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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Duncan is a longtime friend of Max Daly, and a drug addict caught up in “cuckooing,” where dealers take over people’s homes as drug bases in exchange for product. Daly offers a sympathetic portrait of Duncan’s spiralling life, while opening a window onto a bizarre world where the most vulnerable exploit each other—and sometimes even form bonds.

Over the 2000s and 2010s, wave after wave of gangs fanned out from Britain’s drug supply hubs – London, Liverpool and Birmingham – to set up shop in smaller towns and cities across the country. They took over the homes of drug users and young women who had been groomed by older male gang members. As early as 2008 Suffolk constabulary reported that more than a third of Class A drug dealers arrested in Suffolk were under 21, and the majority were from London. (Before this period, most crack and heroin dealers in towns and smaller cities were “user-dealers”, addicted heroin users in their 30s or older, who were not as “professionalised” as the big city drug gangs.) Gangs often used sex workers, who targeted male tenants and moved in, bringing the young dealers with them. Community safety teams, who rescued 80 tenants in London in 2005, were the first to call the tactic “cuckooing”.

For a brief time, Sacha Jafri was both the creator of the world’s largest painting and one of the world’s most expensive living artists, after his 17,000‑square‑foot work The Journey of Humanity was theatrically “sold” for $62 million at a Dubai charity auction. The buyer, French “crypto billionaire” André Abdoune, never paid a cent and, given his history as a serial fraudster, almost certainly never will—meaning no money ever reached the charities that were promised the proceeds. So what was the real story: a giant painting, or a giant scam?

Many of Jafri’s other claims do not stand up to scrutiny. He is often touted as an artist whose work sells in the millions, but publicly available commercial auction records are more modest. His most expensive painting before The Journey Of Humanity was a piece called Dance of the Midnight Samurai, which sold in 2019 for approximately $70,000. The previous year, another work, Dreamscape II, went unsold at two auctions, before eventually being acquired for $893. Newspaper articles document purchases by Kevin Spacey and Guy Ritchie, but there are no reports of sales to Bill Gates, Leonardo DiCaprio, Barack Obama or Bill Clinton. No pictures exist of their red-printed hands.

I had never heard of the delightfully named Hudsonian godwit before this piece—yet, given their achievements, they deserve global fame. These slight, mudflat-loving shorebirds hold the record for the longest nonstop flight, clocking journeys of seven thousand miles or more that one scientist deems “technically impossible.” Rivka Galchen follows researchers from Patagonian mudflats to Alaskan bogs as they try to understand the biology behind these incredible flights. Along the way, she even gets to hold one of our little celebrities, an “otherworldly and wondrous” experience.

Migratory shorebirds are usually not a person’s first bird crush. They lack the supernatural aura of the resplendent quetzal, and they don’t go in for outlandish mating displays like that of the prairie chicken. As the Princeton University biology professor and shorebird-lover David Wilcove put it, migratory shorebirds can give an impression of being “little brown guys, buzzing around in the mud, not too big and not too small, and, whether one is a stint or a phalarope or a knot or a godwit, they’re just kind of there.” And yet, Wilcove told me, they are a birder’s kind of bird. Once people get to know them, they tend to fall in love.

I’m not a fan of improv. I’ve even walked out of a class before—being told to pretend to give birth just wasn’t for me. But its popularity was once never in doubt: people were all too willing to shell out hard‑earned cash to watch performers fumble through impromptu sketches. Nowadays, the form has lost its shine, and Dennis M. Hogan traces whether it still has a place in today’s culture. The inspired title alone means this is a read you should say “yes” to.

During the boom years of the late 2000s and 2010s, improv persuaded many people that it was not just a wacky gimmick but, as I believed, an art in itself. The rise of stars like the improv-trained Steve Carell, Tina Fey, and Amy Poehler convinced casting directors and network executives that improvisers had graduated from sideshows to being bankable talents in their own rights. Performances were packed with newbies and aficionados alike. Major theaters added classes and facilities to meet growing demand, allowing many improvisers who never made it big to eke out livings as teachers and theater staff. The gospel of improv spread to those far outside the comedy world, from self-improvement seekers hoping to level up their interpersonal abilities to corporate suits eager to take advantage of the latest team-building and soft skill-optimization fad.

This story moves chronologically through a marriage that begins to unravel—with fatal consequences. The victim is Dan Markel, the ex-husband of Wendi Adelson, but it’s the involvement of Wendi’s domineering mother, Donna, and her brother, Charlie, that leads to his tragic end. Katherine Laidlaw shows how there were far more than two people in this marriage—and far more than two lives destroyed when it fell apart.

