worn out from five semi-sleepless nights, as many days packed with conversation and playing, and a dubious diet of beer, bananas, and cheese sandwiches that I decided to sit it out and trekked up the hill to Main Street for some Chinese food. Besides, I don’t even play clawhammer banjo. I’ve developed a hybrid style: I use finger picks, like bluegrass, but keep rhythm by striking the strings with the back of my middle finger, like clawhammer. After five days of watching virtuosos of both styles create magic on their instruments, I wasn’t about to do my mishmash in front of a panel of judges.

As I sat in my air-conditioned booth, hovering over a plate of garlic chicken, I got a call from Tara. Was I going to compete? I told her I’d spent the whole day interviewing people and was exhausted. “You have to participate!” she countered. “I triple-dog dare ya.” I was just delirious enough to bend. Thirty minutes later I was backstage rehearsing my song with John Garrison, who has gone to Galax each of the past 46 years. After a few runs through an instrumental version of “White Freightliner Blues” by Townes Van Zandt, I checked in, slapped a number on my chest, and took the stage. Tara squatted right in front to take video, smiling wide. Our pickin’ was clean, but we landed way outside the money: I bastardized the form and played a copyrighted song. We still got a big round of applause. 

My style served me better in the jams, where more than once people assured me that if it sounds good, ain’t no reason to change it. Some of the best sessions I went to were inside an A-frame tent adjacent to the gayborhood and maybe 100 yards from my campsite. On Monday night, I played fiddle tunes and shared a jar of moonshine in that tent with three young guys who lived just down the road, near the town of Fries, in Grayson County. One of them built a fiddle from scratch; it took him years. I did my version of “White Freightliner Blues” with them, and when we finished, one yipped, “That’s how it’s done!”  

Thanks to the moonshine, I forgot about Tara’s advice to sit out the nighttime jams and hopped over to a bluegrass jam that was really crackin’. At least 10 musicians stood in a circle, and the tempo was hot. I asked a guitar player if I could join. “You’ll have to ask him,” he replied, motioning to the only banjo player in the group. They did not expand the circle to let me in, and I hung awkwardly on the periphery for a song or two before going back to my tent. 

It was one of only two times I felt unwelcome at Galax. The other came after the guys from Fries learned I was a journalist from New York City. I’d gone back to their tent Tuesday afternoon to jam but ended up talking with Daniel, the sawmill worker, instead. He was without his banjo, so while the other guys picked fiddle tunes, I told Daniel I was there to write about Galax and asked if I could record our conversation. He cheerfully agreed, but after that—and I could very well be wrong about this—I sensed that the other guys looked at me sideways. 

Daniel, on the other hand, remained inviting and warm. One afternoon late in the week, I was sitting by my tent when he wandered over to say hello. He wanted to give me a leaf of galax, the rubbery, low-lying evergreen from which the town takes its name. “I thought you’d like this for your story,” he said, and stayed to visit awhile.

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I broke camp Saturday afternoon and packed up my car. Before I left Galax, however, I dashed over to catch the “43rd Yearly International Kazoo Championship” a few campsites down from Bill and Nancy’s Airstream, as Tara had assured me it was “not to be missed.” Reporters don’t spend much time at the Old Fiddler’s Convention, and Tara was concerned that I might focus too much on the negatives in my writing—the mud, the gastronomic limitations, the attrition. Like everyone I met in Felts Park, she wanted me to return to New York with a real sense of why they keep coming back, year after year, and of what could be lost if they stopped.

Several dozen people were gathered at the “soup kitchen,” a community tent where, two nights prior, Chief Cooper had served hundreds of Styrofoam cups filled with venison stew, made by Nancy herself, from deer she and Bill had hunted on their property. Now, the ground was muddy and more rain was imminent. The contestants were undeterred, ready to blow their hearts out on plastic kazoos. 

