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.

Earlier this year, the US Supreme Court heard an appeal from death row inmate Terry Pitchford, who was denied relief by the Mississippi Supreme Court after his attorneys claimed Black people were illegally struck from his jury. Investigative reporter Hannah McAlilly delves into the case, and into the wider problem of racial prejudice in the selection of juries in Mississippi:

A prosecutor struck a Black woman for having “red dyed hair” and in another, a prosecutor struck a Black man because he had “a ponytail, a sort of strange hair design.” That prosecutor told the judge he was concerned the juror might identify too closely with the defendant, who also was of a similar age. “Both have unusual hair styles,” the prosecutor said. 

Prosecutors struck Black jurors who, they said, seemed angry, irritated or inattentive. A Black woman was struck because the prosecutor didn’t like her “vibe.” Another, who worked a night shift before showing up to jury selection, was struck for being “fidgety” and looking “angry.” Another was struck because she “frowned a lot.” 

In a beautiful and vivid essay on home, time, and family, Diane Roberts reflects on the house that her parents built, and their family’s land in Leon County, Florida, to which she feels deeply connected. I especially love Roberts’s thoughts on a home versus a house—the latter is composed of construction materials, but “home implies a complex neural network of family association and feeling, layers of experience, a shared past.” Despite the tragedies the home holds, it is ultimately a place of memory and meaning.

Home and time are as tangled as the skunk vine and Confederate jasmine choking my backyard fence. I suppose that’s to be expected. My house holds our history and the indispensable relics of former houses, objects cherished by the now-dead: the tiny rocking chair my grandfather made for my mother when she was three; the 1960 TR3 in the barn my brother never quite got around to fixing; the two old rosebushes dug up from the Washington County farm, replanted at Great-Aunt Rilla’s house in Chipley, then dug up again and transported to our front yard. The house didn’t simply belong to us, it was us—our mother, our father, Brad, and me.

In this story for MIT Technology Review, Sara Harrison explores the field of social robotics and the growing use of robot companions as therapy for autistic and other neurodivergent kids. These playful machines show promise: Research suggests that they can help children practice social skills and offer something overworked therapists and exhausted parents can’t—a patient companion, available 24/7. But Harrison also reports on their limitations and risks. Does this approach truly work? What about all the data gathered on the child? And what happens when a robot friend suddenly stops working and “dies”? A fascinating and unsettling look at tech that has moved into the most intimate corners of a family’s home.

While Moxie found herself in more and more people’s homes, Embodied still struggled to make money. In 2024, the company announced it would cease operations. Its robots—which depended on external servers that the company could no longer pay for—would descend into a deep slumber. 

Videos of bereft children who seemed to have become deeply attached to the blue bot began to circulate online. “I don’t want her to leave,” wailed one child in a TikTok video. Desperate parents posted on TikTok, Instagram, and Reddit looking for solutions. “My autistic child is devastated and I’m pissed,” wrote one parent. “Hope Embodied gives us a couple days to say goodbye,” wrote another. 

When I was little I had a ritual with my parents where, as they tucked me into bed, they’d tell me a few reasons why they loved me (yes, I know how lucky I am to have been raised in an environment like this). As part of their list, I always asked them to say I was careful, and dutifully they’d repeat, “Yes, of course, we love you because you’re so careful.” I needed my parents’ words to ward against a recurring-day-mare-type vision I had in those years, in which I climbed onto our roof and then, while recklessly peering over the edge, toppled off the eave and cracked open my skull. I would never have put myself in that situation in waking life; I was so cautious that even an imagined scenario in which I endangered myself was enough to terrify me. But being reassured of my carefulness night after night made me feel safer.

My prudent youth did involve a handful of responsibly chaperoned birthday parties at Northern California climbing gyms, and a handful of climbing excursions in the Sierras with my grandfather, but ironically the flatland of Minnesota is where I got serious about the sport. During those unrelentingly brutal winters I seized upon climbing for exercise and entertainment—in the gym, since it was colder than the dark side of Mars outside—as a way to stave off cabin fever in the long months of permafrost. On a recent visit back to the Twin Cities at the close of one such winter, right after a session at the gym where I first cut my teeth, I posted up on the patio of an organic café to bask in the abrupt warmth of springtime. A guy sitting at the table next to me asked if I was a climber—our veiny forearms signal us to one another like Harley-Davidson jackets do for bikers—and I said yes. We started chatting.

This guy had just moved to town to save his own life. He was a paraglider, parachutist, kite-surfer, and wingsuiter, and he said that in the last year a dozen members of his inner circle “went in,” including his best friend and his brother, all in accidents related to their gravity-skirting pursuits. At first I couldn’t figure out what he meant by “went in,” but as I listened to him enumerate their various methods of “going in,” I eventually realized he was telling me they had all died. I could hardly comprehend the reality he described: being at the heart of a community where loved ones blink out in droves, like candles in a gale. He knew if he stayed in the game as a professional extreme athlete, pressured by peers and sponsors alike to remain at the cutting edge, he himself wouldn’t be around much longer. So, sight-unseen, he moved to the flattest and boringest place he’d ever heard of: Minnesota. He came specifically because there weren’t any cliffs for him to throw himself off. Only a few months into his new life as a Minnesotan, he was still in the jittery, cold turkey phase of his thrill detox.

“You done much free soloing?” he asked.

“Not really,” I said. A truer answer would have been HELL NO I’M A WIMP, MY PARENTS LOVE ME BECAUSE I’M CAREFUL.

“Amazing feeling,” he said. “Being certain if you fuck up you’ll die, and being equally certain you won’t fuck up.”

We listened to the birds, sipped our coffees. I picked at the remains of my huevos rancheros. The juncos twittering around us sounded gladder than usual to be alive. I asked, “Is it really that much less fun to have a rope on? Like, clip a few draws? Place some cams along the way?”

He shook his head. “Once you been hucking yourself off the high dive, it’s no fun jumping off the edge of the pool.”

This at least rang true. Even I find it boring to jump off the edge of the pool.

“Glad you got out when you did,” I said.

He nodded grimly, seeming less glad than I was. Then I asked what he was getting up to instead. Of course, it was the most extreme thing you can do on flat ground.

“Ultramarathons,” he said.

He didn’t seem interested in probing his own psychology or rationales. He unapologetically liked the feeling of being adrenalized, and he wanted to feel that feeling as much as possible without killing himself. Why turn it into some elaborate trolley problem? For those living on the outer edges of risk, I suspect confidence is the key to survival: the confidence in one’s ability to assess a risk and then the confidence to execute the necessary action once a risk is deemed acceptable. Extreme athletes don’t seem to think too hard, at least on an abstract philosophical level, about the dangers they face. Their engagement is logistical, methodical. Far more productive to test the snowpack, visualize the beta, read the weather report, double-check the way the parachute is folded, determine what direction the wind blows down the talus field.

Rather than focusing on what we stand to lose, what riches does risk put us in position to gain?

But risk has been on my mind of late, because, much to my own surprise, my relationship to it has been changing. Recently I was on a very tall boulder called the Kraken, and it felt like I spent a hundred years with the sand in its penultimate pocket rolling grittily under my fingertips while I searched the rounded top of the block for a hold I could trust. A part of me is there still, suspended in that epoch of hold hunting, gearing up for the final move. This is one of risk’s most obvious gifts, the chance to experience that rare, thin-slicing acuity where each separate millisecond stands out like an image etched in stone. The present dilates to activate the past and future, too, as though we’re living our whole life all at once. With a cognitive rapacity available only during a fight-or-flight response, we cast our gaze forward, asking what grim future will bloom if we fall. And simultaneously cast it back, asking what errors in our past have brought us to this crossroads. Have I survived a situation like this before? Will I get lucky and survive again?

In a film, that’s where the music would come up, dissonant strings, ringing ears, the drums increasing tempo. It’s odd that the times of our deepest dumbstruck not-knowingness should be called “moments of truth.” I found a shallow, sandy divot for my right hand, threw my left heel high over the lip, and rolled onto the top of the boulder. A friend took photos, but it makes me uncomfortable to look at them.

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From the back seat of a lifted pickup, deep house oozing out of a handmade portable stereo that Owen built into an antique suitcase, I look over the truck bed at the contrail of dust we send into the Eastern Sierra evening. Our pilot expertly navigates a kaleidoscope of dirt roads to deliver us at the Crab Cooker. Tumbling out of the truck we grab towels, water bottles, and puffy jackets, and walk a raised wooden path to the area’s hottest hot spring. An eggy, algal cloud envelops us before the spring itself comes into view. Then we see the rock-rimmed pool, a steam plume ascending from a dark crater. The water here, when it first comes to the surface, hovers around 150 degrees Fahrenheit—hot enough to cook crabs, no exaggeration in the name—so people cut it with cold water from a surface stream until it comes down to around 110. The pool is still hotter than any man-made tub I’ve ever sunk myself into, and its scalding sting feels spectacular on the aches we’ve accrued from several consecutive climbing days at the Buttermilks and in Owens River Gorge. We keep our hands lifted above the surface of the water so our hard-earned calluses don’t melt off.

