In collaboration with Arkansas Times, Mountain State Spotlight, and The Assembly, ProPublica reporters tested how easily they could launch new private schools in three states. The experiment revealed major gaps in oversight, from Arkansas, where the only requirement is displaying an American flag; to West Virginia, where reporters found a way to bypass building health and safety requirements by registering a “microschool” instead.

In Arkansas, all it took was a few clicks on the Arkansas secretary of state website, $45 and an American flag to form a bona fide private school with the Arkansas Times.

We established a school with Mountain State Spotlight in West Virginia after filing our new school’s name and location with authorities on a piece of notebook paper, then exchanging a few emails.

And with The Assembly in North Carolina, we filed an online notice of intent to open a private school at Ponysaurus Brewing Co. in Durham, while perched on its metal bar stools, eyeing glasses of a crisp kolsch.

For Boston Magazine, Kara Baskin explores a growing subculture of tweens and teens who don’t feel entirely human. Some identify as one animal, like a cat or a dog; others identify with multiple animals. One kid Baskin speaks to, Sol, says she “doesn’t summon the animals, but rather they come and go on their own schedule.” These young people call themselves therians (distinct from furries, who are fans of anthropomorphic animal characters). Baskin provides a fascinating glimpse into a world where adolescents can express themselves and explore their identities.

Bafflement is the baseline condition of raising kids right now. The adolescent quest for self-discovery is timeless—but today’s parents experimented in ways that were analog: new hairstyles, inscrutable music, beer snuck in the woods. Their own parents might not have liked it, but they could at least relate.

Now the landscape of adolescent discovery is literally foreign, thanks to social media, which has turbocharged once-obscure subcultures like the furry fandom—and, at its rarer edge, therianthropy—and redefined what “fringe” even means. Even if a kid is the only therian at school, she can find 400 more people just like her online. That’s one of the biggest challenges for parents in the algorithm age: The world your kid actually lives in is one you can’t enter. It touches the fear in every parent, therian kid or not: What happens when our kids inhabit a world we don’t understand, with idols we don’t recognize?

Louisiana recently started executing death-row prisoners after more than 20 years of not doing so (save a “voluntary” execution in 2010, when a prisoner waived his right to appeal and said he wanted to die). John Corley, an award-winning writer who is incarcerated at Louisiana’s Angola prison, reflects on how MAGA politics have re-invigorated the practice of state killing in Louisiana and elsewhere, and what it means for the tenor of life in institutions like Angola:

Dalton Prejean Jr, who is serving time for manslaughter, found Hoffman’s execution particularly painful. When he was ten years old, in 1990, his father died in the penitentiary’s electric chair. “The day it all went down, it was almost like reliving the moments leading up to my father’s execution,” Prejean told me. “At ten o’clock the news reporter announced that Hoffman was dead. My heart skipped. I couldn’t believe they had actually killed somebody. Was what he did so bad that he just couldn’t be allowed to go on living? Wasn’t there anything about him that was redeemable?”

Twice a week, the inmate counsel substitute Gary Boudreaux makes rounds on the five death row tiers. He knows each of the surviving men housed there. “There was no tension on the row because the guys believed the execution wouldn’t happen,” Boudreaux said. “It had been so long, and they have good lawyers. They just didn’t think executions would come back.”

A week after the execution, Boudreaux returned to the row. The atmosphere was “totally different.” The men now knew that Governor Landry “is serious about executing people, and the state will execute people. There’s no doubt in their minds about that any more.”

James Whorton Jr. | Longreads | October 13, 2026 | 5,932 words (25 minutes)

I live in Edgewood, a subdivision of quarter-acre lots in the town of Brighton, New York. Before the house was here, Edgewood was a farm, and before the farm, there was a forest. On a July day in 1788, a 55-year-old man named Hugh Maxwell set out to cross the forest in straight lines.

Not kind of straight. Maxwell’s job was to walk 1,100 miles on ruler-straight lines through this vast, obstacle-filled forest, to divide it into a grid of parcels that could eventually be sold as property. To shrink it down to the scale of human imagination. To look at the forest and see something else in its place.

I first learned about Maxwell from Mary Jo Lanphear, Brighton’s town historian. I had gone to Lanphear to research the racially restrictive housing covenants that made home ownership in Brighton exclusive to white people for decades. Whose fault was this? I wanted to know. Some racist real-estate developer? Something to do with the Federal Housing Administration? Lanphear printed out a copy of an old deed linking the Edgewood land to the Phelps and Gorham Company, a group of New England speculators. For a bargain price, Phelps and Gorham had acquired the title to 2.6 million acres of forested country along the Genesee River, in what is now western New York. The company then hired Maxwell—a Revolutionary War veteran, father of seven, and the first recorded white person to pass within shouting distance of the place where I now live—as surveyor. 

As Maxwell crossed the forest, he imagined the nation he believed would one day replace it. “The land in this country is exceedingly good, but it wants good inhabitants,” Maxwell wrote to his wife, Bridget, imagining “many worshipping assemblies of Christians where now the wild beasts howl.” In place of the forest, he envisioned schools, churches, cash crops, and county clerks. However, he wrote, “these things are in the womb of futurity, and will be brought about in the proper way and time, as also by the proper means.” 

Maxwell’s walk—through leechy ponds and tick-infested brush, down and up creek banks, over the rocky exposures that rattlesnakes prefer, in those remarkably straight lines—was like the act his fellow new citizens were performing daily, striving and pretending a nation into being. At the time he set out, the United States were only loosely joined, under the Articles of Confederation. Alexander Hamilton, writing in the first essay of The Federalist Papers, had recently asked “whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.” Neither the new government nor the grid of lots for sale were to be discovered on the ground. They were ideas in people’s heads, notes on paper. In the “womb of futurity,” maybe. 

The forest, however, was real. 

Have you ever retraced your steps looking for some lost thing you had no hope of ever finding again? More than two centuries after he walked the forest into the future, Maxwell’s path persists, as lines on a map and on the ground in my neighborhood. I wanted to find the forest he walked through. 