Harvey was nominally the breadwinner, but Donna ruled the family. She had strict ideas about how her children should live, pushing them to earn advanced degrees and build prestigious careers. Rob became a doctor, and Charlie became a periodontist, eventually buying his father’s dental practice. Donna obsessed, too, about her children’s love lives, scrolling through online dating profiles and sending them lists of promising candidates. When Rob started seeing a woman who wasn’t Jewish, Donna interfered so aggressively that he eventually broke it off and briefly married someone else. (He has since married his original non-Jewish girlfriend.) At first, Donna was thrilled that her daughter was seeing Dan, then a lawyer at a boutique firm. She was less thrilled when he left to pursue academia, a path that she felt paid poorly and lacked cachet.

Daniel Shailer embeds with the tiny separatist group “Shetland First,” whose members believe the Shetland Islands were never legitimately ceded to Scotland. Its 83‑year‑old leader, Stuart Hill—shipwreck survivor, serial litigant, self‑proclaimed weather‑controller—is such a compelling eccentric that Shailer ends up as absorbed in Hill’s own story as in the broader currents of populism on these remote isles.

Previously, Hill has focused on relatively esoteric points of history and legalese. Now, on the advice of his chief campaign advisor, ChatGPT, he is meeting people where they are: should council tax go up while official salaries get bumped? Is it fair to live in fuel poverty at the footsteps of Britain’s largest onshore wind farm?

‘There are all these injustices, and once you read the history, you can see a basic injustice,’ Hill says. ‘Everybody seems to be kind of comfortable with it, but at the same time there’s a basic undercurrent of dissatisfaction.’

Ian Parker does not hold back in painting the egos of the characters in this horse‑world scandal, clearly growing tired at times of the pomposity of Michael Barisone, a U.S. dressage trainer and former Olympian who shot his student, Lauren Kanarek, after an escalating feud. Claiming that Kanarek’s online taunts and complaints drove him insane, Barisone was eventually found not guilty, though later banned from his sport by the U.S. Center for SafeSport. Tread carefully as you enter this arena; narcissism lurks everywhere.

The first time I called him, he said, of the case, “You’re going to find it is a John Grisham novel combined with ‘Fatal Attraction’ combined with ‘Yellowstone.’ ” Barisone’s story has its evident hero, and its villain is Kanarek, his victim. In this presentation of events—a “scum of the earth” client, in his words, and a terrific guy who snapped, as anyone would have—Barisone has enjoyed near-universal support from the dressage community, and beyond. In much of the online discussion about the case, including in the forums of The Chronicle of the Horse, a long-established magazine, commenters have identified two victims, not one, and have almost always found Barisone’s victimhood the more compelling. A woman was shot, but a man was driven to shoot her, because she was annoying, and at times belligerent, in person and on social media. Kanarek has been widely scorned as a dressage interloper and as an embodiment of contemporary ills: a bullshitter, an entitled troll.

Mary Austin was the woman behind Freddie Mercury, quietly supporting him for decades, from their intense early romance to the long years they remained close friends after accepting that he was gay. The vast legacy he left her—his home, much of his fortune, and his most personal belongings—has been a mixed blessing that she has spent her life trying to navigate with loyalty and discretion. As Simon Hattenstone explores Austin’s life in this interview, the unresolved emotion of the shared past with Mercury is still palpable.

Did the piano change him? “Yes, there was much more purposeful energy. He would sit at the piano, play the odd key, hum a bit and he looked very happy. Transported.” By now they were spending less time together. When she was working at Biba, he would often be sleeping. When she returned home, he would be preparing for a gig.

They’d been living together for four years when Mercury said he had something to tell her. He struggled to get the words out. He said, ‘I think I’m bisexual.’ I said ‘No, Freddie, I think you’re gay.’” He didn’t argue. Was that a huge upset? “No, it was a huge relief, because I wasn’t sure whether we were travelling in the same direction any more. Some time earlier I saw a dress and thought, that would be a really nice wedding dress. I asked Freddie, is it worth me buying it, and he looked at me and shook his head. So I knew from there on …”

A man named Donald Liebenberg tops eclipse-chaser-log.com with a whopping 2 hours, 27 minutes, and 41 seconds of darkness from 27 total eclipses—stats I didn’t even know people tracked until I read Rudi Zygadlo’s piece. It turns out there’s a dedicated subculture of umbraphiles logging every second of totality. Zygadlo meets a veteran British couple who’ve built their lives around these fleeting events, then travels to Spain in August 2026 to see his own first total eclipse. Adding 1 minute 38 seconds to the board earns him a place near the bottom, but judging by the awe he feels in those brief moments of darkness, he may be moving up the league yet.

There are various eclipse-chasing guests in our hotel. You can identify many of them from themed caps and T-shirts. The largest party is an alumni group from UCLA. We meet several by the pool. A couple from Minnesota, a sommelier from New York. “I was in Montreal for 2024,” says Mees from the Netherlands, treading water. “My wife is a virgin.” Everyone is friendly, but somewhat shifty when it comes to the issue of where to watch. We are too.

