If you make time for one 9/11 anniversary story this year, make it Garrett M. Graff’s piece. This is no mere retrospective. For National Geographic, Graff takes us through that Tuesday morning 25 years ago to explain how America lost its sense of security, minute-by-minute on the morning of September 11, 2001.

It was now 8:53 a.m. There were just 10 minutes left in America as we knew it.

FBI director Robert Mueller was in his first week on the job, sitting in his office suite on the seventh floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington. . . .Toward the end of the meeting, someone interrupted to tell Mueller a plane had crashed in New York. Sitting in a briefing on al Qaeda, deep in a conversation about terrorism, Mueller turned and looked out the window at the blue sky beyond and asked, “How could a plane not see the tower? It’s so clear out today.”

Truthfully, terrorism in 2001 just wasn’t something most Americans thought about, outside of the movies or the occasional evening news story or headline. It was a plot device for thrillers, not a perpetual source of anxiety at shopping malls, schools, or public events. And even in the cinema, the “terrorists” were less ideological enemies doing existential battle against the Great Satan and more often the disgruntled genius or vaguely European criminal mastermind. Think Dennis Hopper’s villainous former bomb squad officer in the 1994 blockbuster Speed or Alan Rickman’s turn as the suave, ruthless radical Hans Gruber in Die Hard.

Joël Kyaviro is a professional cyclist from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who has risen above government instability, war, violence, poverty, and Ebola, overcoming every “tack in his path” to become the first rider from the DRC to win a Union Cycliste International race. What’s more, he’s used his success to get the next generation of kids interested in the sport by founding Tumaini Academy, “a cycling program aimed at transcending war by getting Goméen kids on bikes and in school.”

He rolled into the finish zone alone, a full ten seconds ahead, the cushion so big that he was able to victoriously throw his arms in the air. He coasted the last few meters no hands, grinning ear to ear, as his old club president, Charles Guy Makongo, leapt up and down on the sidelines.

Makongo’s sneakers got soaked in the puddles, but he did not care. In the entire 126-year run of the Union Cycliste International, no Congolese rider had ever won a UCI race. On Instagram that night, a picture of Joël ran with a banner header reading, “A historic moment in Congolese cycling.” Posting on an African cycling forum, Makongo proclaimed, “Today’s victory is much more than a sporting result.” It showed, he said, “that talent can flourish even in the most challenging environments.”

What defines success when it comes to music? For Hrishikesh Hirway, who wrote four albums under the name The One AM Radio, it meant commercial attention. His interest in making music cooled after sales and airplay failed to materialize; he went 15 years without releasing an album. In this essay for The Bitter Southerner, Hirway looks at how he overcame perfectionism to write and record In the Last Hour of Light, an album heavy on collaboration.

“But Phil was echoing something I’d heard in the interviews I’d conducted and read about in books on writing: separate your creative, generative side from your editing, critical side. They push in opposite directions, and as soon as you start to edit, you’re no longer as free to play.”

“It was two days after my 47th birthday, which had left me feeling melancholy about reaching middle age and still feeling so far from my goals. I sat on my couch, put my headphones on, and played the album. Something had shifted for me. Somewhere around the third song, I felt something for the first time: I loved what I was hearing.

The music brought back memories with perfect clarity: what it felt like to write each song, to record them, the long journey to transform a part of myself into this music. It was no longer a question of the music’s worth. I can say to myself: this album is a document. And in it —listen!—you’re alive.”

The house with the red-brick exterior, huge old-growth maple, and sprawling back patio on Castle Frank Crescent in Toronto’s pricy Rosedale neighborhood seemed like the perfect symbol of generational wealth and respectability. As Malcolm Johnston reports for Toronto Life, the occupants, Chakib Mansouri and Majdouline Alouah, might have appeared to be upwardly mobile, driving fancy cars and “dripping” with designer couture. In reality, they funded all their luxuries with a life of crime.

By the fall of 2023, Mansouri and Alouah were so engrossed in their lives of leisure that neither picked up on the vehicles tailing them, day after day. Nor did they notice the plainclothes officers posted up on street corners, in condo lobbies and at cafés, collecting evidence that would expose the couple’s part in an audacious scam that stole more than $185 million from victims in Toronto, across Canada and around the world.