Parallel to us climbers, there runs an entire subculture of hot springs enthusiasts who travel the country to find the loveliest, toastiest, unlikeliest geothermal pools that tectonics has to offer. Connecting with this odd population of wanderers is one of the surprise pleasures of our annual Bishop trip. The Crab Cooker must rank high on their list. Wild sage and scrubby junipers riddle the sand, boulders punctuate the foothills and draws, and the impressive ridgelines of the Sierra Eastside tower over it all, seemingly close enough to splash with the flick of a finger. At sunset the land gets saturated with glory and import and impeccable desert light, and we in our good fortune get to gaze at this panorama while the guts of the planet warm us to temperatures well in excess of our own hearts’ heat.

When, to our surprise, two bodies coalesce out of the steam, we apologize for our loudness and promptly shut down the stereo. The strangers don’t mind, they say, they’ve been enjoying the ruckus. The new arrivals are a pair of Germans, a father and his grown son, who have been touring America together. Before long our separate conversations become enmeshed in the small pool. We learn that the younger soaker, the son, used to be an accomplished extreme athlete. He somberly explains that he found himself a lonelier and lonelier survivor as his BASE-jumping and wingsuiting friends went in. Hearing the phrase now for the second time, I’m struck by the gentleness of the euphemism, far softer than the verb to crater, as in “their parachute didn’t deploy and they cratered,” which I’d heard in gruffer conversations with BASE jumpers. I picture these lost friends “going in” to a collective reserve of matter and spirit, the heavenly welter where all unmade is remade. Although, with the image of a crater in mind, I suppose “going in” could refer not to the eternally cyclical return to one’s mysterious origin but rather to a body “going in” to the ground at terminal velocity. Needless to say, I don’t ask the German.

He explains to a rapt audience that last year, upon successfully landing a jump, his still-open parachute caught a fierce gust of wind that slammed him into a cliff and dragged him across a talus field. Multiple impacts against the rocks shattered innumerable bones, including several in his back. By coincidence, the guy’s best friend was flying the emergency helicopter that came to collect his ragdoll body. To those on board it looked like a hopeless case, a certain fatality, but in the end the guy survived. Hearing the story, I look to my own best friend soaking by my side. We make eye contact and discreetly drop our jaws a fraction of a centimeter, a silent exchange of Jesus fucking Christ.

“Jesus Christ,” I say aloud to the German.

“It’s no problem,” the guy says, gesturing grandly at the mountain-rimmed basin that surrounds us. “Happy I am living.”

He’s still in the middle of a years-long rehabilitation process, he explains. He points to a neck brace he’d removed before his soak, whose plastic struts I now see glowing in the moonlight, a safe distance back from the water where it won’t get splashed. “It’s no problem to wear that sometimes.”

“Just like when he was a baby,” the dad says cheerfully. “I help him eat, then I help him shit!”

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We typically view risk in relation to death—inviting its possibility, skirting its tentacles—but I’ve lately been exploring a philosophy that views risk, instead, in relation to life. Rather than focusing on what we stand to lose, what riches does risk put us in position to gain? This question came by way of a book called Éloge du risque by French philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle. It hadn’t yet been translated into English, but with undergrad French memories and a Larousse dictionary in hand, I bought a copy and dove in. I worked on my translations of Éloge du risque while riding the Flatiron Flyer bus between Boulder and Denver. During this commute the Flatirons themselves rise to the west like a fleet of ships tacking in formation, their huge reddish triangular faces making a tidy row of sails afloat on a choppy sea of pine.

A route called Freeway ascends the Second Flatiron (they’re numbered sequentially from north to south), and locals tell me it’s a fun, dead-easy romp for the entire thousand feet of the eastern face. Nobody bothers to use the melodramatic phrase free solo; they just call it a scramble. The route has seen barefoot ascents, no-hands ascents, and, the clearest indicator of its difficulty, an ascent by a climber wearing roller skates. For some reason I never wonder whether I’m going to climb it, I just know, innately, that I’m going to. It’s an indicator that my relationship to risk is changing. Even still, as I prepare to solo—sorry, scramble—the Second, I approach it with a solemnity bordering on gloom. I warm up at home, stretch, fuel and hydrate, tidy the basement so that if I die I won’t leave an unsightly mess for my landlady to deal with. Ridiculous. The short drive across town feels haunted, with the Flatirons leering in the windshield as I pilot my way westward. I park and take a deep breath before exiting the vehicle. Walk up the trail, a well-beaten one that sees countless tourists and toddlers safely along the base of the range, taking every rock-hopping step with exaggerated care, testing the infallibility of my balance. And then I sit at the base of the Second for ages, meditative and serious, while a string of a half-dozen stoned teenagers fire the route, unroped, not even pausing their giggling conversation as they step off the trail and onto the rock.

Supposedly there’s a crux around fifty feet off the ground, but for me it turned out the crux was just deciding to do it. When I finally put on my climbing shoes, tuck my sneakers into my backpack, and lay my hands on the crystalline stone, hard moves are absolutely nowhere to be found. The climbing feels easier than walking, in fact, since I get to use my hands in addition to my feet. From a hundred feet up, and again at three hundred and again at five hundred, I glance down at the sandstone ramp the foot of the mountain makes, observe how the trail gets thinner and the trees get smaller as I rise, and experience a wave of giddiness. I sip that sensation like champagne, peering, bubbling, then I turn my face to the wall and continue the scramble. At the summit I sit a long time and look east at a flat expanse of town and plain that appears to extend all the way to the Atlantic. I’ve wagered my life, and have been repaid tenfold.

A week later, I take an incremental step up in difficulty and try the Third Flatiron. Locals, I notice, do tend to refer to this one as a solo, not a scramble. I’m exiting the kiddie pool. Again I follow the trail through Chautauqua Park with a measure of unease in my gut, hiking through grassy open fields up into the pine sea, and then across a stretch of loose talus to the base of the route. A thousand angling, rippling feet of sandstone thrust westward, the summit hidden from view. I bring my chalk bag this time and coat my palms with a layer of white dust to keep them from slickening with sweat. Unlike the Second, the Third is a legitimate, if moderate, climb. I make careful progress, never moving more than one limb at a time, testing each handhold for soundness, testing each surface for slipperiness, before entrusting my weight to it. Focus, rather than rhapsody, rules the experience. The crux comes at the top. Until that point I’d been hanging on bucket-like holds, generous craters, but the rock comprising the last twenty feet below the peak has been worn smooth by the elements. Though the terrain is low angle, it’s holdless as an asphalt road. This section, I knew from my research beforehand, would require a few moves of open-hand slab climbing. In the absence of tangible features on the cliff, you just paste your hands and feet onto the surface and rely on friction to hold you in place.

Slab is an unnerving, faith-based style of climbing, and those few moves—a thousand feet off the ground, knowing a fall would be fatal—demand a degree of meticulousness I’ve never before needed to summon. To summon it that afternoon is like flexing a new muscle for the very first time. I feel each grain of the gritty matrix as it deforms the skin of my fingertips, fitting the ridges of my fingerprint to match the ridges of the Flatiron’s surface. I attune to the gumminess of my shoe, the pressure of the ball of my foot compressing its rubber sole, filling completely the negative space of the rock’s surface. Death isn’t on my mind. It’s a million miles away. I know I will be perfect, and this perfection will make me invincible. If I fall, my last thought will be I never saw this coming. But I wager; I scurry. I summit. From the top I stare down at the backs of raptors, at the pine and the prairie, and again my spirit prospers.

The next morning from the bus I cast a lingering glance over the Flatirons. I look at the granulated ripples of the cliffs and superimpose my antlike image onto them, watching memories of myself crawl up the faces as if in footage captured by a drone. I’m still up there, forever taking those calm breaths, forever palming those grainy domes. Fellow commuters catch me wearing a moony smile. Now, pen gripped in my teeth, Éloge du risque open in my lap, my gaze drifts a click northward. My newfound muscle twitches. In the notebook for my scraps and outlines I write FOR RISK ESSAY: SOLO THE FIRST? After spending the day on campus I get back on the bus for my evening commute, and that scribbled notion digs into me uncomfortably. The wobble on the highway made my script look manic. It is manic. The idea stands squarely outside of what I consider to be an acceptable level of climbing risk. From the bus window the First dominates the ridgeline as the Flatirons fall into shadow. Morning and evening light seem to fashion two different ranges out of the same rock space. When I try on the idea of soloing the First, it feels like a too-small sweater pulled over my head, grabbing my skull. I know I should rip it off and discard it. But I could also push my way inside. I recall a strong, confident climber-friend whose trip report after soloing the First was simply, “I’m never going to do that again.” I wondered what had happened to turn his face so ashen, but he didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t pry.

These accident reports save lives more directly, more demonstrably, than poetry or scripture.