I soon understood Tara’s insistence. The International Kazoo Championship pokes a little fun at the rigidity of the main stage. One by one, each contestant was disqualified for breaking at least one of the competition’s 12 rules, which included “No Fun Not Allowed” and “All Participants Must Be Present In Order To Attend.” They were then each invited to perform again, and one by one, each was named the winner. Then all the contestants and judges second-lined through Felts Park in the rain, led by a trumpet and trailed by a banjo, blowing “When the Saints Go Marching In” on their kazoos.

After a quick walkabout to say my goodbyes, I drove north on Route 221, past the Applebee’s and the Walmart where, at Tara’s urging, I did most of my shopping for the week. That night I met up with a friend from New York, who’d invited me to a 40th birthday party at a 19th-century cabin deep in the woods north of Roanoke. We stayed up late, drinking bourbon and talking about music. I’d rather have been playing it. 

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On Sunday morning, I got in my car and continued north on Route 11. As I wound through the mountains, catching the occasional glimpse of semis and cars streaming by on I-81, I played a recording I made of “Going to the West” through the car’s stereo. Brian Muller, who placed third in this year’s mandolin contest, led us in the jam, his plaintive baritone providing the perfect soundtrack to my drive: I leave you here, in this land that you love, ’mid scenes so bright and fair, where fragrant flowers are blooming and music fills the air. I imagined bringing the song to New York jams, and wondered if it would fly.

Passing through the town of Buchanan, a few hours from Galax, I saw a familiar face. Ted McAllister and his wife, Debbie, were getting out of their car just outside the Buchanan Baptist Church. I pulled alongside them, rolled down my window, and said, “Fancy seeing you here.” Ted, guitar case in hand, told me to come inside.

A few dozen people were gathered in the Fellowship Hall for a potluck lunch to celebrate the Buchanan Baptist Church’s 190th anniversary. A preacher named Bill Hartsfield welcomed me at the door. (“Like a field of hearts,” he said with a firm handshake.) Then he walked with me to the serving counter, where I fixed a plate of fried chicken, cheese casserole, and ambrosia salad. We sat down with the McAllisters and two other local musicians, Alan Berry and Mike Lee. “Galax is a subculture of a subculture,” Ted explained as we ate. Music is woven into everything from Sunday morning church services to holiday parties and family picnics. 

We finished our plates and went into the chapel, where, for the next 90 minutes or so, Ted, Alan, Mike, and a banjo player named Kim Wood played bluegrass versions of church hymns for around 20 people. Two little girls danced in the aisle, swept up by the music. Halfway through their set, as I sat in my pew, Ted walked to the pulpit and introduced me. He explained that we’d spent the week as neighbors in Galax, talking, telling stories, picking songs, and he was delighted to show me a little more of “how we do things ’round here.”

I hadn’t been to church in decades, and a couple hours of Southern hospitality won’t make a believer out of me. But hearing Ted and the others play, watching children dance, and meeting people who looked me in the eye and didn’t rush the conversation felt deeply familiar. I may have spent almost my entire adult life in New York City, but I grew up on the Illinois-Iowa border, on the banks of the Mississippi. Church backrooms, potlucks, and ambrosia salad were all part of my childhood. 

By 2:30, I really had to get going. For the second time in two days, I said goodbye to Ted, got in my car, and was on my way. 

A week later, I was back at Sunny’s Bar in Brooklyn, playing songs with a dozen or so people in the bar’s backroom. I called “Going to the West,” and after a quick run through the chords on my latest banjo build, a resonator back with a dragon fretboard inlay that I’d played on stage in Galax, I started singing. It was a little shaky at first, but by the second verse everyone was locked in. 

When we finished, one of the musicians remarked that it was a beautiful song. I agreed and asked if he knew it already. “No,” he said. “But I’m going to learn it now.”

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David Alm is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor. His work has frequently been included in Longreads‘ Weekly Top Five and annual Best Features lists. He also teaches journalism at Hunter College-CUNY, where he focuses on feature writing and creative nonfiction.