There’s nothing like walking into a pub and sitting down at an empty stool where your regular order awaits you. You have been seen; it’s a singular feeling of camaraderie and community. Club 2101, a dive bar in Oakland California, opens around 8 am each day. For The Oaklandside, Azucena Rasilla profiles a 16-hour-day in the life of the 80-year-old haunt, a story as colorful as the dedicated regulars who frequent the establishment, many of them captured in evocative photos by Sarahbeth Maney.

Another regular, Steve Powell, puts on the jukebox’s first song of the day, Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Texas Flood,” and just as Vaughan’s guitar solo builds, another Breakfast Club member walks in: 71-year-old Kurt Meyer. Perez says Meyer had a health scare a few months ago; Perez is happy to see Meyer get back to his routine of hanging out with the crew. 

By 11:30 a.m., the ice chest is in need of a refill and the bar starts to settle down. There are about a dozen people inside, some playing pool, others chatting or reading the newspaper. A few attentively watch the horse races now playing on the TV screens.

George is the first of the early morning crew to call it quits and catch the bus home. Winn and Altamonte follow shortly after. 

“All of these regulars are not just customers,” Perez says. “They are friends and family.”

When Saeed Jones gets a Lyft ride with Mister Anthony in New Orleans, he has no idea he’s in for brief but deep connection that will occupy his mind long after the trip is over. Anthony is a Black elder originally from Mississippi, “old enough to be retired but still taking gigs.” As the man recalls the racism he experienced in the Magnolia State, Jones is reminded of his own experiences, his own trepidation. In all his travels, Jones reveals that Mississippi is the only place he has ever felt scared for his safety as a Black man.

Maybe to distract myself from the question of loneliness, I’m working to chart the depths of my ride with Mister Anthony. I’m interested in how people unexpectedly find one another. I refuse to romanticize the labor conditions and racial terror, for example, that played a role in introducing him to me. If America was doing right by someone like Mister Anthony, I would not have met him today. I know that fact like I know the blade of his laughter. But I am grateful I met him. Maybe it’s easier, especially for men of his generation and journey, to set one’s burdens down with a receptive stranger. Or maybe Mister Anthony is just like that with everyone and I happen to be a poet riding co-pilot with deep feelings. I want to save Mister Anthony’s life. I want to make his life better. Writing about him won’t do either, but I bow before him all the same.

When Leslie Buck was discovered dead in her home in 2002, Mystic, Connecticut, went into shock. What had happened to the grade school teacher and who had wanted her to die? For journalist Brenna Ehrlich, this one was personal; Buck had been her teacher in grade one. In her latest for Rolling Stone, Ehrlich returns to Mystic to learn more about who Leslie Buck was and why she was murdered.

And Anna Greene, my second-grade teacher, told me about the poems she found in Leslie’s desk after she died — that she read at the funeral. There’s one about the kids who are different, “who don’t fit,” who “dance to a different drum.” For some reason, that hit me harder than police reports or autopsies. More than the horrors that true-crime often focuses on. I still can’t read it without crying. Maybe because I definitely was one of those kids, or maybe it’s just because it shows that she truly saw her students — all of them. Or maybe it’s a much-needed reminder that Leslie Buck isn’t a story, a case to be solved. She was a person. And she deserves to be remembered.

Monarch butterfly populations are on the upswing. But, faced with climate change, pine bark beetles, and even avocado-farming cartels, can it last? For The Atlantic, Vann R. Newkirk II follows Cinderella, Eric, and Carle, three butterflies named by his young daughter, as they leave their wintering ground in Mexico to migrate north to lay eggs in order to complete their “biological mission.”

Cinderella, Eric, and Carle had all been tagged in Sierra Chincua, which meant that I could deduce certain facts about their lives. They were already bona fide world-class wanderers, having flown there all the way from Canada in the fall, a three-month trip. Along the way, they’d dodged birds and windmills and cars, eventually reaching the same patch of forest—perhaps even the same trees—that their great-grandparents had roosted in. For much of the winter, they had not eaten and had barely moved, jamming themselves so tightly against their fellow travelers that from a distance they looked like scales armoring the sides of the trees. Now they’d awakened, stretching their wings and warming up.