So I set out to follow Hugh Maxwell—through books and archives, on maps and over the ground, across the state of New York and, finally, across my neighborhood, looking for traces of the forest in what is here now.

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On July 25, 1788, Maxwell set off from the southeastern corner of the Phelps and Gorham purchase, on the Pennsylvania line, headed due north. He led a small crew, whose job it was to drag a Gunter’s chain, a surveyor’s tool used to measure distance. The chain was 66 feet long; 80 chains made a mile. Every six miles he marked a township corner, hacking Roman numerals into the sides of a convenient tree, Vs and Xs being easier to cut in bark than 5s and 10s. 

While his helpers dragged the chain, Maxwell carried the grid in his head. The job was to lay this imaginary grid over the forest itself, to parcelize the land into numbered squares—to cut it up and shrink it. In a notebook that first day, he wrote:

From the 82 mile Stone

120 Rods the groth is Beech

Maple birch ash Basswood

and Hemlock mixt

Throughout Maxwell’s young life, the forest had been a chaotic place, subject to accident and force, to the wars that would determine its fate. During the French and Indian War, Maxwell, in his early 20s and part of a Massachusetts militia, barely escaped a violent death at Lake George. Following a surrender, Indians pulled militia men from the retreating lines, killing some on the spot and taking others prisoner, to be ransomed in Montreal. Maxwell was pulled aside, too, and had his boots, coat, and shirt stripped from his body. But he got loose somehow and escaped into the forest, running at least 14 miles to Fort Edward, barefoot in his pantaloons. Later, during the Revolutionary War, Maxwell was shot at the Battle of Bunker Hill. A musket ball entered his body just beneath the right collar bone, breaking Maxwell’s shoulder blade and exiting through his back. He survived field surgery and gangrene, and wrote home to Bridget with his left hand, fretting that his nurses fussed too much over him.

Now, as Maxwell walked off the eastern line of the Phelps and Gorham purchase, the forest wars were coming to an end. Still, the forest itself resisted him in its way. It did not lend itself to being crossed in straight lines, as though it were a blank page awaiting the pen’s touch. Branches snagged his clothes. “I am of the opinion,” he wrote to Bridget from his walk, “that if I live to return, I shall stand in need of some winter shirts for I think my old ones will be pretty much worn out.”

What makes a forest? How do I know when I’m standing in one, and not just under some trees?

To reach Maxwell’s starting place—his “82 mile stone,” a roadside block of granite 82 miles west of the Delaware River—I drove a hundred miles south to Caton, New York. A welcome to caton sign marked the town line, which was also the state line. I took my phone out, opened a map on the screen. The phone is able to locate itself using pings from four satellite systems: GPS (“a global public service brought to you by the US government”), GLONASS (same, but brought to you by Russia), Galileo (European Union), and BeiDou (China). The screen suggested there should be a marker right in front of me.

Crouched inside a brushy spot, I shoved skinny branches out of my face and slapped at my hair. I found a tangle of rusted barbed wire. I found a deer skeleton. But no mile marker. Feeling things crawling on me, I climbed out into the sunlight and slapped down my shirt and pants. 

The growth I saw around me now was not so mixed as what Maxwell described in his notebook. I was standing on a stone chip road, looking across a hay field. My phone screen showed a satellite image with a red pin to the west of the road, in the brush I’d climbed out of, and a blue dot in the road, which was me. This had to be the spot, though. I walked to my car, felt my head for ticks again. Then I walked back up the road, to check under the welcome to caton sign. There, I found a block of pink and gray granite with an “82” cut into the side and several loops of orange surveyor’s tape tied around it. It wasn’t hidden—I’d simply been looking on the wrong side of the road. Looking for what was in my head instead of seeing what was there.

It was a slow march from here for Maxwell and his crew, dragging their chain in a straight line through the thickness of mixed trees and across creek cuts. It took them two weeks to cover the first 54 miles. For me it was an easy drive, a straight shot north between fields of sweet corn. I stopped to examine an occasional historical marker, and again at a roadside farm stand, hoping to say hello to someone who lived on this line. The little stall was well stocked with honey and dried garlic, but there was nobody to say hi to: Sales were on the honor system, with a Mason jar on the counter to leave your cash in. I had only brought a credit card.

Maxwell’s notebook was a memento of a different world. He passed massive chestnut trees such as I could only read about. One spot he judged “moist and good and springy,” another “good for grass.” He noted with approval where a stream was big enough to support a sawmill. And yet the gaps in his notes are astonishing. A few weeks into his survey, he crossed “some old clear land” and “through the old castle.” Castle was the colonial way of referring to an Indian town. Here was proof on the ground of what Maxwell already knew: People had been living in this forest for a very long time, cultivating this land in a different way than European settlers did. And yet Maxwell found little to note about the old castle. He carried on instead with his catalog of trees—”white ash, basswood, elm, &c.”

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What makes a forest? How do I know when I’m standing in one, and not just under some trees?

The Latin precursor of the word “forest” meant something like an unenclosed outdoor space. In early English law, the silva forestis was a place for lords to chase game and for ordinary people to gather wood. In the 13th century, as the Magna Carta encoded the rights of English barons, the Carta de Foresta laid out the rights of commoners to pasture cattle in the open places among the English forests. Similarly, the forest Maxwell entered in the summer of 1788 was more than just mixed trees. Its openings included the towns, orchards, and farm fields of the Seneca Nation. The Senecas had long used fire to manage areas of the forest, clearing thick undergrowth to attract deer, and they moved their farming fields from time to time to prevent exhausting the soil.