Editor: Brendan Fitzgerald
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

During one of his son’s hockey games, Nick Paumgarten watches as his eight-year-old is hit from behind, only to rise to his feet and use his stick to hit the side of his opponent’s head. Alongside his concern for his son’s head and neck, Paumgarten, who has written about his own hockey-related concussions, rapidly processes the outcomes of the exchange: a game-deciding penalty, his own reflexive rationalization, and the evaluation of other parents who “held me in some way responsible, as both father and coach, for the violence and loss of self-control.” Paumgarten’s essay is rich with such moments of parent-coach double-consciousness, and sensitive to the numerous ways, some of them awful, in which those two identities intrude upon each other.

That Sunday, it wasn’t yet 8 A.M. when a Rye player shoved James from behind into the boards. James went down awkwardly and stayed prone a moment, then leaped up and, with an implausible ferocity, cross-checked the other kid in the ear. The Rye boy collapsed to the ice, and the other kids poured in and began grappling with one another, while parents shouted and pointed. Soon there was a pile of mites, with the two referees pulling players off and flinging them aside like puppies. Through the windows, you could see that the sun had risen over the Long Island Sound. I thought of my son’s fellow second graders back in the city, likely still asleep or watching cartoons in their pajamas or getting dressed for church or whatever the unrinked got up to on weekend mornings, but here at Playland my boy had instigated a munchkin brawl.

If you were to look at your belongings, which might you choose to represent you after your death? What’s worth passing down to the next generation? These are the questions that Marci Wilding mulls in this keenly observed essay for Oxford American, after she and her colleague are tasked with sifting through the possessions of a judge who had served the state of Mississippi for 48 years. What Wilding chooses to preserve will surely surprise you.

The details we had about the judge were general: A man had spent a lifetime in service for the Mississippi judiciary, forty-eight years, eventually reaching its highest bench. His opinions moved quietly through the lives of strangers and friends, altering custody, land, and inheritance, shaping the fragile scaffolding of other people’s futures. Those who worked with him spoke of him in retirement as measured, fair, and courteous, and as a man who loved and remembered his people, a modern-day Atticus Finch.

There is something magnetic about decay. It repels and attracts in the same breath. I think it unsettles because it reminds us of what we are made of: flesh that can soften, skin that can host growth, breath that can carry contamination. The strange intimacy in the way the surface gives way and something underneath begins to show makes it difficult to turn away, not because it is unfamiliar, but because it isn’t. We recognize ourselves in what is rotting.

The United States is deporting parents without their children, creating a whole new family-separation crisis. Caitlin Dickerson, whose coverage of family separation during the first Trump administration won her a Pulitzer Prize, spends time with parents desperate to be reunited with their kids, ad hoc caretakers stretched to the breaking point, and lawyers working non-stop to mitigate the trauma Trump 2.0 is inflicting on families. And then there are the children themselves:

A father named Edwin said that after three years of meticulously following the government’s requests to further his family’s asylum case, his wife, Sarah, was thinking about going into hiding; she didn’t want to be picked up by ICE and have to leave her children alone.

When I went to visit Sarah in May, in a Dallas suburb, her 4-year-old son, Johnny, answered the door and asked me: “Do you know when my dad is coming home?”

Before I could answer, Johnny continued: “Do you know what happened to him?” He repeated versions of these questions over the two days of my visit. “Do you know where my dad is? Do you know if he’s okay?”

When the questions would start, Johnny’s 12-year-old sister, Katie, tried to distract him with coloring books and screens. Recently, he’d had an hours-long meltdown when Sarah tried to donate some of Edwin’s work clothes that were crowding the closet. Every afternoon he sits at the front window waiting for his dad’s truck to pull up outside.

Not long after the death of his father, Derek Askey, a new father himself, is selected as an alternate juror for a murder trial. The experience upends the typical vulnerability and openness of his life: Askey, under court order, cannot speak with his wife about the random violence heaped upon him, yet nevertheless worries about what his infant son “received from me” during his wordless days in the courtroom. He must withstand the gruesome details of the criminal trial, yet will not be allowed to participate in the jury’s deliberations. His personal essay is a challenging exploration of enforced silence, and the ways in which we seek to unburden ourselves through voice.

