Palmeros harvest medjool dates by hand by leaping into the crown of a tree “full of thorns sharp enough to puncture a tire—or, say, a human limb.” For Offrange, Ashley Stimpson introduces us to the workers who carry on a proud, 6,000-year-old farming tradition that’s in danger of dying out, just as date sales take off in the United States. (Photos by Siri Kaur.)

As far as harrowing job descriptions go, the palmero is up there with trapeze artist and surgeon. Must like heights, must work well in punishing heat, must feel comfortable yielding lethally sharp hand tools. In addition to brute labor, the job also requires an aptitude for botanical minutiae: the pungency of a ripening spadix, the dusky translucency of a perfectly ready date.

Palmeros spend most of their year in the top of the palm trees, which are dioecious plants, meaning male and female reproductive organs grow on separate trees. While the wind can carry pollen from tree to tree, it results in an unpredictable and uneven yield. Around 4000 BC in the Persian Gulf, our ancestors got wise and started cultivating the date palm by hand, kicking off a tradition Medina and Patino still carry out today.

Forrest Welborn had nothing to do with the Yogurt Shop Murders, the grisly killing of four young women in Austin, Texas, in 1991. His buddy, Maurice Pierce, had been under pressure to confess by investigators who wanted a collar for the crime. Eventually, Pierce caved under questioning. He implicated himself and his best friend, Forrest, along with two others, in a crime they did not commit. For Texas Monthly, Michael Hall covers the case and its horrific aftermath.

Both boys were taken to a juvenile detention center, and at around midnight, Maurice was transferred to the police station. A couple of hours later, his questioning began, directed by Senior Sergeant Hector Polanco, a fifteen-year veteran with a reputation for getting confessions. Polanco was known to walk into an interrogation room and announce that his nickname was “El Diablo”; he would threaten the death penalty and grab a man’s arm and show just where the needle would go.

Maurice was terrified. He later told his girlfriend, Kim, that Polanco had claimed that his pistol was the murder weapon—and showed him graphic photos of the dead girls. “They were throwing them in his face, saying, ‘This is how the girls look now,’ ” Kim told me. (Polanco later denied doing either of these things.) In a statement Maurice wrote later that afternoon, after several hours of questioning by Polanco, he admitted to having the gun the night of the murders but insisted he didn’t have anything to do with the crime. Instead, he claimed that Forrest had borrowed the gun, had been acting oddly (“I think he was on some kind of drugs. . . . He was jumping around and acting crazy”), and had boasted that he and a friend had shot the girls in the back of the store and started a fire with their bodies. Maurice said Forrest told him, “I enjoyed watching them burn.”

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

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

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

If you were to look at your belongings, which might you choose to represent you after your death? What’s worth passing down to the next generation? These are the questions that Marci Wilding mulls in this keenly observed essay for Oxford American, after she and her colleague are tasked with sifting through the possessions of a judge who had served the state of Mississippi for 48 years. What Wilding chooses to preserve will surely surprise you.

The details we had about the judge were general: A man had spent a lifetime in service for the Mississippi judiciary, forty-eight years, eventually reaching its highest bench. His opinions moved quietly through the lives of strangers and friends, altering custody, land, and inheritance, shaping the fragile scaffolding of other people’s futures. Those who worked with him spoke of him in retirement as measured, fair, and courteous, and as a man who loved and remembered his people, a modern-day Atticus Finch.

There is something magnetic about decay. It repels and attracts in the same breath. I think it unsettles because it reminds us of what we are made of: flesh that can soften, skin that can host growth, breath that can carry contamination. The strange intimacy in the way the surface gives way and something underneath begins to show makes it difficult to turn away, not because it is unfamiliar, but because it isn’t. We recognize ourselves in what is rotting.

Beryl Gilothwest’s grandmother, Sandy “Moose” West, passed away at age 108 in 2021. For The Bitter Southerner, Gilothwest profiles a diminutive woman whose love for Ossabaw, an island off the coast of Georgia, was larger than life. In a world striving for “progress,” West was a staunch advocate for thoughtful preservation; she was a fierce conservationist and environmentalist who embraced the unknown and took pleasure in learning from it.