A forest is too big to see all at once, and maybe too big to describe. Writing about it, one is moved to grand language and weird leaps of perspective. The historian Francis Parkman devoted his career to what he called “a history of the American forest,” which is really a history of empires. Writing in the 1880s, with no satellite photos at hand, Parkman borrowed the point of view of a flock of Canada geese flying north from Albany. “As the aërial travellers winged their way, the seat of war lay spread beneath them like a map. First the blue Hudson, slumbering among its forests, with the forts along its banks. . . .” Parkman’s geese paid special attention to military architecture, noticing Fort William Henry by the “glistening breast of Lake George” and the white flag of the French at Ticonderoga. Onward they flapped: 

“Lake Champlain now spread before them, widening as they flew: on the left, the mountain wilderness of the Adirondacks, like a stormy sea congealed; on the right, the long procession of the Green Mountains; and, far beyond, on the dim verge of the eastern sky, the White Mountains throned in savage solitude.” 

This is silly poetry, but I am in deep sympathy with it, having also spent countless hours staring at different maps, trying to transplant a whole forest into my head. 

At the heart of Parkman’s seven-volume France and England in North America was a question about property. “To whom belonged this world of prairies and forests?” he asked. Parkman wrote that France had “claimed it by right of discovery and occupation,” adding that the French had an “excellent system” for distributing land: “Whoever received a grant from the Crown was required to improve it, and this within reasonable time. If he did not, the land ceased to be his, and was given to another more able or industrious.” The English eventually outdid the French in this regard, Parkman wrote: “New England was pre-eminently the land of material progress . . . nay, in defiance of the four Gospels, assiduity in the pursuit of gain was promoted to the rank of a duty.” The quickest way to gain from the forest was to sell or burn the timber and put a cash crop in the ground. 

Sir Albert Howard, an English botanist, saw the forest as a model for sustainable farming. In what he called “Nature’s agriculture,” variety is the first rule: “Many species of plants and of animals all live together,” he wrote in the early pages of An Agricultural Testament, published in 1940. Economy is another rule: “Nothing is wasted” and “nothing is lost.” Somehow, life and decomposition continue across millennia with no one in charge. 

Wendell Berry, referencing Howard in The Unsettling of America, writes that the forest is a place where “the forces of growth and the forces of decay are in balance.” I like this way of putting it very much. A forest tree dies in place, and its slow decay swells with life—mosses, fungi, beetles, and things that eat beetles. A living hardwood tree throws its leaves away every year. In The Great American Forest, Rutherford Platt calls this “the deciduous idea”—a funny way to imagine it, as though the founding fathers of the forest had written this leaf-shedding principle into their charter. But it is a brilliant idea, a world-changer. In balance, growth and decay work in cycles. The mat of discarded leaves becomes the food of millipedes and the habitat of worms. In spring, the snow sinks into it. A thick, black soil builds.

This is silly poetry, but I am in deep sympathy with it, having also spent countless hours staring at different maps, trying to transplant a whole forest into my head.

I had already traveled to Maxwell’s starting place; now, it occurred to me that I had never followed Hugh Maxwell’s route where he passed nearest to my house, along the eastern township line, which is not a road at all and which happens to be covered over with trees. From my front door, I followed the sidewalk along Edgewood Avenue, where the utility poles shrink away into the distance like an exercise in single-point perspective. 

The place where I live has gone through a lot of changes in the 20,000 years since the most recent ice age, from deglaciation to migration and cultivation. At the time Maxwell began his walk, the towns, orchards, and farm fields of the Seneca Nation were openings in a vast forest that still covered half of North America, from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River. The houses in my part of Brighton were built beginning in the 1930s, but the older eras of this place are visible on any road map. The early roads go from some important place to some other important place. Monroe Avenue, a very old road, follows a route from the north end of Canandaigua Lake to a shallow, fordable spot in the Genesee River. It is not straight, but bends sensibly between Cobbs Hill and Pinnacle Hill. People have been walking that way for a long time, since long before Maxwell arrived. 

After Maxwell, there came an era when all new roads were cut parallel to his township lines. The logic of the Brighton-Henrietta Town Line Road, for instance, has nothing to do with terrain, and the things one passes when driving it—an auto body shop, a small church with three steeples, an Asian market, a sex shop, Dunkin’—have little to do with each other. It’s as though Maxwell set the place to auto-arrange, so that every major surface road for the next two hundred years would snap to grid. 

I stopped at the former site of the old Rowland farm. My friend Roger lived next door to the farm as a boy. Mr. Rowland had a stand of virgin timber on his place, Roger recalls, and the soil in his fields was so fertile that a person had to take care not to get knocked over by his produce. “Dig a hole, drop a seed in, and stand back,” Mr. Rowland warned. 

As late as the 1950s, there still were some farms along Edgewood Avenue. But it wasn’t long before they were subdivided into residential lots.The timber now is mostly whatever people have chosen to set out in their yards. Norway maples are common—tough street trees, not from around here, indifferent to road salt and car exhaust. Rows of arborvitae make living privacy fences. Shading the Briar Manor apartments are seven big sycamores, handsome monsters with paint-by-number bark of yellow, gray, and lilac brown.

Past the row of sycamores, I turned onto a paved bicycle path that follows a chain-link fence. A little further, a sign marked the town line. I found a low place in the fence and stepped over, into the trees, following Maxwell again.

It was dark under the high canopy, and the underbrush was sparse. Maxwell had once described this section of his route as “very good beech and maple land with a mixture of ash, elm, oak, basswood, etc.” I found a beech tree, its pale sides smooth, its trunk a good two feet across. Beneath the beech tree was a shattered porcelain toilet. There was no plumbing attached; somebody had brought this toilet out here, set it on the ground, and taken a hammer to it.

I checked the map on my phone. In the satellite photo, the woods were more or less featureless except for the town line, superimposed in yellow over the treetops, and a blue dot, me, on top of that yellow line. I was still on Maxwell’s course. There was no trail on the ground for me to follow, though. The only trails were the soft, narrow animal trails that passed under blown-down branches or veered away into low cover.

The growth was mixed: saplings, mature trees, dead standing, and dead fallen. I found a red maple with circular fractures erupting like a target in its bark. I found an ash tree, its bark split open and buckling, the meandering tracks of an emerald ash borer scoring the bare wood. A lean musclewood with ten trunks, one with its bark chewed at the height of my knee. A basswood with a stripe of red spray paint on it and rings of woodpecker holes.