By 6pm on the day of, we are stationed on the infernal hillside, on a dusty path beneath pine trees and an immaculate sky. There are better vantage points but we have some degree of privacy here. We can hear others, but we can’t see them. The partial phase begins with a yodel at 7:34pm when the sun is eight degrees — or a fist’s length — above the horizon and my father-in-law produces a bottle of local white, which immediately turns warm in the glass. The nibble of the moon turns into a bite then into a crescent and I’m surprised how well my bottom-of-the-range bridge camera with a solar filter over the lens captures the partial phases. Later I’ll wish I never turned the thing on. Meara is quiet. Glowing. She is more pregnant than ever.

Apparently, African wild dogs enjoy knocking around balls of elephant dung like a football. It’s this playfulness that has endeared them to researchers—but, as Helen Sullivan points out, they have their work cut out for them trying to protect this persecuted big predator. Sullivan follows conservationists in southern Africa who are carefully managing tiny, isolated populations and attempting to introduce genetic diversity. The story of the three sisters who are flown over from Mozambique to be introduced to Waterberg—a South African municipality three hours from Johannesburg—is heart-wrenching. Yet in such a harsh environment, individual tragedies have to be endured while staying focused on the bigger picture: the fragile recovery of the species as a whole.

As we help Greyling and Hlako lift a crate off the pickup, a dusty paw flops out of one corner, and I think of something my uncle says: “You can smell the world in a dog’s paw.” Mooney and I back away, watching from inside a container as Hlako moves the car so that the overheating dog is in the shade. Though it is late afternoon, the temperature is still around 90 degrees. 

Hlako and Greyling release the dogs one at a time, opening the crate and waiting until a dog walks, then trots, out. The first is less sure on her feet, the second seems almost normal, until Mooney points out that she would have run much faster from the crate and people had she not still been a bit dozy. The sisters stand together in a grassy area, point their noses in the air, move their satellite-dish ears and lie down under a thorn tree; it has been a long day. 

As Eliran Arazi spends time with the Andoque, an Indigenous people in southern Colombia along the Caquetá River, he finds himself increasingly drawn into their tales that interweave sexuality with the creatures of the jungle. Gradually, those stories begin to shape his own way of thinking about seduction in modern life, as his mind spins off its own fantasies. A fascinating piece that blurs the lines between writer and subject, leaving the reader in a dreamlike state.

A few days later, jaguar footprints appeared along the long path leading to a small harbour on the Caquetá River. For the next week, Dufi’s family expressed concerns about venturing down that path, especially alone, for fear of a jaguar attack. When I mentioned my plan to go there for a phone call, hoping for better reception by the river, one of Dufi’s sons again cautioned me about the jaguar. Dufi, however, quickly reassured me. I had nothing to fear because jaguars dislike the soapy, perfumed scent of white people, which, he added, is precisely the smell that attracts dolphins.

As I reached the Caquetá in the late afternoon, I sensed the dolphin smell again. Odours and attraction, I thought – at least it works both ways.

When Sabrina Imbler’s cat, Melon, becomes seriously ill with what is later confirmed as feline infectious peritonitis (FIP), Imbler feels she doesn’t have time to wait for a formal diagnosis and turns to a Facebook group that connects desperate cat owners with a black‑market treatment: GS‑441524. Injecting Melon twice a day at home, they enter a frantic stretch in which the acidic drug causes a wound to open on Melon’s back, and she is sentenced to weeks in a hated recovery suit called a Suitical: “Melon was so upset that she lay on her side like a tipped cow for hours, her chin glumly fixed to the carpet.” With Melon finally fully recovered, Imbler has the space to look back on the desperate measures it took to save her.

The FIP Warriors contact met me in the lobby of their building, wearing a knit cap with cat ears. They proceeded to demonstrate how to deliver the medicine on their stuffed cat, Edward. I watched as they manipulated the stuffed toy, lifting up pockets in Edward’s “skin” into which I was to drive a 22-gauge needle at an angle into subcutaneous tissue. I paid $50 for two vials of injectable GS-441524, which was acidic to keep it shelf-stable. This acidity, the contact warned me, meant the injections burned. “It’s really best if you have help,” they told me. “Will you have help?” No, I told them. My ex was out of town and it was just me and Melon. “Well, you’ll figure something out,” they said. I would have to.

Europe is warming more than twice as fast as the global average—a terrifying statistic made all too apparent this summer as heat wave followed heat wave. European cities were never designed for these temperatures, and public health, infrastructure, and tourism are all under strain. Eric Klinenberg arrives in Milan just as “Europe’s third heat wave of the summer entered its fiercest stretch” and sweats his way across the continent to see how trees, shade, water, and other measures are being deployed to adapt urban centers. But with this crisis set to deepen can these experiments really keep pace?

