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.

You don’t have to live in El Cerrito, California, or have ever used Nextdoor, for this essay to resonate. For Oakland Review of Books, Amy Brown recounts buying her first home in the East Bay city and swiftly becoming the villain of her local Nextdoor—after her uncharitable Bluesky posts about the seniors opposing a library tax made their way back to her neighbors. Honest and funny, Brown’s essay explores being locally online—that weird, often uncomfortable place between online and IRL—and shows how (not) to talk to people you’ll run into at the grocery store.

Still, I spent multiple nights lying awake, thinking that everyone in this town must know I’m a bitch now. My son is supposed to start TK at the public school in the fall. What if his classmates’ parents use Nextdoor? What if the nice lady across the street who organizes a monthly dinner for our block uses Nextdoor? What if my neighbor already told everyone that the woman who moved into the house on the corner is an asshole? Does everyone I see on the street think I’m an asshole? Can they tell I don’t belong here? Do I have to go crawling back to my hometown and get a job at the car seat manufacturing plant?

Midway through Boyce Upholt’s mind-boggling dispatch, one of his sources sums up the central challenge of the Gulf Coast canid: “Why is there not just a simple explanation for what this thing is?” The “wolfy coyotes” of southeastern Texas hold genetic traces that may link them to red wolves, which were declared extinct in the wild in 1980. But a lack of data makes it challenging to define the species—or, for that matter, to determine whether a private company has cloned the red wolf or something else entirely. Upholt doesn’t deal in simple explanations; the pleasure, here, is in the complexity.

The concept of a “species” is less sturdy than your high school biology teacher might have led you to believe. The most familiar definition is that a species consists of animals that can produce fertile offspring. But that’s a rule various species of canids violate all the time; it’s long been clear that North America’s soup of Canis genes is something less like a family tree and more like a river—one that’s broken by islands and sandbars into many braided channels that split and merge and re-split.

Next to rubble and pictures of the deceased, people in Gaza are still getting married. Athar Abu Samra reports on why couples are refusing to delay their nuptials. With so much already lost, and so much still under threat, families in Gaza are seizing moments of joy wherever they can. Marriage ceremonies are no longer what they once were—nor do they express hope in quite the same way—but they have become powerful testaments to resilience.

As I worked on this story, I came to understand that the war has not only transformed weddings in Gaza. It has transformed people’s relationship with time itself. Before the war, marriage followed a familiar sequence. People finished their education, found work, built or rented a home, saved enough money and only then began planning a wedding. Families often postponed marriages until those expectations had been met. But now no one has that luxury — the luxury of time.

I spoke with one mother who had lost several of her children during the war, yet hurried to arrange the marriage of her youngest son. She told me she had always dreamed, like any mother, of watching all of her children grow up, get married, and fill her home with grandchildren. The war had taken much of that dream away, but she was determined not to lose what remained.

Ready to test your knowledge of hue, value, and saturation? Rivka Galchen’s latest for The New Yorker is a trove of fascinating details about our understanding of color. Galchen opens with the buzziest tidbit: an experiment conducted by a vision scientist who used a laser to stimulate a selection of his own cone cells and glimpse a color unknown outside of his laboratory. From there, she roams—through philosophy and art history, from studios to pigment shops—complicating our understanding of perception with each new turn of her titular question.

In the children’s novel “The Midnight Fox,” by Betsy Byars, the main character daydreams about digging in his back yard and coming across a “brand-new color.” A friend of mine remembers being captivated by this scene, and trying to picture the color. “I felt like I could conceive of it, but I couldn’t see it,” she said. The eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume considered at length whether a person who had seen every shade of blue except for one would be able to picture that one un-experienced shade; he concluded that the answer was yes. In my youth, I spent an afternoon wondering if I would have been able to imagine the fluorescent yellow of highlighter markers if I’d never seen it.

When Jessica Black was 16 years old, she told a story to North Carolina police detectives that helped convict five friends of murder. Decades later, she’s still trying to correct the record. Matthew Bremner’s feature for Financial Times is a brisk tick-tock of efforts by Black and her incarcerated friends to overturn criminal convictions they claim were built on disturbing intimidation tactics.

The investigators do not accept these firm denials. To them, they seem likely to be the initial stories of a group of boys who know more than they are saying. As officers move in and out of interview rooms, carrying information from one interrogation to the next, the pressure intensifies. They tell the teenagers that their friends are already telling their side of it, that they should too. Under North Carolina law in 2002, police are permitted to exaggerate, even to suggest they have evidence they do not possess. There is no rule requiring a parent or other adult to be present while 14- and 15-year-olds are questioned. For most of their time in these rooms, the five boys are alone. When I interviewed him in late 2025, Tolliver told me that a detective asked him to hold out his arm. “That’s the vein,” he told him. “This is where the lethal injection would go.”