If this was a forest, it was a half-wrecked one. Much of the soil was exposed and cracked from flooding. Variety was here, though, and life among the decay. Deer tracks crossed a muddy trench. Bright moss blanketed the softening fallen trunks, and ferns grew. I heard chattering overhead and a rainlike sound in the leaves. Somebody was up there taking nuts apart. Chunks of green and yellow hull hit the ground around me, cycling back to the soil. 

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In September of 1788, Hugh Maxwell took a fall in the woods and hurt his shin. He made things worse, he wrote, “by wading in the swamp and through wet brush.” For three weeks, he was laid up in the Seneca town of Kanadesaga, where he had nothing to do but think and write home.

He missed Bridget. “I feel anxious for your welfare,” he wrote to her. “I long to hear from you and love to hear from you.” He reminded Bridget to have their son get the haying done, get some long shingles to fix the roof, cart the dung to the field, plow the field on time, and do the sowing.

He also missed church. Shortly after his near-death experience at Lake George as a young man, Maxwell had joined a church and, judging from his letters, devoted himself to a stern code under which he must strive constantly for an approval that he would never earn. For Maxwell, life on earth became a moral exercise, an attempt to deserve immortality. God, he wrote, “is Daily Loading us with his Benefits, though we are evil and unthankfull.” Now, once more wounded far from home, Maxwell wrote to his wife of “unprincipled fellows and drunken savages,” adding, “Religious society is quite out of the question here.” 

It had been only nine years since the Continental Army’s expedition across Seneca country. After Senecas joined with Tories to raid White settlements along the Mohawk, the young United States had set aside European conventions of war in an attempt to drive Seneca communities from their land. “The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible,” George Washington wrote in his orders. “It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.” At Kanadesaga, the Continental Army had burned at least 50 Seneca houses, tore ripe corn and beans from the fields, and bayoneted pumpkins. A whole orchard of apple trees was girdled, a circle of bark stripped from around each trunk, creating an unhealable, fatal wound. The Continental Army took few hostages: The Senecas moved west just ahead of the approaching troops and then returned again when the troops went home, rebuilding their houses and replanting their fields. 

Nine years later, laid up in Kanadesaga while his shin healed, Maxwell now found himself surrounded by Indians. “I am in hopes their time with us here is short,” Maxwell wrote to Bridget. “I do think that the Great Governor of the universe is about to plant a glorious gospel in this wilderness,” he predicted—with the help of his own survey, of course. “May it be so and soon spread over this land.” Maxwell, in effect, had two tough jobs: crossing the forest in straight lines, and convincing himself that he was a good person for doing so.

After more than a month’s recovery, Maxwell resumed his survey. “First mile through excellent land,” he wrote from the woods, on the line of a future township along the east bank of the Genesee River, noting nearly a half-dozen different trees in the area. The next mile: “Same sort of excellent land and growth but considerable mixed with chestnut.” The third mile was less good: “80 rods over a wet low land.” Then more very good land again. He crossed a brook that ran one way, then the other. Both Maxwell and the brook were headed to the same place, north to Lake Ontario. The brook took the easy way, downhill. Maxwell took the straight way, leading his team and their chain through swamp and timber, mile after mile.

At the end of the 18th mile, he chopped a “XIII” into the side of a small basswood tree, marking a corner of the 13th township—“with trees marked for witness about it,” he wrote, for the benefit of some future settler searching for the corners of his lot. 

Maxwell, in effect, had two tough jobs: crossing the forest in straight lines, and convincing himself that he was a good person for doing so.

When the blue dot on my phone told me I had reached the southeast corner of the town of Brighton, I spent some time looking for the basswood tree with the XIII in its bark. But I was kidding myself, of course. Maxwell’s hatchet marks were meant to last years, not centuries. I slapped at mosquitoes, scanning for some connection between the forest Maxwell had walked through and the place I was in. A scrap of fluorescent pink tape caught my eye. I’ve been seeing this stuff in the woods for my entire life, weatherproof trash that will outlive me and, I suppose, every other individual living thing in the woods as well. I looked past it, because I can’t pick up every piece of garbage in the woods and carry it out. Then I looked again and my understanding of the place shifted. 

The pink plastic was a piece of surveyor’s tape, tied to a branch. Near the branch was a short, square concrete pillar. This was the marker—a “monument,” in surveyor-speak—that had taken the place of the basswood with the XIII in its side. It was a more durable monument than a tree, and though it was short and unobtrusive, the little non-decaying flag of pink plastic made it hard to miss, even for me. 

Maxwell wrote of this site:

The line of this town is very

good land covered with a thick

growth of Beech Maple Elm Basswood

Ash Butternut &c. Not very uneven.

No elms now, but I had seen the others he mentioned. This wasn’t “virgin timber”: The nearest big tree was a two-trunked silver maple, second growth, sprouted back from a stump. This was the place, though. 

I stayed there awhile doing nothing, a little dazzled, a little jarred by the impression of two forests coming together—the one Maxwell crossed and the one I was in. The forest wasn’t gone, but it had changed, and so had the way we live with it. In imagining the forest as a wild place, it seemed to me, we had imagined ourselves right out of it. It’s become a place to visit, a resource or a park, not our home. 

Or something like that. Half-stumped, I managed to stand there motionless long enough that a red fox, not noticing me, stopped nearby with its nose in the air and its tail extended. I watched it for a while as it watched something else. Then a leaf blower whined, and the fox and I went our separate ways.

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In a healthy forest, the forces of growth and the forces of decay are in balance. But those same forces are the conditions of life everywhere—balanced or not.