Climbing culture has a storytelling idiom I call “Close Calls.” They’re an inversion of just-so stories; instead of tales of creation like “How the Zebra Got Its Stripes” or “How the Giraffe’s Neck Got So Long,” Close Calls focus on tales of destruction like “How Rebecca Lost Her Leg” or “How Johnny Lost His Partner.” Years ago at the base of the Incredible Hulk, a gorgeous granite outcrop in the Sierras, Owen and I were preparing to climb the classic Red Dihedral. We’d undertaken the steep approach hike in the evening, stove heated some expired and deeply disappointing beef stew, and established our bivvy beside a picturesque rivulet riffling through a boulder field. Two young women camped at another minimeadow a few hundred feet downstream, and when the stars came up, they invited us down for a sip of whiskey. We splashed a bit of warmish bourbon into our unwashed bowls, resulting in a cocktail like a hot Sazerac with a beef-grease rinse instead of an absinthe one. During that night’s edition of Close Calls, we hear of a time an inexperienced leader led a pitch and built an anchor, and one of the women (now sipping her whiskey between plot points) followed him up, arriving at a worthless nest of protection that, had she fallen, would have sputtered from the wall and killed them both. Next my buddy describes watching a climber follow an outdoor route on top-rope, unclipping each draw along the way, and then, at the top, unclipping the two draws that held the rope, and then, the height of outrageousness, untying his rope and dropping it to the ground, meaning he was now clinging to holds a hundred feet off the deck with nothing else to hold him in place. By some miracle a professional climber was on a route next door and, seeing the disaster unfold, climbed to the stranded kid in minutes with a spare rope to reattach him to the world.

As with any public storytelling genre, there’s a ritual to it. One teller shares the scariest climbing story they’ve heard or experienced, a story of someone’s closest call. The fireside audience takes in the punchline—a survival unscathed, a rescue, an injury, a fatality—in solemn contemplation. After a respectful interval and perhaps another sip of whiskey, the next teller narrates an even closer call. For listeners familiar enough with safety systems to fully appreciate the danger, miscommunication, unpreparedness or negligence in these stories, the tales provide riveting entertainment, in their own grim way. But they serve a deeper purpose, too, in that they circulate these scenarios as a risk-prevention measure. The same could be said of the more formal narratives published by the American Alpine Club. Their style is unadorned, a blow-by-blow sequence of errors that led up to an injury or death on the wall, but safety-oriented climbers read these annual accident reports with biblical devotion. Instead of re-living old traumas, these prudent folks pre-live them, learning to deal with such catastrophes should they arise or, better yet, learning to avoid such catastrophes altogether. These accident reports save lives more directly, more demonstrably, than poetry or scripture.

We could easily swap Close Calls all night, but both teams are planning to start our ascents of the Hulk at dawn, so we force ourselves to break up the party before it gets too late. I brush my teeth, taking a gamble on unfiltered river water, and tuck myself into bed. In the sleeping bag, staring up at the densest panorama of stars I’ve seen in months, I wonder what moment, in my life so far, was the moment I was nearest to death. My own closest call, in a statistical sense, when my odds of survival were lowest. At first I think it would land among the instances when I was most afraid. There was a hike to a ghost town called Lundy when I was dead certain I was being stalked by a mountain lion. Or a time at an outdoor concert in Denver when gunshots broke out and the whole crowd stampeded in panic away from the brutal sound. Then I wonder if my closest call fell among the times I sustained an injury: a spinout on the highway from a blown tire, a fainting spell in the Rockies brought on by dehydration and exhaustion, a split forehead from an ice cave collapse that let me see my own skull through the hole in my skin. But in all likelihood, I bet the moment passed by me altogether unnoticed. One of my countless midnights on a two-lane country road, maybe, when the approaching headlights belonged to a drunk driver, or a trucker on the cusp of sleep, or a heartsick teenager composing a text to an ex. So long as they keep their car on the proper side of the yellow line, I never know the peril I’m in.

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This evening in Boulder the sky is not its usual bluebird. From the egress window of my cheap-ass basement rental I see bulbous clouds gathering overhead. A handful of months have passed and by now the Second Flatiron scramble has become my go-to after-work workout. I lap it a couple times a week, not bothering with climbing shoes anymore, just using the same busted sneakers I wear for the approach hike. But when it rains, the rock slickens, the lichen sucks up moisture and magically transforms from a crust to a lubricant. Given the inclement weather, it’s shaping up to be a work night. So instead of soloing—sorry, scrambling—at sunset, I’m at my desk with a mug of mint tea, bringing Dufourmantelle into English word by word. Risk, she writes and I translate, “inaugurates an other time, as though traumatic. But a positive trauma.”

“An other time” makes me think, to my discredit, of the movie Donnie Darko. The premise of that film, as I interpret it, is that one night in a freak accident an airplane engine fell through the roof of the protagonist Donnie’s house, and should have crushed him, except that he was somnambulantly chasing a giant nightmare rabbit onto a golf course at the time, and thereby avoided his fate. This sets in motion an alternate universe—the one where Donnie lives—that runs alongside the one in which he rightfully dies. I think this is what Dufourmantelle means: When we take a risk, knowing we’ll either experience a near-miss like the Donnie who lives or a direct hit like the Donnie who dies, we create a narrative fork in the road. I’ve long wondered what wingsuiters, free soloists, and skydivers gain through their constant navigation of risk, and tonight I start to sense it. When carefully and responsibly considered, these dangerous activities let adventurers inhabit innumerable parallel universes. We get to live infinite lives and die infinite deaths as, in preparation, we imagine the outcomes and contingencies of each climb, each jump, each flight. The potential plotlines proliferate and the density of our life experience increases. Time dilates to accommodate not only the life we’ve lived and the life we will lead, but also all the lives we might have lived, and might yet lead.

I turn my attention to trauma positif. It’s an uncomfortable phrase. The language carries a reminder that many people experience risk and precarity only under duress. As far as I’m concerned, the privilege inherent in elective risk is alpinism’s original sin, and a key reason that, despite the vast increase in diversity and gender parity in climbing in the last decade, the sport has been slow to shake its aura of patriarchy and whiteness. But Dufourmantelle’s claims sound right to me. Just as negative trauma has the power to reshape the stories that people tell themselves about themselves and about the worlds they inhabit, so too can a trauma positif rewrite a person’s history, even as it rewrites their future. As a result of the risks I’ve taken, and the trauma positif of surviving them, I’m phasing out the story that I’m a meek person. Now, with demonstrable evidence, I must tell myself I’m capable of being brave. Maybe every time you risk your life, you lose it: You lose the life you had before taking the risk, and supplant that life with a new one. A solo of the First Flatiron feels this way for me. Ever since moving to town I’ve told myself I couldn’t solo it. So if I solo it, the version of me too frightened to try it will die.

Days later I see the headline in the local paper: “17-Year-Old Falls to His Death While Climbing Boulder’s First Flatiron.” There’s a photograph of the formation I’ve spent my daily commute mulling over, and the article below:

Equipped with camping and outdoor survival gear—but no climbing-specific equipment—a 17-year-old died after climbing alone and falling up to 100 feet or more from Boulder’s First Flatiron on Sunday evening.

Climber rescues, and non-fatal falls, are common every summer across the iconic rock formations above Chautauqua Park. But this appears to be the first accidental climbing death on the Flatirons in nine years.

The teenager—whose identity has not yet been released, and who officials initially said was 18—was found by a hiker near the base of the First Flatiron, above the Blue Bell Shelter in Chautauqua Park, according to Boulder County sheriff’s officials.

Sheriff’s Cmdr. Mike Wagner said the teen was free-soloing—climbing alone, without the use of ropes or gear—on the First Flatiron when he fell possibly more than 100 feet and suffered “massive traumatic injuries.”

Sources report that the climber took a selfie and posted it to Instagram shortly before the fall. There follow, in the next few days, admonishments from the climbing community, the oft-repeated self-assurances that this kid was unprepared but we know better, and more than a few references to a phenomenon known as “Kodak Courage,” where the possibility of taking an impressive photograph pushes a climber past their typical margin of safety. The next time I walk up to the foot of the First Flatiron, a sober memorial sits at the base of a pine tree. Cards, flowers, offerings. A printout of the photo the climber snapped and posted minutes before his death.

Toward the tail end of the same season the paper runs another headline: “Climber Dies After Falling from Boulder’s First Flatiron.” This time there’s a different stock photo of the mountain, now caked with snow. The article reads:

A man climbing on the First Flatiron on Thursday afternoon fell to his death, the second person to die following an accidental plummet off of the iconic Boulder landmark since August but only the second in nearly a decade.

Boulder County Sheriff’s Office Cmdr. Kevin Parker said that the man—who has not been publicly identified—did not appear to be using any kind of climbing gear, but rescuers were searching the area for any signs of a backpack or gear on Thursday afternoon.