Before the trial, the other would-be jurors and I were asked our names, our occupations, whether we had spouses or children, and whether we could be impartial regarding the case, in which a man was being accused of murdering his girlfriend. At first I was curious to hear other people’s answers—Oh, wow, that guy fixes airplanes?—but curiosity quickly gave way to numb shock at how many people’s lives had been touched by domestic violence or murder. Or both. People you see every day. People who fix airplanes. One man said that, when he was little, his dad had beaten his mother; if he was being honest, he didn’t think he could be unbiased. The man was dismissed, and a woman was called up from the uncomfortable wooden pews to face the same interrogation. She had been attacked herself, she said. Some women had sisters, sisters-in-law, or best friends who’d been hit by a spouse or boyfriend.

Celebrated novelists J.M. Coetzee and F.M. Siccardi recently published a co-written book, Un mal salvaje (A Savage Evil), about their experiences coming of age in South Africa and Argentina, respectively. Both states were created by colonial forces that all but wiped out indigenous populations and cultures. This excerpt juxtaposes the authors’ childhood memories of life in the shadow of genocide, though neither would have known to call it that when they were young. In particular they recall the workers on their families’ land—men they somehow knew both intimately and not at all:

Freek did not see himself as a tragic figure, did not even see himself as a survivor. To see yourself as a survivor of the past you must have a firm conception of that past, you must know where you come from; and Ros and Freek had no such historical consciousness. First, they were illiterate. Second, it was of the essence of the genocide which they had survived that communal memory was erased.

If I were magically able to return to the 1950s and tell Freek about the Khoi who had pastured their stock at the Cape for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years before the Dutch came and laid waste to their society, about a people who were his ancestors, he would have thought it was just a story I was making up. Genocide is not just the destruction of a people, it is also the obliteration of that people’s store of memories and, with it, the destruction of their ability to see themselves historically.

Once, as a young adult in the city, I was walking home after a long day of work. The main street leading to my place wasn’t well lit, with dark stretches between streetlamps. There was a huddle of men under one, some standing around, some lounging against the post. They moved in the orange light, turning as one to face me. Something shifted in the air. 

An earlier version of me would have been slower to respond, given them the benefit of the doubt. But after a recent knife-point mugging, I had begun to develop a sort of second skin—a keen, physical sense of danger. I slipped back into the shadows and ran in and out of alleyways. I doubled back, cut across fences, and scaled half walls. I made no sound at all; I made it home. I had made a spiraling maze in real time. They could not find me.

In his essay “From the Tree to the Labyrinth,” Umberto Eco, a lover of labyrinths, explores how we “create and organize knowledge.” Moving away from the restrictive “tree” model, Eco approaches the “labyrinth” model, listing three kinds—a unicursal labyrinth, with only one path to the center and back; a multicursal maze, with many paths, all but one leading to dead ends; and an infinite network of interlinked points, which he calls by the borrowed term “rhizome.”

There are many labyrinths and mazes woven into my memory—verbal, textual, graphical, physical, metaphorical. Tamil kolams, for instance: My mother draws small, perfect threshold patterns at home, and immense, geometrically flawless labyrinths and mazes for events—no outlines, no tools, just her seeing eye and moving hand. When the sky is still dark, she dips folded muslin in wet, ground rice and draws liquid lines on the clean floor. She must draw each bit before the white dries on her hand, which it does almost instantly. Nothing can be erased or redrawn. She must keep moving until the whole kolam is done—the body walking the labyrinth even as it summons it out of nothing, the labyrinth making the world even as it is devoured by little black ants.

Eco’s rhizome model, to its credit, says we may never know everything, but we can keep going. Jorge Luis Borges certainly did, over and over like a modern-day Scheherazade. He wrote The Garden of Forking Paths, The Library of Babel, Funes the Memorious, The House of Asterion, and more, for those of us that love our awful infinities rendered in chewy, fictional ways. 