Reaching Lake Ontario, Maxwell cut his initials into a tree, then went home to Heath, Massachusetts. In years to come he served as a deacon and justice of the peace in that town. He applied for an invalid officer’s pension, but was denied. At 67 years old, in debt, he bought some horses and embarked with them for the West Indies, where the animals, along with enslaved humans, were in demand on sugar plantations. It was a nightmare world where both humans and horses were routinely worked to death in brutal heat. I wonder how he justified that new venture to himself. Maxwell took a profit from the sale, but died of yellow fever on the voyage home, and his body was buried at sea.

I couldn’t visit Maxwell’s final resting place. Instead, I drove to western Massachusetts, to his house. On Route 2 I locked on to an excellent Albany radio station whose signal held through the Taconic Mountains as far as Williamston, Massachusetts. The road had been graded and guard-railed in the 1920s, on top of an older road that people had been walking since the last ice age, for all one can know. The road sided a stream tumbling over rocks. And what was so important about that? Why did I love it? I loved this road because it was no one’s idea. A glacier put this road here, and people followed. 

The house that once belonged to Maxwell was surprisingly modern-looking, with its solar panels and a Prius in the driveway. I knocked and a woman came to the door. Sue, the owner, invited me in. In the kitchen, one wall was almost all fireplace, paneled above with a single blond board 20 inches wide—spruce, Sue thought. In the next room, there was more of that broad paneling, and a row of cupboards over a smaller fireplace with a grow-light installed inside it over a collection of potted cacti. Sue showed me a copy of Maxwell’s only portrait, a silhouette on horseback that was made during the Revolutionary War. She also had a copy of The Christian Patriot, a biography written by Maxwell’s daughter, Priscilla, who recalled her father’s strong singing voice and a gory song about the courage of the Bunker Hill heroes that he liked to sing for the children. Near the house was a cemetery with a marker for Maxwell, a tall obelisk with worn stories in its sides.

I also drove to Lake George to see the place where 22-year-old Maxwell had first spied death coming for him through the forest. I followed US Route 9 past a sprawling outlet mall and Bloody Pond, where the bodies of slain men had been thrown at the end of that chaotic day early in the French and Indian War. Then I emerged from under clustered trees to what Thomas Jefferson once called “without comparison, the most beautiful water I ever saw.” Lake George was “ limpid as crystal,” he wrote, the mountains on either side “covered with rich groves of thuja, silver fir, white pine, aspen, and paper birch.” Today the groves of thuja are interrupted with summer mansions and the sandy parking lot by the beach is jammed with cars, but the mountains are still mountains and the long lake still stretches far away between them. When I arrived, the beach was crowded with boogie boarders, volleyballers, and people just splashing. A man threw a tennis ball into the lake, and a dog took a fierce running leap to retrieve it. 

I’d booked a camp site nearby at the Lake George Battleground Campground. A few pines were all that separated my site from Route 9, its four lanes roaring with traffic. I set up my folding camp stool by the sidewalk, across from an Exxon. 

I tried to picture a young Maxwell loping through here shirtless in his bare feet, enveloped by the forest and afraid for his life. Among the English-speaking settlers, the events at Lake George would be remembered as a massacre, and the Indigenous people whose home this was, whose conventions of war did not match those of the European empires, were called savages. It was powerful storytelling, indispensable to the colonial project. 

Every story I could imagine about this place, and about Hugh Maxwell, seemed another work of fiction, a mechanism for assigning blame.

Maxwell trained himself on a version of that story: He had outrun death, sought God, and sought profit while declaring himself unthankful. He hardened himself into a professional fighter, banking on the next life while he improved an ancient forest by drawing a checkerboard on it. He wrote home about the “womb of futurity,” a bizarre metaphor I still do not understand. Whom did he think made futurity pregnant? Was it God, or the Phelps and Gorham Company? I didn’t understand the guy. On the other hand, I didn’t go to war when I was 22. I was working in a restaurant and writing stories. 

Every story I could imagine about this place, and about Hugh Maxwell, seemed another work of fiction, a mechanism for assigning blame. Blame has to be assigned—Indigenous communities did not displace themselves, nor did the forest wreck itself—but it is also necessary to keep looking and to try to keep noticing how much one does not understand. Among the Native allies who joined the French at Lake George all those years ago was a band of ten Iowas who had traveled a thousand miles, from beyond the Great Lakes, to fight the English. What were they thinking, and what had their journey been like? They had only themselves to tell their story to, because no one at Lake George spoke their language. 

As I tried to conjure the experiences of these men nearly 270 years ago, it occurred to me that I ought to be more concerned for the daring pedestrians trying to cross Route 9 from the campground to the MiniMart attached to the Exxon. There was a crosswalk, but the traffic was coming in fast. 

There was too much here for me to make sense of. The seat of war was now a vacation spot. War is violent and so are four-lane highways. Lake George is beautiful, and it puzzled me to notice that the MiniMart was pretty, too, with its high-wattage red-and-white Exxon sign and its glass front glowing softly yellow.

I walked over. Inside, the MiniMart was lit up like a minor carnival, aggressively air-conditioned, and it had a sweet, grimy, convenience-store smell of burnt coffee and potato logs. People were getting chips, jerky, gasoline, and party ice. The forces of growth and the forces of decay were jostling. I liked being there. I selected two cold singles, thanked the cashier, and followed the crosswalk safely back to my campsite and my folding camp stool, from which I watched the people coming and going late into the night.

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When Hugh Maxwell wrote home to Bridget with his story about the womb of futurity, he got a couple things wrong. 

He was right that the country was changing. While he was in the forest tramping out lines, trying to get his head around this thing that was too big to fit inside anyone’s head, the United States ratified their second constitution. The document was a little over 4,000 words long, and it relied heavily on the word “shall,” a modal verb used to indicate a future action, which was used 191 times. The official copy covered four big sheets of parchment in ink made from oak galls. 

He was wrong about the Senecas’ time being short. They are still here. On the Tonawanda Territory, an hour’s drive west from my house, Senecas still govern themselves according to the Great Law of Peace—a constitution established by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and recorded in white wampum before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. The Tonawanda Seneca Nation is currently fighting a plan to build a data center next to their woods.