By the time a Denver Post article comes out about the incident later that night, investigators have located and interviewed an eyewitness, so the article is able to provide a bit of additional detail: “The witness believed the climber fell about 1,000 feet from the top of the First Flatiron.”

With that, this essay gets shelved for a spell. It’s not just because the weather has shifted, although the snow on the Front Range makes the Flatirons unclimbable through the winter, intermittent warm days sending rivers of melt down the faces, cold storms stacking new layers of powder over the slush. But more acutely, I realize I’ve been lulled into thinking a solo of the First Flatiron would be a casual endeavor, one that wouldn’t really bring me into proximity of any grave risk. The two deaths, in rapid succession, on the route I’ve planned to climb in the same style abruptly extinguish this confidence, leave me not only shaken but also self-admonishing for having been so cocksure in the first place. I take winter walks through Chautauqua. The snow crunches under my feet, sifts from trailside pine boughs. The Flatirons stand above, their features outlined in icy white. Below, the town of Boulder enjoys its bubble of dreamy calm, a hush of distant traffic in the air, interrupted by an occasional siren belting down Baseline or Table Mesa. During these walking meditations my notebook starts to feel suspiciously similar to the luckless young climber’s selfie camera. Moleskine Courage.

What do we stand to win when our ante is ourselves? The chance to make our finite time feel infinite? The chance to make our finite self feel infinite?

The crux of the First comes in its first hundred feet, where the climbing is particularly thin, slabby and insecure. I stand in the snow at the base—where a second memorial is now tucked in the pines—and visualize the climb. My counterfactual imagination invents a worst-case scenario: I’m not far up the route, approaching the gnarled tree that marks the top of the first pitch where a roped party would typically belay. Immediately below this point there’s a delicate section of friction-dependent slab; the first time I climbed the pitch on rope, this stretch clarified for me that I’d never, ever attempt the route as a solo. There aren’t proper holds, just shallow dishes for the hands and feet. I imagine extending my left foot and placing it in one such divot. I reach farther left with my left hand, where a small diagonal rail supports my left fingertips, stacked in a row. My right hand is similarly stacked in a higher-up dish, and as I go to move my right foot toward my body’s centerline, the left foot slips off. My knees strike the rock first, my elbows a moment after. The angle is low, so I don’t go into full vertical freefall. I bounce down the face. After twenty feet a heel catches and I invert, delivering a rolling blow to my shoulder and an impact to the back of my skull. In my chest a depth charge, a low moan as I land in the talus beside the twin shrines. After my death, my writer-friends will wonder what I was working on in my last days. I’ve kept my preparations for the solo secret, but now they will look in my notebook and see I’ve been planning it for months, getting ready to sacrifice myself for no greater purpose than a literal thought exercise.

I shift my weight in the snow, shake the spectacle out of my head. I return to the trail, the car, the comforts of home.

The winter months pass, long nights, a bomb cyclone that buries my basement windows in snow and leaves me to lurk in the dark like a slumbering bear, and then spring arrives abrupt and clanging and golden. Overnight the Flatirons slough off their snowy coats. Still ambivalent about soloing the First, I go to Chautauqua with two friends, planning to rope up and climb with them as a party of three. This will give me a chance, I figure, to scope the route once more and make a final call. Reassess those dishes and divots, determine whether I can trust my life to them. We spend a long time at the base, not rushing, just racking up and rearranging our packs, sipping water and snacking, enjoying the gorgeous day. The sun dips behind the ridge and the temperature gets perfect, just on the cooler edge of pleasant. The rock won’t be greasy, there’ll be plenty of friction, but it won’t be so cold I’ll get chilly and misinterpret my shivers as fear. Plenty of daylight, light spirits, and for once in my life, I don’t overthink. I know deep in my soul that I don’t need the rope today. So I don’t tie in. I just climb alongside my friends. It’s easier than walking because I get to use my hands, and everything goes perfectly, which means in the end there’s no story at all.

I won’t solo the First again, but not because I hated it. I won’t solo it again because I loved it too much. Since then, I haven’t exactly become a soloist, but I’ve heard the bell-clear siren song from routes a number of times, Johnny Vegas in Red Rocks, the Capstan on Flagstaff Mountain, a few choice cracks in the Sierra, a handful of highballs like Airwolf and High Plains Drifter in various deserts of the West. I am measured and studious, with my books and dictionaries and writing routine and mint tea. I also, when called, enjoy something categorically deadly. Soloing puts me in touch with the multitudes I contain. On insomniac nights I relive the memories of these ropeless ascents, with every detail of every hold seared in my mind in everlasting high resolution, and the perfection of my movements lulls me to sleep. It must sound counterintuitive, but nothing in this world makes me calmer.

The phrase “to risk one’s life” conjures in my mind’s eye a kind of scale, like the one Anubis uses to weigh a heart against a feather. On one of its golden dishes sits your wager, your life; on the other there must be something of equal or greater value in order for the risk to seem worthwhile. What do we stand to win when our ante is ourselves? The chance to make our finite time feel infinite? The chance to make our finite self feel infinite? The satisfaction of saving our own life? Is that payoff enough?

I discovered Anne Dufourmantelle’s work on the university library search engine, under keywords “philosophy” and “risk.” At the time I didn’t look into her biography, just went straight to the primary text. But I’m curious to see what she’s working on now, so I check the regular internet instead of the university database. The first hit is an article from the New York Times, headlined “Philosopher Who Praised Risk Died Trying to Save Children from Drowning.” It reads:

PARIS—A French philosopher and psychoanalyst, known for her work that praised living a life that embraced risk, died last week as a result of following her own bold philosophy.

The philosopher, Anne Dufourmantelle, 53, drowned on Friday as she tried to save two children who were struggling to swim off the coast of Pampelonne beach, near St.-Tropez, France, according to a report from French public television.

Ms. Dufourmantelle was on the beach when the weather began to change and the previously safe swimming area became treacherous. She saw two children who were in danger and leapt into the sea to help, according to France 3, before being caught in the rough surf.

She was pulled unresponsive from the water by two other swimmers, and attempts to resuscitate her failed.

Both children survived.

I’m stunned by how recent the news is: Dufourmantelle died days before the first soloist fell from the First Flatiron. Another search result, an obituary, quotes an English-language lecture she’d once given: “Being completely alive is a task, it’s not at all a given thing. It’s not just about being present to the world, it’s being present to yourself, reaching an intensity that is in itself a way of being reborn.” Having only experienced her work, up until this point, through the veil of translation, there’s something uncannily intimate about reading her words in my own language for the first time. The clarity of it is painful, the poetry self-evident, breaking out of human time and into the mythic. She saw the children, the danger. She saw the swift water. She went in.

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Brian Laidlaw is an author of the two collections of poetry, The Mirrormaker and The Stuntman. A songwriter and musician, he has released several albums, most recently This Aster. He writes for outdoor magazines including Outside, Climbing, Alpinist, and Orion. Based out of Moab, Utah, he moonlights—often by literal moonlight—as a rock climber.

In the new print issue of Esses, a quarterly print magazine covering motorsports and the culture around it, Duncan Fyfe writes about the most bizarre Formula One video game ever made. Centered around Gerhard Berger, a former racing driver from Austria who competed in F1 from 1984 to 1997, Gerhard Berger’s Formula 1 Quiz is a quirky video game from 1993 that raises more questions than it asks. Fyfe digs into the mystery, investigating the quiz’s grammatically awkward questions and the game’s developer, Austria Soft, whose existence is questionable. (Esses subscription may be required—consider becoming a member.)

THE REAL QUIZ, it soon becomes clear, is not a test of one’s F1 knowledge, but figuring out what the game expects to hear. This only becomes more difficult, and even sinister. Question nine: FROM WHAT COUNTRY IS JEAN ALESI REALLY? The answer is not France, where Alesi was born and grew up, and under whose flag Alesi competed for over a decade. To progress in the quiz, the game forces one to submit that Alesi was born to Italian parents, and thus is “really” from Italy.

The game’s questions all have correct answers that cannot be submitted, and yet they are less difficult to answer than these ones: Who made this game? Why? And what was Gerhard Berger thinking?

“Taste is a new core skill,” OpenAI President Greg Brockman declared earlier this year—one voice in a growing chorus of pronouncements about the centrality of judgment and preference in an economy built on artificial intelligence. And yet taste itself is largely undefined by many of its loudest proponents. Celine Nguyen considers the historic relationship between automation and taste; the “seemingly irrelevant, unimportant” inputs that shape our critical perceptions; and the perils of wielding taste like a cudgel. A striking, insightful blend of criticism and personal essay.

Today’s frontier models are trained on enormous quantities of data. One takeaway from Anthropic’s 2025 settlement with a group of authors, in which the company agreed to pay $1.5 billion (or an estimated $3,000 per book) for scraping copyrighted books from shadow libraries like LibGen, is that its models have “read” at least 482,460 books. But even Claude Opus 4.8 hasn’t written a short story that I enjoy more than those by Lydia Davis or Jessi Jezewska Stevens — both of whom, despite being prodigiously well-read, have almost certainly read fewer books.