It’s been so long since the mugging and the maze. Those events (and others like them) ingrained hard habits into me. Unless I’m absolutely certain about the safety of the time and the place, I don’t listen to music as I walk. I wear barefoot shoes. I wear my bag cross-body, coax my hands out of my pockets. I note the exits and sit like a mob boss, the door never to my back. But I myself am softer, and I understand the ways of wayfinding a little better now.

Be Amazed (James McConnachie, Aeon, October 2017)

Abhimanyu, warrior prince, has broken into the Cakravyūha, the battle formation of the colossal whirling disc. While still in his mother’s womb, he had overheard his father, the great warrior Arjuna, discuss war strategy with his uncle Kṛṣṇa, and filed the knowledge away in his preternaturally precocious mind. Now the Kurukṣetra War is upon them, and 16-year-old Abhimanyu has found his way to the center of the moving labyrinth. He is a trained warrior, no doubt, but he is alone, fighting seasoned Kaurava generals on all fronts. They have trapped him away from his fellow Pāṇḍavas. They have sunk his chariot, killed his horses, and broken his sword and bow. Abhimanyu raises a chariot wheel above his head. He doesn’t know how to come out. He never heard the end of the conversation.

This heartbreaking story from the Sanskrit epic The Mahābhārata was likely my own mythical introduction to the labyrinth. McConnachie, too, starts with a myth—a Greek mythopoeic myth—but first he runs a little labyrinth on the morning of his own wedding. His essay for Aeon moves lucidly through history, architecture, religion, folklore, games, psychoanalysis, New Age rituals, and more. 

P.S.: Don’t worry about Ariadne; she gets to chill with Dionysus. Theseus’s dad, not so great.

Instinctively, we sense that mazes and labyrinths are essentially metaphorical—even if it is not always clear what they represent—which explains why it’s so common to seek the meaning of the maze in myth. According to the ancient Greek story, as retold by the Roman writers Plutarch and Ovid, Minos of Crete demanded a tribute from the city of Athens in the form of seven young men and seven women. They would be imprisoned inside the Labyrinth created by Minos’ brilliant architect Daedalus, and there sacrificed to the Minotaur, a monstrous creature born of the unnatural union between Minos’ wife and a white bull.

The brave and ambitious Theseus gets himself chosen among the Athenians and, on arrival in Crete, seduces Minos’ daughter, Ariadne. She secretly arms him and slips him a “clew” of thread. (This is the old word for a ball or skein of yarn and is, fascinatingly, the origin of the English word “clue.”) Theseus kills the Minotaur, escapes the Labyrinth, runs off with Ariadne, and should return home happily—except that he abandons Ariadne on the island of Naxos and then, upon homecoming, forgets to change the color of the sails on his ship as he promised his father he would do if he survived. On seeing the black canvas, the old man drowns himself in the sea.

How the World’s Foremost Maze-maker Leads People Astray (Nicola Twilley, The New Yorker, November 2021)

Adrian Fisher has over 700 mazes across 42 countries to his name, “including one on a skyscraper in Dubai and another that’s now reproduced on Britain’s five-pound note.” He’s also likely the only person to make a successful business out of mazemaking. Twilley profiles Fisher comprehensively, and not a little warily.

Starting with the design of the medieval Christian labyrinth, the most famous of which is in the Chartres Cathedral, France, Fisher slowly included other complex features. “Fisher realized that if he wanted to make mazes he first had to make people want mazes,” Twilley writes. According to Oskar van Deventer, an engineer and creator of renowned mechanical puzzles, he’s the “world’s best maze psychologist,” using what he knows about how people behave “against the unsuspecting solver and even against the suspecting solver.”

In 1980, Fisher was twenty-eight years-old and working for I.T.T., a multinational manufacturing company, where he was responsible for productivity enhancement. He was increasingly drawn to the idea of designing mazes; he’d even formed a company, Minotaur Designs, with a wealthy labyrinthologist and former diplomat, Randoll Coate. But public commissions proved elusive. “At first, I thought it was impossible,” Fisher said. “How do you start? How do you do it?”