He was right about the coming of new inhabitants. The grid he’d laid over the forest became a map in a land office, and his employers were soon marking squares SOLD in small cursive. Settlers arrived slowly, then in booms, cutting trees, burning stumps, shooting wolves, and plowing the black ground with teams of oxen, raising vegetables for their families and wheat to sell over the Erie Canal.

The land in Township 13, my township, turned out to be mixed. The ground was clay in some parts. Brighton became known for brickyards. That industry is gone now, but the high school had an ugly surprise this year when it tried to replace a grass playing field with plastic turf. Chunks of brick, glass, and metal were buried a few inches down; tests showed high levels of arsenic, lead, and semi-volatile organic compounds. The field where my daughter played soccer is now sheeted in plastic while the state decides what to do next.

In Edgewood, the earth is as rich as Maxwell said it was, but he might have been surprised to learn how briefly that would matter. Soil fertility is mostly beside the point, and even an inconvenience, since lawns have to be mowed, leaves blown into piles, and pollen hosed off windshields in the spring. 

No description, no story, is big enough to capture the forest Maxwell walked through. The best I can think to do is to keep looking for better questions about it. Here’s one: If a forest had a constitution, what would it say? Its coequal branches might be soil, air, water, and sun. It certainly would have no president. Its bill of rights might hold that differences exist, that living things may strive, that life includes an accumulation of wealth, and that death includes the release of that wealth. Nothing is wasted, nothing is lost, but eventually everything has to be let go of. When you die, you simply spread out your wealth on the ground.

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James Whorton Jr. grew up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.  He is the author of three novels, and his writing has appeared in The Best American Essays, The Oxford American, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, Washington Square Review, The Gettysburg Review, and The Washington Post.  He teaches at SUNY Brockport.

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

For The New York Times Magazine, Blair Braverman tells the story of Steffen Skjottelvik, a 29-year-old Norwegian man who attempted a multi-year trek across the wilderness of Canada. Despite danger in the form of wolves and polar bears and trail hardships like bug swarms of biblical proportions, Skjottelvik revelled in a life of adventure on the land with his dogs.

Togo, a malamute, pulled himself from the river on Aug. 15, 2025. His saddlebag pack was soaked through and weighed him down, and mud stuck to his paws in heavy clods. The bank was nearly vertical, overgrown with stunted willows, but he found a narrow ramp up. His pack caught on a root; he chewed through a strap and left it behind. At the top, he curled up, looking back on the river, which was wide and brown. It smelled like seaweed. Like the barren coast of Canada’s remote Hudson Bay, which he and Steffen had been walking for 300 miles. All those polar bears and storms.

Togo would wait for Steffen right here, among the horsetails and ferns. They had been inseparable for almost a decade, since Togo was a tiny pup — sharing their fish and caribou meat, sleeping together on a caribou hide at night. Togo knew Steffen would climb from the river and sit beside him, and they would rest their heads on each other, the way they liked to do. Steffen always came

Nearly 60 years ago, John McPhee rafted the Colorado River with a longtime Sierra Club reader and his nemesis, taking notes as the men argued over the fate of the land, the future of Lake Powell. Today, McPhee is 95 years old and widely acknowledged as a singuler chronicler of place, people, and time. As David Schurman Wallace notes, he also has “a good chance of outlasting the lake.” In a stimulating review of Encounters with Wild America, a four-book collection by McPhee, Wallace sets a master’s time-intensive and famously lengthy projects against the contemporary attention economy and the media industry. Longform writing didn’t spring from a hashtag; it was a natural outcome of applying narrative frames to complex subjects, including nature itself. Now, writes Wallace, “this work of dedicated attention, so essential to thinking about, say, the environment, is at risk of becoming a relic.”

[McPhee’s] work is an artifact, one that aids reflection, but demands you stop first and take things slowly. It’s no accident that the books that Library of America have chosen to canonize first are about nature and the people who inhabit it. To appreciate, or even just think about an expanse—a nearly deserted forest, a glacier, a stretch of tundra—is difficult. You can look at an image, but you can just as quickly turn away or scroll past. His writing is a tool that helps us feel distance. You have to spend time on the page getting to know it, trying to imagine things you will most likely never experience yourself.

Stories on the color orange, the data center rush, a local hero, the AI labor takeover, and a boy dinner subreddit.

r/BoyDinnerDiaries is a subreddit where men post photos of their often rather sad-looking meals alongside their most private worries. Zack Hauptman carefully explores this unusual place for community and care, meeting the men who are learning to share more than just what is on their plate. We hear a lot about the “male loneliness epidemic,” so it’s heartening to glimpse even a small shift in the other direction.

Others use the forum regardless of whether they have a vast social circle. Robert*, 31, says he has many people to turn to but uses Reddit when he needs to unload his feelings further. “I have an urge to vent when I don’t want to call a friend,” he says. In August, after experiencing repeated rejection from women he was seeing, he decided to post about it online. “I’m at the point where I feel so disappointed and let down but also so grateful that I have the opportunity to learn and grow from all of it,” he wrote alongside a photo of mushy canned tuna in a bowl. “I could talk about it pretty much all the time, but I don’t really want to be doing that,” he says. “Going to the subreddit…it’s like throwing it into the void.”

Hundreds of newsletters land in my inbox each week. I use Gmail filters to route most of them into one big feed, and only a handful go into a separate folder for easier visibility. Erika Hayasaki’s The Reported Essay is one of them. In each edition, Hayasaki—a professor at the University of California, Irvine’s Literary Journalism Program—writes about the craft of nonfiction and shares conversations with fellow journalists. She offers advice on the practice of reporting and storytelling and the business of freelancing, from balancing interiority and research to building a story’s structure to pitching stories.