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.”

Running with Rachel Entrekin must be pretty wild—she encourages competitors and stops mid-race to pet dogs. But her personality is even bigger off the course. Tough and empathetic, her running success has come after 13 years of hard work and a battle to transform an addictive, perfectionist past into a healthier relationship with food, rest, and herself. And even as success came and ultramarathons were won, she watched opportunities go to her male competitors. Gloria Liu honors the incredible achievement of “smashing records while battling impostor syndrome and the fragility of your own self-worth in a world enamored with men, and their accomplishments.”

The key word, however, is average. As any female runner who’s ever passed a dude working himself into a froth to stay ahead of her on the trail knows, women beat men on an individual basis daily. And as athletes like Entrekin and Dauwalter have shown, they do so, occasionally and spectacularly, even at the elite level. We have an understandable reflex to point to categorical advantages that might explain why women can do this, Malcolm says: “It’s inherently feel good, the David and Goliath aspect of a woman winning outright.”

But in searching for the advantages we hope all women have, we may be missing a simpler truth: Most men are faster than most women, but some women still beat most men. The point is not that we have any advantage. The point is that they have almost every advantage—and we still win.

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. 

In this edition: Bad medicine, imperfect sound forever, know when to fold ’em, brainiacs, and a call of the wild.

America’s elders need more places to live, but even in liberal enclaves that recognize the problem, developers are facing fierce foes: America’s elders. Make it make sense! Charley Locke reports from her hometown of Oakland, California, where boomers are organizing against two proposals that would add 618 market-rate residential units to the city’s senior housing stock:

Many in the crowd had been marching against governmental and corporate overreach for half a century: against the Vietnam draft and the invasion of Iraq; against Wall Street; against police brutality. They’re part of a generational force that’s antiestablishment and suspicious of power. But in this fight, it wasn’t so clear who the establishment was or who had the power. Were these righteous middle-class activists fending off greedy developers who would charge high rents, or were they wealthy seniors prioritizing neighborhood character over ameliorating the housing crisis? Were they once again David, or had they become Goliath?

“Most people don’t get to buy their old homes back, or ever step foot in them again, and that’s okay. But we sure can spend a lifetime trying to re-create them.” In this poignant essay for Dwell, Emilia Petrarca celebrates the work of her late father, the New York City architect John Petrarca, and explores how his influence has shaped her own relationship to home and interior design. Petrarca reflects on the process of finding her own aesthetic while carrying her father’s with her, considering the ways belongings and spaces can hold our memories, legacies, and grief.

When I moved out of my mom’s house and into my first apartment with a roommate at 23, I brought with me a black rug my dad bought in Morocco. After graduating from Carnegie Mellon, he joined the Peace Corps and spent time in Ouarzazate designing government buildings. In a room full of cheap Ikea furniture, it was the only thing that truly felt like a reflection of me. Well, that and a rigid, plastic, yellow outdoor chair I for some reason bought to go with my desk. Looking back at photos now, I see that the choice makes more sense: The chair my dad got me for my room in the Big House was almost the exact same hue.

Lisa Whittington-Hill | Longreads | August 27, 2026 | 5,568 words (20 minutes)

“Very, very whorish,” was how Annie Lennox described it to Melody Maker. “It was like she was fucking the music industry,” the Eurythmics lead singer said of Madonna’s performance at the inaugural MTV Video Music Awards (VMA) in September, 1984. With her bright orange crew cut and fondness for men’s tailored suits, Lennox’s androgynous appearance challenged sexualized, hyper-feminine images of women in music. For both artists, sweet dreams were made of shattering gender norms; Lennox just preferred her trailblazing with a little less dry humping.

Madonna had snagged a Best New Artist nomination for “Borderline,” the Top 10 single from her 1983 self-titled debut, but she was also opening the show. Rather than perform a track from the album, like MTV and her management wanted, Madonna insisted on the not-yet-released “Like a Virgin.” She had requested a Bengal tiger for the performance, but for safety reasons that idea was killed. (Protect Moonman nominees Herbie Hancock and Huey Lewis at all costs!)

Instead, Madonna appeared atop a 17-foot-tall, three-tier wedding cake, with a mannequin dressed as a groom. (Probably a better choice than future husband, Sean Penn.) Her wedding dress was a white lace bustier and tulle skirt. Her unconventional bridal attire also included fingerless, white lace gloves, chains, crosses, and her BOY TOY belt—a nod to Madonna’s graffiti tag that also happened to irk feminists like Lennox. As she strode down the cake, she kicked off her white pumps, removed her veil, and shook out her hair. Later, she dropped to her knees, gyrated and writhed on top of the veil, and suggestively crawled across the Radio City Music Hall stage. In the process, she exposed her garters, white silk panties, and Moonman to the audience. 

For Madonna, the performance was a commentary on marriage and sexual double standards. Others saw a career-ending disaster. “This gal, Madonna—this is not going to happen,” Huey Lewis’s agent Dan Weiner said of the shocking opener. 

Weiner wasn’t alone in thinking the singer’s image was as destroyed as the guitar Roger Daltrey had smashed onstage while presenting one of the night’s awards. Watching backstage, her manager Freddy DeMann also worried she’d gone too far, but Madonna wasn’t concerned. As a new artist, she felt she didn’t have a career to lose. She also maintained she didn’t know about the wardrobe malfunction. “Well, fuck it, I made a mistake,” was her unapologetic reaction. 

The mistake paid off. Rather than kill her career, the performance defined it. By late December, “Like a Virgin” was the number one single in America, and remained atop the charts for six weeks. MTV put the video in heavy rotation and the album from which it came, also called Like a Virgin, reached the top spot on the Billboard 200. Being touched wasn’t the only thing Madonna was doing for the very first time. Like a Virgin was the first-ever album by a woman to sell more than five million copies. 

I spent my allowance on one of those five million copies. I was 13 then, and Madonna was different than the female singers I heard in my house while growing up. The soft, soothing sounds of Anne Murray and the over-the-top, emotional ballads of Barbra Streisand had filled our living room and shaped my understanding of female singers. On album covers, they looked poised and polished. In television appearances they stood politely in front of microphones as they sang. Babs and Anne weren’t rolling around on an MTV stage or dancing on a gondola in a music video while wearing spandex pants. It never occurred to me that women could do that. When Madonna descended from that wedding cake and stunned the MTV audience, she also shattered my notions of what a female singer was, what she looked like, and what she could accomplish. 

As a nerdy kid growing up in suburban Edmonton, I struggled to fit in. I wasn’t athletic like the other girls in my class: They made all the sports teams and racked up more Canada Fitness Test gold badges than Madonna had crucifixes. The girls on the volleyball team always got the boys, the party invites, and the coolest cabin on the school ski trip. I never felt fully comfortable in my Jordaches until Madonna and Cyndi Lauper burst into my life. (Lauper’s debut She’s So Unusual was released a year before Madonna’s MTV performance, but her nine VMA nominations had ignited my interest in the quirky singer, especially her feminist anthem “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.”) I played their records non-stop and studied the covers, fascinated by Lauper’s bright orange hair and Madonna’s lace bustier. They defied conformity and represented a different version of femininity than the one I had been raised with. I didn’t know where Lauper shopped, but it was definitely cooler than the Fairweather at my local mall.

As a nerdy kid growing up in suburban Edmonton, I struggled to fit in. I wasn’t athletic like the other girls in my class: They made all the sports teams and racked up more Canada Fitness Test gold badges than Madonna had crucifixes.

They helped me understand that being different was more than just OK, it was cool. I didn’t have to look, dress, or act like the volleyball girls. Rather than join their ski cabin, I could build my own (metaphorically speaking, of course, since the Canada Fitness Test had shattered any confidence I had in my upper arm strength). If girls just wanted to have fun, Lauper and Madonna taught me that physical fitness badges weren’t the only way to do it. 

I’d also grown up surrounded by a steady stream of male artists on Friday Night Videos, in Tiger Beat, and on the radio. The ladies of the ’80s showed me that girls could sing, play instruments, and make cool videos (and have fun doing so). They represented opportunities for women in music, roles that were something other than being David Lee Roth’s set dressing. They seized on the expectations about what women could accomplish and ripped them to shreds—a move previously reserved for Roth’s animal-print spandex pants.

A few days after the VMA aired, my friends and I sat in someone’s wood-paneled basement, rewinding and replaying a VHS tape of the awards. “Madonna is humping the floor,” we said, giggling as we rolled around on the shag carpet imitating her performance. We didn’t fully understand what we were watching, we just knew it was very cool and that our parents probably wouldn’t like it. The VMA appearance kickstarted our obsession with all things Madonna—as it did for the rest of the world. “That three minutes in 1984 was the point when Madonna became a superstar,” said MTV’s Jocelyn Vena of the performance, which Rolling Stone later called “as indelible as the Beatles on Ed Sullivan.” 