Runcie’s dream gave him an idea: Fisher wrote to the letters page of the London Times, briefly outlining the maze’s long history as a Christian symbol and noting that, as in the Archbishop’s dream, a maze’s goal is typically reached not by “pressing toward the center” but, rather, by “returning almost to the edge,” in order to find the proper path. In his signature, Fisher styled himself a “Maze Consultant,” and, before long, this stealth marketing had reeled in a customer, and Minotaur’s first public commission. 

How Brainless Slime Molds Redefine Intelligence (Ferris Jabr, Nature/Scientific American, November 2012)

What can live without a brain or a nervous system, eat better than you, navigate mazes, and win scientists not one, but two Ig Nobel Prizes? The answer is a single-celled organism called the slime mold, also affectionately known as the blob. 

In the 2000s, Toshiyuki Nakagaki, a scientist at Hokkaido University, scattered bits of a single Physarum polycephalum in a maze, a few dots in a petri dish. The bits grew enough to find each other, and then grew some more to fill the maze. The mold then retracted itself from the dead ends, restricting itself to the most rewarding path—and this was the least it could do. Using its ability to grow up to a meter; its ability to analyze, solve problems, and optimize in real time; and its own slime as “externalized spatial memory,” it “effectively re-created Tokyo’s railway network in miniature as well as the highways of Canada, the U.K., and Spain.”

Catch a glimpse of this incredibly cool mold in action in this WIRED video: Mycologist Explains How a Slime Mold Can Solve Mazes. Looks like Nakagaki will have the last laugh, after all. And if you’ve ever wondered how other animals are so much better at this stuff than us, read Kathryn Schulz’s essay for The New Yorker, “Why Animals Don’t Get Lost.”

Gardeners sometimes encounter them in their backyards—spongy yellow masses squatting in the dirt or slowly swallowing wood chips. Hikers often spot them clinging to the sides of rotting logs like spilled bowls of extra cheesy macaroni. In Mexico some people reportedly scrape their tender bodies from trees and rocks and scramble them like eggs. They are slime molds: gelatinous amoebae that have little to do with the kinds of fungal mold that ruin sourdough and pumpernickel. Biologists currently classify slime molds as protists, a taxonomic group reserved for “everything we don’t really understand,” says Chris Reid of the University of Sydney.

Something scientists have come to understand is that slime molds are much smarter than they look. One species in particular, the SpongeBob SquarePants-yellow Physarum polycephalum, can solve mazes, mimic the layout of man-made transportation networks and choose the healthiest food from a diverse menu—and all this without a brain or nervous system. “Slime molds are redefining what you need to have to qualify as intelligent,” Reid says.

Haunted Mazes (Joe Milutis, Cabinet, Winter 2007-8)

I had some trouble choosing a quote from this retro maze of an essay. Every passage seemed appealingly contrarian, sometimes even to the essay’s own points, every idea poised for intertextual sparring with the other pieces in this reading list (something I secretly enjoy). 

Yes, it is gleefully haunted by its own ideas going back and forth and switching back upon themselves, and yes, it will make you question a few axiomatic notions about labyrinths and mazes. But maybe because times have changed, maybe because no one seems to be saying labyrinths are better than mazes or vice versa any longer, some of the arguments may seem a little heavy-handed. 

But some, like this one seemingly drawing from Freud/Jung psychological arcana, still sparkle: “The maze is the labyrinth’s uncanny.”