Of all the problems that heat poses for Barcelona, losing some of the hundred and sixty thousand tourists who typically visit each day ranks low on the priority lists of most officials and residents. Some locals have staged protests, chanting “Tourists go home” while targeting visitors with water guns. But tourism employs more than a hundred and sixty thousand people in Barcelona and accounts for around thirteen per cent of its economic output, which explains why, despite concerns that the city gets too many visitors, more than seventy per cent of residents consider tourism beneficial. At midday, when I arrived on La Rambla, the city’s most heavily visited and photographed corridor, the street had little shade and surprisingly few people. At La Boqueria market, normally jam-packed at lunchtime, I found my way to a famously busy bar counter and took one of several open seats.

Do you remember the media frenzy over lab-grown meat? Why, several years later, has it not become a supermarket staple? Erin Somers investigates with wry humor as she throws herself, and her taste buds, into exploring why cultivated meat has yet to take over the world. You’ll devour this piece.

The two of them ate with forks and knives, passing the plate, sawing off thoughtful bites. Chewing slowly. Afterward they rendered their verdicts. “I would say it is somewhere on the spectrum between a Boca Burger and McDonald’s,” Schonwald told a reporter from NBC. “The absence of fat makes a big difference. It has the texture, which I was not expecting. It was like an animal-protein cake.” Rützler noted the burger’s blandness to a reporter from Science. “There is room for improvement here,” she said. At the end of the event, roughly $150,000 worth of burger remained uneaten. But none of this stopped Post from predicting that meat cultivated in a lab would become a consumer product within the decade.

When Rhonda MacDonald put out a plea for help on Facebook, the cowboys answered. Wildfires have been ravaging British Columbia, Canada, this summer—and when a ranch is put under evacuation, it is no easy feat to round up 150 free‑roaming cattle. The MacDonald herd was roaming a vast, 100,000‑acre expanse of Crown rangeland above the ranch, and the people of most use were those on horseback. This exhilarating piece documents the people who came to help, and honors the skills and hard‑won knowledge needed to navigate treacherous, fire‑scarred terrain to save the herd and help a neighbour in crisis.

Before the riders headed up Mimenuh Mountain, Wayne MacDonald stood in front of a whiteboard with a red Sharpie and began drawing. Not a map, exactly. More like 50 years of memory. He sketched the ridges, draws and escape routes cattle would choose under pressure. There was one thing he kept returning to: the lack of escape routes. “As far as road, there’s one in and one out.” They knew there might come a moment when staying was no longer brave – it was reckless.

“Sound is a tangible way of connecting to aspects of nature that are hidden from humans. The deep ocean, the dark night, and now the dense earth beneath our feet,” writes Ella Browning. And you can hear underground for yourself in the fascinating recordings she includes in her essay on earthworm “munching.” In this emerging field of soil ecoacoustics, researchers—including Browning—are finding links between ecosystem recovery and the character of underground soundscapes. Healthy soil literally sounds different. This piece will change how you view the ground beneath your feet.

A core principle of ecoacoustics is that complexly noisy natural places are healthier natural places. This means that it’s not just the volume of noise, but the diversity of sound that indicates habitat health. The dawn chorus in an intact Bornean tropical forest is magical in its complexity, especially if you’re lucky to experience it mixed in with the whoops of a troop of gibbons swinging through overhead, as I was during a visit in 2019.

In contrast, cities are generally not ecologically healthy and, while they are incredibly noisy places, they are filled with the harsh, more monotonous sounds of car engines and other machines, and often little biotic sound. Soundscapes dominated by anthropogenic sounds have been linked to poor mental health in people, whereas the opposite has been found for natural sounds like birdsong or forest soundscapes.

I used to be in a friend group chat called “Tinder Spinsters,” a group of girls offering support as we navigated the tumultuous dating world. Faith Hill’s chat is named “Lonely Hearts Club,” but are these groups becoming a thing of the past? Are people even still trying? In a 2025 YouGov poll, 69 percent of single respondents said they “rarely” or “never” go on dates. Nowadays, it’s complicated. On the positive side, a relationship is no longer seen as essential for a happy life—women’s interest in men, in particular, has dimmed as their financial independence has grown. But many people would still love to find a partner; they are just finding that modern romance requires a toll “paid in energy, in sanity, in cash, in hours—and not everyone can afford it.”

The hug was the last round, though, and then real life resumed. We mingled, but the intimacy had disappeared. One man told me that he had high emotional intelligence and could tell that I did too—then he suggested that we travel together someday, handed me his business card, and walked away. I gave a few people my phone number, including one man who sent me a picture of his face the very next morning and another who texted me so much (even after a polite rebuff) that I had to block him. One date with another guy resulted, but I wasn’t interested in a second. The perception of abundance had, once again, evaporated into nothing.