“Sandy believed that embracing what we cannot understand is the pathway to enlightenment. In her mind, spending time in the uncharted wilds of Ossabaw is the best way to learn that lesson. Separated from the mainland by a 30-minute boat ride, the island is deeply remote. Cell service is scant, and there is no wi-fi. You have to fend for yourself out there in a way that is uncommon in contemporary culture, where we always seem to have an escape hatch. Sandy knew that welcoming people into that kind of environment, where they have to relinquish control to the island, would force them to reckon with the unknown.”

For Orion Magazine, Seth Kaplan writes of turning to his tomato plants as a way to decompress after a long day at work. In this brief but beautiful essay, he revels in the tactile pleasures of trimming leaves and pinching suckers, of tending beings that make no demands.

The tomatoes do not have opinions, or so I tell myself, though it is mostly a lie. For they do lean toward the sun and then, perversely, away from it. They sulk when I overwater and they sulk when I forget, and they have firm convictions about how much attention is too much. But whatever they want, they show me plainly. A leaning plant wants turning. A pale, unhappy one wants trimming. A bushy one wants care. There is no tone in it—no door slamming or softly clicking shut upstairs, no message that says fine in a way that is clearly not fine. When a tomato is unhappy with me, it tells me in a language I can actually answer. And it does tell me. Skip a few days—a work trip, a long weekend, some obligation that drags me out of the side yard—and they turn unruly, almost insolent.

For The New Yorker, Hanif Abdurraqib looks at group chats and the place they hold in our lives as cherished spaces to connect over memes, share photos, and process difficult times. For him, though, the most important function of these online spaces is to help one another feel seen, regardless of what’s happening in our lives or in the world.

Over time, the group has become a family affair, as partners and spouses have joined. The conversation is sometimes absurd, and sometimes salacious, but I’ve come to cherish it as a sturdy and rich world that hangs on the edge of the wider collapsing one. I fall into it and remember that even if I fail in a great number of things, on any given day, I can love my friends well just by finding something they love and saying, “Look, I saw this and I thought of you.”

If you spend your day in front of a computer, you may ask yourself, at times, why you do it. What’s it all for? Who benefits? For Noēma, Aaron Horwath suggests that the crisis confronting knowledge workers these days isn’t strictly economic, it’s also existential. He explores the pitfalls of work-as-performance and wonders whether the “messy middle,” which embraces human interaction and collaboration over an army of agents, might offer more for workers and employers alike.

But perhaps the most powerful action of all is simply to maintain an awareness (and remind others) that Workism is a spectacle. For most employees, we owe it to each other to remind one another that this work is not, in the grand scheme of things, all that important. It is illusory. No one has ever died over a spreadsheet. The world does not wait with bated breath for product launches. A marketing campaign will not change the world. Almost no one will remember all the work we do. But they might remember the types of people we were, the relationships we had and how we treated the people we worked with.

Dave Masters watched as his father’s house careened into a telephone pole and split in two, after Hurricane Frances lifted it from its foundation in 2004. Hayward County, in Western North Carolina, bought the house and declared the patch near the town of Clyde “permanent open space under a federally funded program to reduce the risk of future loss of life and property damage.” Not all homes were treated equally, though, in the aftermath of distaster. Hurricanes Frances, Ivan, and Helene, along with Tropical Storm Fred, all brought heavy rains and flooding to the nearby Hyder Mountain Road mobile home park. They’re “part the result of a gap in disaster policy that allows mobile home residents to be put in harm’s way again and again.” For The Assembly, in a piece produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, Ren Larson explains why.

The federal government’s programs to buy out disaster-prone buildings are “the cornerstone of the Nation’s system for emergency management,” according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But the program was developed with traditional homeowners in mind, and mobile homes, the country’s largest source of affordable housing, are often left out. Trailers, even when they become immovable and lifelong homes, aren’t typically considered real estate but instead personal property, like motorcycles and boats.

That still leaves people living on flood-prone land. For the state to actually buy that land, mobile home park owners have to take the buyout, and FEMA’s program offers little incentive for them to do so: They can’t collect from the government for lost rent or for the value of the mobile homes on top of the land. 

Some park owners say the payouts are not high enough to allow them to relocate; others aren’t even aware of the buyout program. So park owners regularly allow new trailers to move into the vacant spots. Art and Lynne Heinmiller, who own the Hyder Mountain Road mobile home park, did not respond to questions — which were emailed, texted and mailed via certified letter — about allowing trailers and campers to move back to where they’d washed away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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