With “Like a Virgin,” Madonna delivered an anthem of female sexuality that was empowering rather than exploitative. Media messages and awkward health classes in school had taught us that sex was bad, something to be avoided unless we wanted to end up pregnant. While my friends and I whispered about sex in the library at lunch, Madonna sang openly about it, promoting pleasure over passivity and encouraging us to embrace our sexuality. Thanks to Madonna, our voices got louder. 

Madonna and Lauper weren’t the only ’80s ladies I idolized. The decade provided plenty of trailblazing female musicians for me to look up to. Women from Tina Turner and Pat Benatar to Chaka Khan and Whitney Houston influenced me with their catchy songs, compelling videos, and unique personal styles. Their success redefined what it meant to be a woman making music, and for me it redefined what it meant to be a woman making her way in the world.

With the help of my red Sony Walkman, I heard lyrics that promoted individuality, independence, and confidence. If Joan Jett didn’t care about her reputation, why should I care about mine? (Not that I had one, serious dork that I was, but the message was empowering nonetheless.) Women like Jett sang about something other than romantic love, the perennial subject matter for female singers up to that point. Instead of heartbreak and hunks, I heard songs that inspired me. Lauper’s “True Colors” promoted self-acceptance; “Sisters Are Doing It for Themselves,” Annie Lennox’s and Aretha Franklin’s 1985 hit, celebrated women supporting each other; Irene Cara’s “Flashdance… What a Feeling” encouraged young women like me to pursue our dreams (and was the perfect theme song for the sleepover-favorite movie it accompanies). While Deniece Williams sang “Let’s hear it for the boy,” these women made me want to hear it for the girl.

Music and videos that featured diverse women and addressed topics like race, class, and sexuality broadened my perspective. Donna Summer singing about the struggles of working women in “She Works Hard for the Money,” Annie Lennox challenging traditional gender roles in the video for Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” and Madonna’s support for the LGBTQ+ community exposed me to a world beyond my very white, very conservative, very middle-class suburb.

As my worldview evolved, so did my style. Growing up, pop culture’s representations of girlhood included a blonde Wakefield twin from Sweet Valley High, a post-makeover Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club, and a big-breasted bombshell manufactured by some dorks with a Commodore 64. (We don’t talk nearly enough about how problematic Weird Science was.) At a time when I was discovering makeup, Sun In hair lightener, and clothing my mom didn’t buy for me, seeing women on MTV who were different taught me it was OK to develop my own look.

Video might have killed the radio star, but it ignited something in me. Depictions of women standing up for themselves, whether it was Madonna’s insistence on keeping her baby in “Papa Don’t Preach” or Pat Benatar confronting a creepy club owner in the “Love Is a Battlefield” video, made me want to do the same. I felt rebellious and wanted to raise a lace-glove-clad middle finger to anyone who told me I had to fit in—boys, teachers, mean girls, or my boss at Taco Time.

These women helped to shape music long after the ’80s ended, from Jett’s production work with ’90s riot grrrl band Bikini Kill to Grace Jones collaborating with Beyoncé. Pop princesses Debbie Gibson and Tiffany and later Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera would not have experienced success had Madonna and Lauper not paved the way.

So, as we remember the decade when Axl welcomed us to the jungle, Public Enemy brought the noise, and the Go-Go’s had the beat, it’s time to examine the impact these female musicians had. For a young girl like me, it was bigger than all that teased ’80s hair.

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In a 1982 Melody Maker interview, Madonna said she wanted to make music for “the kind of people who might like Grace Jones.” It wasn’t just the Jamaican singer’s audience that inspired Madonna, it was also her subversive style and sound. A fixture in New York’s disco scene, Jones signed a deal with Island Records in 1977 and achieved chart success with hits like “I Need a Man” and “I’m Not Perfect (But I’m Perfect For You).” In the ’80s, as anti-disco sentiment spread, her music embraced a new wave, pop, funk, and reggae sound, as evidenced by 1980’s Warm Leatherette and 1981’s Nightclubbing, the latter of which introduced Jones to a wider audience, including MTV. 

One of my earliest memories of Jones was seeing her present the Best Male Video award at the 1985 VMA. She was wearing a slinky, rust-colored silk evening gown that clung to her body and accentuated her statuesque height. Her signature flat-top hair peeked out from under a black headwrap and her blush highlighted razor-sharp cheekbones. The look was avant-garde and androgynous, a rejection of traditional gender roles and conventional beauty standards. The Best Female Video award nominees that year were Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, Tina Turner, Sheila E., and Sade. (Tina won for “What’s Love Got to Do with It.”) They all had distinct styles, but Jones seemed like she had been beamed in from another universe, one I desperately wanted to visit. “Her image celebrated blackness and subverted gender norms; she presented something we had never seen before in pop performance—a woman who was lithe, sexy, and hyperfeminine while also exuding a ribald, butch swagger,” Barry Walters wrote in a 2015 Pitchfork piece. 

They all had distinct styles, but Jones seemed like she had been beamed in from another universe, one I desperately wanted to visit.

Jones has talked about the rejection she faced in her early modeling days, including regularly being told her skin was too dark and her face too angular. In her 2015 memoir, she recalled a modeling agent who told her that “selling a black model in Paris is like trying to sell them an old car nobody wants to buy.” Her response was, “I’m going to make you eat your words.” She did just that, walking the runways for designers like Yves Saint Laurent and appearing on the covers of Elle and Vogue. Jones made rejection her trademark, rebelling against conformity and embracing an image and music that pushed boundaries and refused labels. “I believe in individuality, that everybody is special, and it’s up to them to find that quality and let it live,” Jones famously said. She let her special quality live and encouraged me to do the same. At a time when I faced intense pressure to fit in, Jones showed me I didn’t have to. On that VMA stage, and in interviews and videos, she exuded confidence and strength, qualities that soon mattered to me more than which Duran Duran member I was going to marry.

I remember discovering Nightclubbing in a friend’s older brother’s record collection. (Older sibling vinyl was a powerful gateway drug in the ’80s.) On the cover, Jones wears an oversized men’s suit jacket with sharp shoulder pads. Her chest is bare under the jacket and a cigarette dangles from her lip. I didn’t see people like Jones in the hallway at school or in the mall food court, but thanks to MTV she was now regularly in my living room.

Jones’s videos often felt more like experimental art projects than slick productions. Everything she did was creative, an expression of her unique personal style. The idea of being able to express myself through clothing, makeup, or how I carried myself in the world hadn’t occurred to me before Jones and my ’80s ladies entered my life. I thought being creative meant playing the recorder or writing a book report on Judy Blume in school. Jones taught me I could embody creativity in every aspect of my life. 

Like Madonna, Jones proudly expressed her sexuality and encouraged others to do the same. Nightclubbing’s hit single “Pull Up to the Bumper” featured the lyrics: 

Pull up to my bumper baby
In your long black limousine
Pull up to my bumper baby
Drive it in between
Grease it
Spray it
Let me lubricate it.

She has insisted the song is not about what you think it is, but rather a post-disco ode to parking cars (as all great post-disco songs are). Whatever the subject matter, it reached number two on Billboard’s Hot Dance Club Songs and was the singer’s first transatlantic hit. It was also some of my earliest exposure to suggestive lyrics; I didn’t entirely know what the song meant, but I knew it wasn’t about parallel parking (a skill I was still trying to master). 

Jones released her last studio album in 2008, but her influence lives on in today’s female singers, and especially in their videos. I see it in the ’80s aesthetic of Rihanna’s “Rude Boy,” the avant-garde imagery of Nicki Minaj’s “Stupid Hoe” (Minaj even replicated Jones’s poses from the cover of Island Life in the video), and the theatrical performance style of Lady Gaga. Jones has also made an impact beyond videos, having contributed vocals to Janelle Monáe’s The Age of Pleasure and Beyoncé’s Renaissance. 

“Trends come along and people say, ‘Follow that trend.’ There’s a lot of that around at the moment,” Jones writes in her memoir. “‘Be like Sasha Fierce. Be like Miley Cyrus. Be like Rihanna. Be like Lady Gaga. Be like Rita Ora and Sia. Be like Madonna.’ I cannot be like them—except to the extent that they are already being like me.” I look forward to Miley’s innuendo-filled post-disco ode to car parking.  

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Growing up, I saw Jett as an artist who carved their own path in the ’80s. Jett projected a tough image, with her leather pants and jacket; rather than smile politely like female performers were supposed to, she snarled and stared. I studied her videos and played air guitar to “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll” in the bathroom mirror after school. Growing up I had been taught that loving, and playing, rock and roll was strictly for the boys, but Jett changed that.

She represented rebellion—a very attractive thing when you’re a teenage girl. I was constantly reminded of all the things girls don’t do. Girls don’t skateboard, girls don’t play drums, girls don’t do math. Girls don’t take up space. Girls definitely don’t talk back. Then came Jett. She taught me that assertiveness and speaking your mind weren’t negative traits, they were necessary. When the world tells you that you can’t do something, you show them you can. (Who knew I was hiding a punk attitude under all that Maybelline and Esprit?)

