Kevin Dupzyk’s profile of Sam Rockwell, a “legendary scene-stealer” now in his fourth decade of work, is a crisp and entertaining one-act, with journalist and actor holed up in a spare Manhattan greenroom. Dupzyk studies Rockwell while Rockwell studies the room, testing the durability of his own idiosyncratic observations—about Red Bull and loss and rain—to see what they might yield in a conversation with a stranger. Dupzyk had wanted to “gin up some action for this story,” but it’s strangely compelling to watch Rockwell’s gaze prowl the room, to see what lodges in the filter of his creative process.

Rockwell is a good tennis player. And like any good athlete, he trains. For as much as he appears to get by on natural charm and charisma, he is an actor’s actor, a true believer, in his words, an “acting nerd.” Research. Running lines. Exerci—

“Do you know what a gibbon is?” Rockwell asks.

“Like, a monkey?” I say, confused.

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.

“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.