It seems to me that hidden behind contemporary etymological distinctions is an attempt to tame multicursality, by way of denigrating multicursal mazes as merely “childish” versions of more sober, unicursal ones. Multicursality challenges meditative clarity with multiple versions, no clear centers, and a sense of ambivalence and confusion. These complications, however, are the point of the labyrinth. Even if we grant that labyrinth merely designates the one-path New Age labyrinth recycled from the medieval era, the object is still haunted by a misrecognition. For even the medievals retained a sense of the unicursal labyrinth’s ambages—the equivocation at the heart of its windings, which the New Age version does not readily admit. Additionally, the labyrinth that is the legacy of the medieval period is enmeshed in a circuit of analogies to such a degree that it is impossible to map out all its symbolic equivalences and their implications without ending up in the muck of indistinction. This tendency of the labyrinth to connote so much is part of what makes it an antithesis to sureness, rationality, and clarity. Its structure is mystically congruent with the idea of a dark or enchanted forest; it is also a stand-in for earthly conundrum, brain fold, uterine canal, spiritual struggle, or psychosexual journey. Its center: Mary, the alchemical rose, Jerusalem, princess, Minotaur, inner-self, lotus blossom. And of course there are the various rewards that the multicursal maze holds out for its young adepts (pots of gold, pies and cakes, utopian wonderlands of bunnies and lollipops). Labyrinthine confusion is not merely an issue of its tortuous corridors, its solution not merely the cheese in the corner. Labyrinth enfolds into labyrinth across times, cultures, and myths.

“Backrooms” Gets Lost in Its Own Labyrinth (Adam Nayman, The Ringer, May 2026)

It’s the yellow that first holds you down, like the yellow fog in T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, like the yellow wallpaper in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story of the same name. There’s something about this sickly yellow, but there’s more.

Backrooms is young YouTuber Kane Parsons’s widely acclaimed horror debut. Failed architect Clark manages a strip-mall furniture store called Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire. During his insomniac wanderings, he stumbles upon a doorway in the store’s basement—the entry to the mysterious Backrooms. (The trailer is a relatively safe place to start before you attempt full liminal dread.) 

Nayman’s critical voice stands a little apart from what seems to be near-universal approbation for the film, which he says “exists in its own liminal space between ambitious experiment and fascinating failure.” But he sounds, I must say, somewhat like a parent speaking of his gifted kid—one who could go very far if only he applied himself a little more. What if the kid knows something that others don’t?

[O]ne of the lurking, not so elusive themes of Backrooms—a movie that doesn’t lack for entry points—is the postmodern terror of reiteration without end, the unsettling and melancholy notion of reality as a series of adjoining, subterranean echo chambers, each a slightly altered copy of the last. “Six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented back rooms,” read the original, anonymous, and extremely viral 4chan post that ended up being used as a blueprint by hordes of online architects eager to build their own additions onto a freestanding urban legend; the sprawling, relentlessly subdivisional logic of this online lore, and the fact that anyone could contribute to it at any time, turned the expanse of the Backrooms into a pretty nifty allegory for itself. 

Parsons was 16—and going by the online handle Kane Pixels—when he made his first Backrooms short in 2022: a found-footage-style clip created in Blender and After Effects. His innovation was to place the preexisting images into a paranoid narrative framework about a research facility offering egress to another dimension; the first clip centered on an amateur filmmaker who gets lost in the Async complex and chased by an unseen creature. 

The Far North of Experience (Rebecca Solnit, Guernica, June 2013)

Solnit describes one summer she spent on an Icelandic peninsula, “in the company of strangers and birds.” 

“Creation is always in the dark because you can only do the work of making by not quite knowing what you’re doing, by walking into darkness, not staying in the light. Ideas emerge from edges and shadows to arrive in the light, and though that’s where they may be seen by others, that’s not where they’re born,” she says, and goes to the last dark place she could find that summer—a labyrinth called the Path, lit by the faintest lavender-blue light.

Lyrical and more atmospheric than her engaged treatment of labyrinths in Wanderlust: A History of Walking, this essay shows us a gentle way of being we would do well to heed.

A labyrinth is an ancient device that compresses a journey into a small space, winds up a path like thread on a spool. It contains beginning, confusion, perseverance, arrival, and return. There at last the metaphysical journey of your life and your actual movements are one and the same. You may wander, may learn that in order to get to your destination you must turn away from it, become lost, spin about, and then only after the way has become overwhelming and absorbing, arrive, having gone the great journey without having gone far on the ground.