In the 2018 documentary Bad Reputation, Jett recounts receiving a Sears electric guitar and amp from her parents as a Christmas gift when she was 13. While her first guitar teacher told her “girls don’t play rock and roll,” 16-year-old Jett thankfully ignored him to found all-girl band the Runaways with drummer Sandy West. While the band toured the world and released four albums, not everyone was a fan. “I thought everyone would love it. Once they realized it was serious and we planned to make an album and go on tour and do everything that male bands were doing the tables turned where it went from ‘cute, sweet’ to ‘slut, whore, cunt,’” Jett said about the sexist double standards the band faced. Misogynistic headlines followed them in the press from “Runaways—Teenaged, Wild & Braless” (Circus) to “The Runaways: Lissome Lolitas or Teenage Trash?” (Creem).

When the world tells you that you can’t do something, you show them you can. (Who knew I was hiding a punk attitude under all that Maybelline and Esprit?)

After various lineup changes, the Runaways broke up and Jett went solo. In May 1980, Ariola Records released Jett’s self-titled debut album in Europe, but she didn’t experience the same luck in the US. The album was rejected by 23 major labels. Jett and her producer Kenny Laguna decided to release it independently on their newly formed Blackheart Records, sometimes selling albums out of the trunk of Laguna’s car. Casablanca Records founder Neil Bogart eventually made a joint venture with Laguna. He signed Jett to his new label, Boardwalk Records, and Joan Jett was rereleased as Bad Reputation. 

While record labels might have said no to Jett, fans were saying yes. Her second album, 1981’s I Love Rock ’n’ Roll, went platinum and its title track was Jett’s first number one hit, spending seven weeks in the top spot on the Billboard 100. She had two other Billboard Top 10 hits during the ’80s, “Crimson and Clover” and “I Hate Myself for Loving You,” and performed sold-out tours with the Police and Queen. In 1987, she starred in the movie drama Light of Day with Michael J. Fox as he tried to shed the conservative, Reaganomics-loving Alex P. Keaton role he played on the popular ’80s television series, Family Ties. 

Jett’s influence also extended well beyond the ’80s, and beyond me. In the summer of 1992, she got her hands on a Bikini Kill demo tape at a Fugazi show in Washington, DC. She became a fan and produced the band’s 1994 vinyl seven-inch EP, New Radio. She also played on the record and sang backup vocals. Bikini Kill’s riot grrrl and DIY ethos were a perfect match with Jett. “She was the cement that kept a lot of things going for some of the feminist bands in the ’90s. Definitely for me. She changed my whole career path and taught me how to record an album,” Bikini Kill lead singer Kathleen Hanna said in Bad Reputation. The Bikini Kill seven-inch was not Jett’s first work as a producer. She also produced the first, and only, studio album by Los Angeles punk band the Germs, 1979’s (GI), which is considered the first full-length hardcore punk record. 

Her attitude was best summed up in a 2010 Rolling Stone interview: “Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do something. Make your own victories. Make your own mistakes.” While I never looked as cool as Jett in a leather jacket, her attitude was something I learned to pull off. All that bathroom mirror air guitar was worth it.

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When “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll” reached the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1982, Jett wasn’t the only woman there: Olivia Newton-John, Diana Ross, Debbie Harry (with Blondie), Sheena Easton, Dolly Parton, and Kim Carnes all had number-one hits the year before. But after August 1981, female artists’ visibility began to increase significantly. That, friends, is when MTV launched.

Pre-MTV, radio was how my friends and I discovered new bands. We made mixtapes of songs recorded off the radio and knowing the exact moment to hit “record” when “Mickey” by Toni Basil came on was a highly-respected skill in the ’80s. Now with music videos, we could not only hear Toni, we could also see her in our living room. A musician’s style and videos now mattered as much as their sound. We traded VHS tapes of Friday Night Videos and spent our babysitting money on records by our favorite video stars. We weren’t the only ones hitting the record store at our local mall. MTV boosted sales; record stores received requests for bands that weren’t on the radio but got MTV play. (Devo is one example.) Record companies and musicians initially skeptical of MTV soon saw the appeal. MTV also influenced concert demographics. Pat Benatar noticed more women at her concerts after MTV started playing her videos. “When we first began, most of our concerts were probably 80/20 male-oriented. There were very few women. Very few women used to go to concerts no matter who was playing, male or female. I saw that really change around 1982.”   

Benatar was the first female artist aired on the channel—and in fact was the first solo artist overall, with her video for “You Better Run” running directly after the network’s debut (and perennial pub-trivia answer), the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star.” Yet “Love Is a Battlefield” remains Benatar’s most iconic video, as well as my favorite. The song’s feminist lyrics promoted independence and addressed the emotional volatility of relationships, presenting love as something more than just happily ever after. Teen Beat may not have devoted much ink to the concept of female agency, but I felt it when Benatar sang the lyrics, “We are strong. No one can tell us we’re wrong.” In the video, Benatar escapes an abusive family situation, confronts a sexist club owner, and encourages a group of female dancers to fight back. The strength and resilience she projected taught young girls like me to stand up for ourselves. Also that killer choreography remains a surprisingly effective tool against creeps.

The strength and resilience she projected taught young girls like me to stand up for ourselves. Also that killer choreography remains a surprisingly effective tool against creeps.

Sadly, creeps were something she was used to. In her 2010 memoir Between a Heart and a Rock Place, Benatar talked about facing music industry sexism, from misogynistic marketing campaigns to DJs insisting she sit on their laps. “We’d be pushing to get airtime for our songs,” she wrote, “and radio programmers would say things like, ‘We’ll definitely put that single in heavy rotation at the end of the week, but we can’t right now. We’re already playing a single by a girl.’”

MTV helped change this “one girl at a time” policy. Now there were many girls at a time, and they were successful. “The 1985 winner of the top Grammy award, Tina Turner, had no record deal one year, but a top hit single the next. Her album, Private Dancer has sold 10 million copies around the world. Pat Benatar, Chaka Khan, and the Pointer Sisters all reached a million in sales with albums promoted by music video,” wrote Lisa Lewis in Jump Cut, a journal devoted to film, television and media. Turner was almost 45 when she released the 1984 single “What’s Love Got to Do with It.” After the video became an MTV hit, the song went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and ultimately won Record of the Year at the Grammys. (While Turner’s success helped challenge ageist notions of sexuality, beauty, and fame, Rolling Stone still put her on an October 1984 cover with a headline that read “She’s Got Legs!”)

I loved that when I watched MTV or video shows like Friday Night Videos I could go from Bananarama to Gloria Estefan to Bonnie Tyler to Sade inside 30 minutes. (I liked Tyler, but the glowing eyes in “Total Eclipse of the Heart” video still give me the creeps. Please don’t turn around, bright eyes.) Their videos presented female role models who were quirky, androgynous, powerful, fun, and sexual without being sex objects.  

Had it not been for these women, female representation in music videos would have been limited to ZZ Top’s “Legs,” Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher” and Tawny Kitaen cartwheeling on the hood of a car in a Whitesnake video. Instead, I experienced women of different ages, races, and body types, all with their own distinct styles. I also saw women playing instruments, singing songs, and commanding stages. I remember recording the video for “We Got the Beat” by the Go-Go’s and playing the VHS tape over and over because it was the first video I saw that showed women actually playing drums and guitars. As a teenager, I wouldn’t have had the courage to pick up a drumstick or a guitar if I hadn’t seen women playing them on MTV first.

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While MTV helped increase representation for female artists, it was criticized in its early days for failing to play Black artists. During a 1983 interview with VJ Mark Goodman, David Bowie called out MTV for ignoring Black musicians, or only playing them during early morning hours. Donna Summer’s 1983 hit “She Works Hard for the Money” was the first video by an African American woman put in heavy rotation by MTV; its portrayal of the struggles of working women and single mothers helped contribute to broader pop culture portrayals of family dynamics during the decade. Single mothers were increasingly represented thanks to Summer’s song and ’80s sitcoms like Who’s the Boss? and Kate & Allie. I was one of the only kids in my class who lived in a single-parent household, and actually seeing this as the subject of songs and videos made me feel seen. (Thanks, Donna!) The majority of my classmates were from middle-class, two-parent households and I hoped hearing Summer’s lyrics (or Dolly Parton singing about working nine to five) might help them better understand my family dynamic.