Hayasaki is one of those writers whose new work I always make time to read. For Men’s Health, she told the intertwined stories of two men trying to understand and treat their long COVID symptoms. For The Cut, she wrote a memorable piece of romance and disaster about a Maui couple on the day Lahaina burned. For The Verge, she reported on an obsessive stalker who harassed Asian American professors online. Her narrative nonfiction illuminates the lives of individuals and communities, and the human connections within them. Her latest, for The Guardian, follows a New Jersey nurse assaulted by ICE, a woman she first wrote about in her book The Death Class. It’s yet another piece grounded in rigorous reporting.

After spending time with Hayasaki below, don’t forget to subscribe to The Reported Essay—it’s an indispensable resource for anyone who writes or reads the kind of nonfiction we recommend and celebrate at Longreads.

—Cheri Lucas Rowlands

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Where did you grow up? 

I was born in Champaign, Illinois, a college town surrounded by corn and soybean fields two hours south of Chicago. I lived there until I was 14, when my parents divorced and lost their home in a bankruptcy. I moved to Lynnwood, Washington, for high school, returning to Champaign for journalism school as an undergrad at the University of Illinois.

What places feel like home?

My current home in Southern California. I know it is my kids’ safe place. But I also think of my first childhood home, a one-story on Hathaway Drive in Champaign that my parents bought for $10,000 in the 1980s. When I am back in my hometown, I drive by it sometimes and glimpse the window I used to sneak out of, or the backyard jacuzzi deck that my dad built, or the strawberry patch where I winced eating unripened berries.

Other than family members, who or what has shaped you the most?

I often wonder how the same hometown that crafted my identity, and deepened my own humanity, could turn around and strip someone else’s away. Obviously, I haven’t let go of this place that shaped me. So for the last several years, I have been reporting and writing a book, College Town, which is based in Champaign. 

What is your favorite time of day?

Early morning writing time, 4:30 to 6:30 a.m, when the house is quiet and I am not checking messages or getting interrupted.

What are you really good at?

Connecting people to other people I think they might get along with, or appreciate, or learn from. Or connecting them to useful resources. I sometimes do mini one-on-one Zoom sessions with my Substack readers, and I like giving each person I meet their own individualized mini-syllabus at the end of it. 

What’s the best gift you’ve ever received?

The ability to communicate.

Describe your favorite meal.

Merkato Ethiopian food in Los Angeles: asa tibs (fried trout), injera, honey wine.

Sound or silence? (And if sound, what sound?)

Silence during writing time. But I love the sound of laughter with family and friends—it is everything.

Where do you do your best thinking?

Long car rides (allowing the mind to rest and wander is key for creatives).

What journey—physical, creative, intellectual, or otherwise—has meant the most to you?

Right out of college, I was hired at the Los Angeles Times into METPRO (the Minority Editorial Program), which is now the Los Angeles Times Fellowship. Miriam Pawel, who just released a new book, California Dreams, was the Metro editor who hired me, and I was also mentored by people like Richard Kipling, Randy Hagihara, Steve Padilla, Richard E. Meyer (who wrote the piece I will never forget, linked below), as well as many other incredible writers and editors. The program also connected me to people who would become some of my best friends. This experience, in many ways, is why I also believe so deeply in the importance of being a mentor and connector.

Where do you like to read?

Home office.

What’s the last rabbit hole you disappeared into?

Every story I report leads to a rabbit hole, and that is part of the joy of reporting. Since the summer, I have disappeared into reporting rabbit holes about meditation scams, Accutane (the acne drug), Illinois history, abuse by ICE agents, international students, and the future of college.

Name three publications you enjoy reading these days.

Longreads, of course. Scratch, a newsletter of interviews, essays, and conversations about how writers are surviving. I also like catching up on long reads via Apple News audio during commutes and housework.

What’s one longread that you can’t stop thinking about?

“Julia Understands Everything,” by Richard E. Meyer, in the Los Angeles Times Magazine. I often assign this story to students. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing in 1996. Reading it myself as a young journalist broke open what I realized is possible in nonfiction storytelling. Rick wrote about a woman paralyzed by a stroke that left her able to only communicate through eye and head movements. He spent nearly 450 hours interviewing her, as she raised her eyes while he pointed to letters of the alphabet on a card.

What was the last book you read?

California Dreams by Miriam Pawel, a fascinating historical portrait of the University of California told through a cast of compelling people. And The Black Shield by Wilbert L. Cooper, a feat of braided history, reported memoir, and narrative journalism that is engaging and nuanced.

What piece of nonfiction are you most proud of writing?

I recently came across a binder from high school with all of these articles and columns I wrote for my high school newspaper and for a teen newspaper run by The Seattle Times. These were earnest and idealistic pieces about discrimination, abuse, educational inequities. I look back at that kid trying to find her way in the world by asking questions and writing stories, and I’m just proud she kept going. 

I see my undergrads doing the same—choosing to major in journalism in these difficult times because they care about what is happening in the world, and even in the age of AI they still yearn to think, question, and write—and that also makes me proud.

What’s your most reliable way to get creatively unstuck?

Sleep on it. Also talking to my writing friends. It’s important to have writing friends and if you don’t have any yet, make an effort to reach out to other writers and connect with them. Build a community (even if it’s intimidating).

Who’s a writer you turn to when you need some inspiration?

I have a Bookshop page with categories like “Inspiring Narrative Nonfiction on Place or Home,” or “Books Erika Teaches in Literary Journalism,” or “Books About Ordinary People in Extraordinary Circumstances.”

What words do you overuse?

“Random.”

What’s your favorite guilty pleasure?

“Bunch of Friends,” YouTubers—but only with my daughter.

What superpower would you like to have? 

Healing.

What animal or nonhuman being do you most identify with?

I’m a people person, which is also why you will find people at the center of all my stories. I am most interested in the human condition. My house is filled with portraits and photos of people. We don’t have pets. This question was harder for me to answer, so I asked my kids. They gave these answers:

“Alicorn. Because you can do everything.”

“A dragon, according to Chinese mythology, because you are wise.”

“Eevee from Pokemon, because you have gone through multiple evolutions.”

If you have a free solitary hour in your day, what do you typically do?