Before I read this piece, all I knew about tomatoes was that homegrown tastes infinitely better than store-bought. For Offrange, Mitch Hagney educated me on how tomatoes ripen naturally and unnaturally, and how Big Tomato forces the issue in huge warehouses by pumping in ethylene gas. It might just inspire you to grow your own.

Tomatoes are climacteric fruits, like bananas, avocados, and mangos, which means they can be harvested unripe and complete the process later. Ethylene sends the hormonal signal to ripen. When that process happens naturally, cells near its seeds start producing the gas and it diffuses outward through the fruit. Each cell the gas reaches begins its own production, and the cascade softens the flesh and the tomato turns red from the inside out. That allows the fruit to be picked much greener, shipped far, and then ripened when they’re close to their eater.

To do it artificially isn’t complicated, but it is expensive. Ethylene floods the room at carefully calibrated amounts, and the operator compresses what might take weeks into five days. Sensors log temperature, humidity, and gas concentrations around the clock. The tomato turns red from the outside in.

People are choosing cremation far more often these days. Open-casket funerals are on a steep decline, along with the professions that allow for loved ones to comfortably view their dead for the last time. For Harper’s Magazine, John Semley talks to Anthony Saldivar, Berri Cooper, Danielle Colquitt, and Hannah Bugos, all of whom competed in the Restorative Art Technical Showcase, “the highlight event of last year’s National Funeral Directors Association convention.” These elite undertakers are highly skilled in what’s known as restorative art, the process by which humans disfigured by grievous injury or disease are made to look like they did in life, so that their loved ones can bid farewell to someone they recognize.

Cooper has dealt with several particularly complex restoration cases during her long career. While we chatted, she pulled up images on her phone of a father who’d been burned so badly in an accident that he was, save for some faintly visible protruding teeth, barely identifiable as a person. She was able to perform a full facial reconstruction on him based on photographs, so that his loved ones could say goodbye to someone who was not only recognizably human, but familiar to them. “There’s not a body where I’ve said, ‘No, I couldn’t,’ ” she told me. That includes the mutilated body of a stillborn baby, whom Cooper embalmed and restored at a grieving mother’s request.

The vanishing of any craft is a tragedy to all who prefer the existence of a thing to its opposite, but restorative art represents more than just a niche domain of aesthetic achievement or a macabre postmortem racket. With its disappearance, we stand to lose a whole way of memorializing our dead: one that might be pricey, unnecessary, and even a little absurd, but only out of commitment to the notion that an occasion as final as death is worthy of pomp and circumstance.

He dresses up for his labor of love, always wearing a white shirt, a silk tie, and a blue four-pocket French work coat as he documents Nashville, Tennessee, moment-by-moment behind the lens of his Leica. Ray Di Pietro started photographing people and events in the city nine years ago and uses precise composition and framing to tell the story of the city and its people.

Di Pietro’s inspiration comes from a surprising place. Andy Warhol, one of his favorite artists (he has several authentic Warhol works), kept a meticulous record of how he spent his days for the 10 years leading up to his death. In 1989, the pop artist’s secretary-turned-collaborator, Pat Hackett, published the notes in a book called The Andy Warhol Diaries.

Warhol, of course, was famously obtuse and provocative. But stories of the flash and dash of the artist’s fame — the crazy parties at The Factory, Warhol’s legendarily debauched, silver foil-papered studio and clubhouse — weren’t necessarily what interested Di Pietro about the conceit. Nor did Warhol’s habit of recording appointments or expenses of the day, including doctors visits, meals, even the price of cab rides. Di Pietro admires Warhol as an accidental historian who documented global figures while recording his daily routine, whether his subjects were Jimmy Carter and the empress of Iran or Mick Jagger and Lou Reed. “He’s writing world history without knowing that it’s world history,” Di Pietro marvels.