Summers’s success helped break down racial barriers, but it was Whitney Houston who transformed MTV’s relationship with Black artists. Her early videos received heavy play on Black Entertainment Television and VH1, but her label struggled to get them on MTV. The network initially rejected the video for her debut single, “You Give Good Love,” because of its R&B sound, but when “Saving All My Love for You” became a huge hit, MTV had no choice but to play the video. “It was a major breakthrough for African American entertainers to be on MTV, because it was solely for rock artists,” Houston said in a 2001 interview. “I remember Michael Jackson making a very big breakthrough, and then Tina Turner, along with myself and Bobby Brown and a few others that were major breakthrough artists on MTV. I do remember the hassle of introducing Black artists to MTV, because, let’s face it, it was solely for white artists at that point.” The heavy rotation she received on MTV helped increase representation for other Black female artists on the station, including Janet Jackson, Jody Watley, and Tracy Chapman. Houston’s success opened MTV’s door for other Black female artists and helped them crossover from R&B stations to pop and Top 40 radio. 

It was the video for “How Will I Know,” the third single from Houston’s self-titled debut, that made me a fan. She appeared in a shiny dress, with a giant sparkly hairbow, dancing through a maze of bright, paint-splattered walls. She was vibrant and energetic, with a girl next door image young girls could aspire to. I was 14 when the video was released and Houston, at 22, seemed closer to my age than some of the other women I saw on MTV. After “How Will I Know” played heavily on MTV, Houston became the first Black female artist to win a VMA, taking home the 1986 Best Female Video award. 

Next came the frothy, fun pop energy of “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me),” from her second album, Whitney. A VHS recording of the video enjoyed heavy rotation in my bedroom where I danced along with Houston. With her candy-colored clothing, bright dangly earrings, and crimped hair teased higher than her four-octave voice, her infectious smile brought me joy (not an emotion I associated with puberty). 

Houston was more than just the soundtrack to my after-school dance parties; she was a feminist trailblazer who breached white, male-dominated music to become the first Black woman to achieve mainstream commercial success in the MTV era, setting records along the way. Whitney Houston is still the most successful debut album by a solo artist, with sales of more than 25 million copies, and “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)” made Houston the first female artist to debut at number one on the Billboard 200. It wasn’t just her musical success I found inspiring; she was one of the first Black women to appear on the cover of Seventeen magazine, the required reading at all my teenage sleepovers. 

With her candy-colored clothing, bright dangly earrings, and crimped hair teased higher than her four-octave voice, her infectious smile brought me joy (not an emotion I associated with puberty). 

I loved that Houston’s videos showed her performing, rehearsing, or working in the studio, contributing to the images of working women I saw in ’80s music videos. Throughout her career she lifted up other Black women, mentoring young singers like Brandy and Monica. The Benetton-clad mean girls at my school could have taken some boosterism tips from Houston. “She kicked down doors for every Black female artist, every Black artist and artists in general,” Brandy told ABC News in 2021. With multiple lead roles in movies, Houston also pioneered the triple threat (singing, acting, and dancing), inspiring other Black female artists like Queen Latifah and Beyoncé to achieve the same legacy. Icon status aside, Houston dancing in her purple dress in the “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)” video still sparks joy for me, especially since it no longer has puberty to compete with.  

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Houston passed away in 2012, having sold more than 200 million records worldwide and boasting seven consecutive number one singles on the Billboard Hot 100—the only artist to do so. In 2023, she had the biggest posthumous earnings for a female artist, proving her crossover appeal isn’t limited to radio stations. And she’s not the only one of the ’80s ladies still in the spotlight. Cyndi Lauper, whose debut album was the first by a female artist to achieve four top-five Billboard Hot 100 hits, was finally inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2025. Pat Benatar, Tina Turner, Chaka Khan, and Annie Lennox (as part of Eurythmics) have also been inducted in recent years. The Go-Go’s—another recent inductee and still the first and only all-girl band who wrote their own music and played their own instruments to have a Billboard number one album (1981’s Beauty and the Beat)—played last year’s Coachella Music Festival, bringing Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong onstage to help them with “Head Over Heels.”

Recent documentaries have also honored ’80s ladies, including 2023’s Love to Love You, Donna Summer and 2022’s I Wanna Dance with Somebody (an examination of Whitney Houston’s legacy). The 50th anniversary of hip-hop celebrations in 2023 included tributes to groundbreaking ’80s rap groups like Salt-N-Pepa. Music journalist Jessica Hopper’s 2022 Women Who Rock series, a history of female musicians, featured several ladies of the ’80s, including Sheila E. and Joan Jett. Recent memoirs and biographies have explored the decade’s female musicians and bands, from Stevie Nicks and Debbie Harry to Heart and the Bangles. 

And while Madonna’s 1984 VMA performance was shocking at the time, the singer doesn’t see it that way. “The most controversial thing I have ever done is stick around,” she said in January 2024 during one of two Toronto stops on the Celebration Tour, which grossed over $225.4 million. The tour’s final stop in Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro, attracted over 1.6 million people—at the time, the largest all-time crowd for a female singer. 

The Queen of Pop remains the best-selling female musician of all time, with sales of more than 300 million records worldwide. She has had 12 number one songs on the Billboard Top 100, 38 Top 10 hits, won seven Grammys and 20 VMAs. Confessions II, her 15th album, came out in July and was the singer’s 10th number one album on the Billboard 200. Madonna still deserves all the Moonmen, and to roll across any stage she wants.

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Lisa Whittington-Hill is the publisher of This Magazine. She also coordinates and teaches in Centennial College’s Book and Magazine Publishing program. Her writing has appeared in Longreads, The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, Hazlitt, Catapult, and more. She is the author of Girls, Interrupted: How Pop Culture Is Failing Women and The Go-Go’s Beauty and the Beat. You Know What You Did: The Hills, her book about the MTV reality show The Hills and how it changed the conversation on fame and young women will be out in October from ECW Press. She is currently working on a collection of essays about Gen X and ’80s pop culture to be published by Vehicule Press in 2027.

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Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Brendan Fitzgerald
Fact checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo

Northwest Arkansas has been changing. Walmart, which has been rooted in Bentonville for more than 75 years, has reshaped the small town, and now that growth is spreading into the surrounding countryside. With that change, writes Jordan P. Hickey in this poignant essay, come wealthy newcomers looking for a country lifestyle and gravel cyclists riding thousands of unpaved rural roads. And then there are the dogs—who have been here longer than any of these transplants—caught in the midst of it all. Hickey calls them “yarddogs,” finding in them a metaphor for a region in the process of transformation. (Subscription required.)

Downtown Bentonville, so carefully planned, feels surreal today—”Disneyfied,” “Pleasantville,” “gentrification” are the apt words of the critics.And not that it needs to be said, but there are no yarddogs in Bentonville. Not anymore. Here, there are only good dogs. Dogs on leashes, dogs that have been to school, dogs that listen, obey, behave, and will not lunge at every passing jogger. 

But, of course, this is not really about dogs at all.

Scientists are growing miniature human brains in labs around the world. (Yep, you read that right.) For Wired, Claire L. Evans reports on the latest research in the field of organoid intelligence, or OI, where scientists are artificially growing brain organoids from tiny human samples, whether skin, blood, teeth, or even hair. As these seed-sized globs mature, they are able to send and receive electrical signals, and even learn to remember and anticipate them. In other words, this living matter is programmable. “And this is where things get truly weird,” writes Evans.

For now, these neural computers are mostly of interest to researchers who want to work with neurons without taking on the tedious wet-lab husbandry themselves. Eventually, however, the company hopes that neurons will prove themselves to be an energy-efficient, resilient substrate for more general computing applications—including some tasks currently handled by AI, like image recognition and classification.

“When you think about what you want from AI, it’s biology,” said Brett Kagan, Cortical Labs’ chief operating officer, when I reached him over Zoom. “You want it to be self-repairing as much as possible. You want it to be adaptable. You want it to be long-lived. You want it to be energy-efficient. These are all features you get for free in biology.”

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.”

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.

Showcasing stories from Andrew Fedorov, Shayla Love, Malcolm Johnston, Erin Somers, and Chris Stanton.

For Nautilus, Charles Digges recounts a massive undertaking begun in 1970 by the Soviet Union: As part of its science program, they decided to dig into Earth. Known as the Kola Superdeep Borehole, at 40,230 feet, it was—and is—the deepest human-made hole on the planet. While the hole didn’t go as deep as they planned, the project gave geologists a new understanding of the subterranean world and the earth’s deep continental crust—a place more alive and dynamic than they ever thought possible.

Other discoveries proved just as momentous. Nearly 22,000 feet beneath the surface, drill cores contained microscopic fossils from two dozen species of plankton that had drifted through an ancient sea more than 2 billion years ago. This showed that even after billions of years of burial deep within the continental crust, unmistakable evidence of some of Earth’s earliest life had survived. Between 16,000 and 23,000 feet, the borehole encountered saline water circulating through fractures in crystalline rocks that geologists had long considered essentially dry. Rather than groundwater that had somehow seeped miles underground, the fluids appear to have originated within the crust itself. As ancient minerals were transformed by heat and pressure, they released chemically bound water, while reactions between water and iron-rich rocks generated hydrogen gas, showing that the supposedly inert continental crust was still chemically active billions of years after it had formed.