Lately, I am big on squeezing in a 20 to 30-minute midday nap. 

What five items would you place in a time capsule?

I really don’t get attached to stuff. Over the last few years, my 75-year-old mother got rid of all her stuff. She also gave up her home, and is now living full time out of her Toyota Sienna. Full-on van life. Yes, one day I will write an essay about this. She’s living her best life right now. I do have a lot of stuff, as you see in my office photo below. But I don’t attach much sentimental value to it. 

I’m much more about the moments that I know will not last. For my first book, The Death Class, I followed a professor of death and dying, Norma Bowe (whom I also published a follow-up story on this week for The Guardian, after she was assaulted by ICE and filed a legal claim). Her class and teachings also helped me learn to value moments and human connections.

What does your writing space look like?

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Erika Hayasaki is the author of The Death Class and Somewhere Sisters, which was named an NPR Best Book of the Year in 2022 and received a Nautilus Book Award in Journalism and Investigative Reporting. She is a professor in the Literary Journalism Program at the University of California, Irvine, and a former national writer for the Los Angeles Times. As an independent journalist, her feature stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, New York, Wired, The Atlantic, The Guardian, National Geographic, and others. She recently received the Longform Narrative Award from the National Association of Science Writers, and her work is anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2025. Erika also served as chair of the 2026 Pulitzer Prize Nominating Jury in Feature Writing, and she publishes a Substack newsletter, The Reported Essay.

In a remote part of Utah, the world’s largest data center project—allegedly—is being fast-tracked in secret. Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame was brought in to hype the 40,000-acre complex. But the backlash among Utahns has been strong. Josh Dzieza reports from the front lines of the popular resistance to data centers:

[Brenna] Williams, a former government econometrician and college instructor, speaks methodically in a calm monotone as she enumerates the many reasons why the data center “doesn’t make sense”—a refrain. First among them is the water, an acutely sensitive issue in Utah in part thanks to Gov. Cox himself, who has declared repeated drought emergencies and urged residents to take shorter showers and cut back on watering their lawns. There is no more potent symbol of the state’s water crisis than the Great Salt Lake, which has been shrinking for years, exposing heavy metals on its lakebed that become airborne dust. Now here came a data center on its northern shore, or where its northern shore would have been if it hadn’t receded several miles.

“We have to report on our neighbors if they’re watering at the wrong times or on the wrong days,” Williams says. (There’s a hotline.) “But we have water to cool a power plant and cool the data center? It doesn’t make sense.”

The horrific story of Jane Doe and the Cornell Seven has spurred nationwide outrage and revived contentious debates around prevention and education. But one question is going unasked: Who really pays after a sexual assault? In terms of actual dollars and cents? The answer, Cosmopolitan finds, isn’t good:

Leah received an email from the first hospital. It was a bill for $3,338, including $663 for lab work and a pregnancy test she hadn’t asked for. She hadn’t been charged for the rape kit, but the price of just checking into the ER was $2,241. After her parents’ insurance was applied, she owed $451.06.

“I was so unbelievably angry,” she says. “I lost it. I was like, ‘You mean it cost me $450 to get raped?!’”

Most people don’t realize this care might not be covered, says Vega, who has worked as an emergency room nurse, emergency room director, and a SANE. But that’s actually common: KFF analyzed a sample of insurance claim data from 2016 to 2018 (the most up-to-date data KFF has) and found that 83 percent of women who received a sexual violence diagnosis were billed for treatment. Another analysis of emergency room department data from 2019 found that the average bill for sexual assault survivors was $3,551, according to the New England Journal of Medicine.

There are more than 800 surveillance towers located along U.S. borders, a number that is expected to triple in the next decade. These towers, according to a government accountability report, “detect items of interest, such as people.” But interest can be fickle. As part of “Dying on Camera,” a sprawling package of features co-published by the MIT Technology Review and Times of San Diego, Lillian Perlmutter reports on the death of Graciela Gómez Hernández, one among hundreds of migrants whose final moments seem as though they should have been witnessed. “The proximity of so many deaths to high-resolution cameras leaves two distinct possibilities,” Perlmutter writes. “Either the system didn’t detect these people in distress, or it did detect them—and officials offered no response. “

Surveillance towers have proliferated in recent years, as contractors added newer camera systems that use artificial intelligence to distinguish border-crossers from other people and animals, and track their movements, at an overall cost of more than a billion dollars. Yet as the cameras scan the terrain, migrants continue to die in plain sight. 

For Oakland Review of Books, Stephanie Uchino-Beach writes about getting laid off at an education tech company that transformed into an “AI-first outfit.” As as customer success manager, she acted as a liaison to district administrators, school principals, and teachers. While AI could automate some of her tasks, what about the core responsibilities of her CSM role: building real relationships and understanding an educator’s needs? An AI sees data points, not people. This is a sobering read from a former tech worker living in the Bay Area, and an edtech company that has gone all in on AI and forgotten about its mission.

Before I went to work for Silicon Valley, I was a lot of things. A few jobs before this last one, I was an elementary school teacher in Chicago, helping kids learn to read, creating units, planning lessons, and buying supplies with my own money on the weekends, like countless other teachers around the country. I grew up on the Peninsula, and I made the move into Customer Success to get a job that would let me move home. Tech was never my dream; it was a means to an end. My dad studied computer science and still works in tech to this day and enjoys it, so it seemed like a satisfying and fruitful career was plausible. I figured that once I broke in, all my problems would be solved: I could get a house, have a kid, and fulfill every middle-class dream that had always felt slightly out of reach for a millennial like myself. 

And yet, job after job, I consistently left feeling unsatisfied. Unsatisfied by how I wasn’t growing and wasn’t developing my skills. Unsatisfied with poor managers who were just in the right place at the right time to be promoted but so often lacked the skills to provide the same success for their employees. Unsatisfied with how the products I worked on could do wrong by the communities we sold them to, even though every company said they were “mission-driven” and “put our customers first.” 

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.”