In this it is the opposite of a maze, which has not one convoluted way but many ways and often no center, so that wandering has no cease or at least no definitive conclusion. A maze is a conversation; a labyrinth is an incantation or perhaps a prayer. In a labyrinth you’re lost in that you don’t know the twists and turns, but if you follow them you get there; and then you reverse your course.

The end of the journey through the labyrinth is not at the center, as is commonly supposed, but back at the threshold again: the beginning is also the real end. That is the home to which you return from the pilgrimage, the adventure. The unpraised edges and margins matter too, because it’s not ultimately a journey of immersion but emergence.

Labyrinth (Amelia Gray, The New Yorker, February 2015)

Dale, reader of “Hellenic myth” and all-round good sport, has organized the Pumpkin Jamboree. It’s a way for the townspeople to have some weekend fun while raising money for the local fire department. Its highlight is always the corn maze. “Only it isn’t a maze this time,” Dale says, “It’s a labyrinth.” 

This unexpected turn of events thins the crowd, but it looks like Jim, his friend, might be willing to give it a go. “Now, you go on, Jim. This is my life’s effort distilled. Find out what it’s all about.”

It’s not easy to take a well-worn, spoiler-free myth known since Plutarch and make it sound fresh. Gray has done that here in her short story without a wasted word, and her Daedalus, cornfield architect, is just getting started.

Dale watched them leave, fingering a pumpkin’s thick stem and surely considering his hours of lost work. He starts his mazes a few months beforehand, cutting into the young corn when it’s tall but not yet sprouted, taking a pass first with the tractor and then with the riding mower to pull out the brace roots and tamp the corn down. He draws the maze plans on drafting paper and displays them afterward in his swept-out garage addition—he calls it the Hall of History—with other jamboree memorabilia: the gearshift from the original hayride truck, trotter prints from the winning pigs. We gather around to reminisce about which wrong turn we took and what was waiting for us on the other side.

Knowing what he must have put into it, I thought it was a shame to stand by and see everyone go. The sun was still low in the sky, and it was lonely at home, where the TV had been broken for a week, and the tap water had begun to taste oddly of blood. “I’ll go first,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

Kanya Kanchana is a writer from India.

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Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Carolyn Wells

Beryl Gilothwest’s grandmother, Sandy “Moose” West, passed away at age 108 in 2021. For The Bitter Southerner, Gilothwest profiles a diminutive woman whose love for Ossabaw, an island off the coast of Georgia, was larger than life. In a world striving for “progress,” West was a staunch advocate for thoughtful preservation; she was a fierce conservationist and environmentalist who embraced the unknown and took pleasure in learning from it.

“Sandy believed that embracing what we cannot understand is the pathway to enlightenment. In her mind, spending time in the uncharted wilds of Ossabaw is the best way to learn that lesson. Separated from the mainland by a 30-minute boat ride, the island is deeply remote. Cell service is scant, and there is no wi-fi. You have to fend for yourself out there in a way that is uncommon in contemporary culture, where we always seem to have an escape hatch. Sandy knew that welcoming people into that kind of environment, where they have to relinquish control to the island, would force them to reckon with the unknown.”

In this story for Dispatch, Lotte Brundle reports on a surprising trend: young women in the UK are pursuing careers in the death care industry. In a time of high unemployment, funeral home apprenticeships offer an alternative to university, where students accumulate significant debt. While the pay is low and the industry needs to do a better job building awareness that the trajectory exists, the young women who speak to Brundle find the work meaningful and rewarding.

Her inspiration to become an undertaker arrived, as many teenage epiphanies now do, via TikTok. Emily was 15 and had been considering becoming a teacher or journalist when she came across an American woman documenting life inside her own funeral home. “I’d never considered it as a career,” she says. “I didn’t know anyone who was an undertaker, but I just thought how interesting it was.”

Two hours later, she was still scrolling through the woman’s profile, engrossed. Running her own funeral home became Emily’s dream.