For China Books Review, Zhang Er reflects on growing up in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution, and how she owes her love of reading to Auntie Zou, a librarian who stripped banned books of their covers and any pages marked with the library seal of the Workers’ Club, smuggled them home, and secretly loaned them to her. Even amid the chaos of that era, Er remembers this part of her childhood as magical, a time “where characters sprung from their pages and interwove with each other’s lives,” and she imagined worlds far beyond the one she lived in.

By the time I was 12 or 13, I could read fast enough to finish the weekly book loan in two days, so I had time to spare before returning it to Auntie Zou. By then I had made a good friend, Yu Ping, who loved reading too. Her home was three blocks from mine. I would bicycle to her place and deliver the book to her. Yu Ping would read day and night to finish the book and return it to me before the due date. We would keep the book wrapped in old newspapers, so that we could read in class without getting into trouble, while our teachers repeated the same quotations from Mao, week after week.

In this harrowing, incredibly reported story co-published by Science and Retraction Watch, Brendan Borrell uncovers how “Mei,” a 6-year-old girl in China, died a week after an experimental gene-editing trial went wrong—and how her medical team, led by neuroscientist Zilong Qiu, downplayed the risks to her parents, did not publicly disclose her death, and has faced no real accountability.

On 23 March 2025, the day before the procedure, the family settled into a shared room inside a crowded pediatric ward. When the other girl in the room broke into tears, Mei handed her one of her favorite stuffed animals: a blue bird. “She liked to give things to other kids,” Jason said.

The next day Mei put on a brave face as she was taken to the procedure room. Yu’s handpicked doctor inserted a needle between two vertebrae on her lower back and withdrew just over a teaspoon of spinal fluid to create space for the drug. Then, he swapped syringes and gently pressed down on the plunger, filling her spinal canal with viruses.

Forced disappearances have plagued Mexico for decades. In 2019, something remarkable happened: Twenty-one disappeared people were found, alive. They had been toiling in narco-slavery camps, an under-covered aspect of Mexico’s illicit drug trade. But there wasn’t a happy ending. (This story was originally published in Spanish by Quinto Elemento Lab):

Freedom had not been kind to the captives. Few had been able to regain even the wretched standard of living that had pushed them into the arms of the cartels in the first place. Many were scarred by paranoia, trapped in addiction or suffering mental illnesses. Some had been abandoned by their partners or families. More than one, we learned, died after being rescued, some by their own hand. We came to feel that these men had been triply betrayed: first by the narcos who had lured them into the mountains, then by the government that failed to look for them, and finally by a society that refused to welcome them back into its fold.

We are telling their stories not because we hope to secure justice, but simply to establish the truth. This was a modest ambition shared by one of our interlocutors, Andrés. He told us that many of the survivors’ accounts had been doubted. He’d even read criticisms on social media: That’s what they deserve for being shiftless and lazy. “Those people should try thinking before they speak, because they don’t know when they might suddenly find themselves in a similar situation,” Andrés said. “They might be lucky enough to be rescued, or unlucky enough to die out there. I decided to give this interview because this situation’s not going to change. In Mexico, there’s sexual slavery, human trafficking, forced labour. This didn’t start yesterday; it’s been going on for many years.” 

Across the United States, dozens of law enforcement officers face accusations of misusing Flock, a surveillance network of 120,000 cameras that track license plates. Flock’s proponents claim that the technology does far more good than harm; one investor tells the Washington Post that abuse is “truly a nonissue.” But fear isn’t a statistic. Drew Harwell, Douglas MacMillan, and Aaron Schaffer structure their investigation of Flock’s misuse by law enforcement around the story of a woman in suburban Atlanta who had her whereabouts tracked hundreds of times by her ex, the local chief of police. Their report telescopes between the tradeoffs of a “transformational” technology and a few nightmarish cases of misuse.

Bakely said the cameras had left her feeling powerless to stop her ex-boyfriend from tracking her life. She didn’t feel safe asking the police agency he led, she said, and she couldn’t get access to records that would have shown the surveillance was happening in real time. After Steffman told her about his Flock searches, she filed for a restraining order, but a judge denied it on the basis that she couldn’t prove ongoing abuse, court records show.

He “watched every single move I made,” she said. But “who do you turn the chief of police in to?”

The war in Iran began five months ago. Headline news about the conflict tends to focus on when and how it might end. In the meantime, the impacts of the conflict are felt worldwide—by drivers, farmers, business owners, and families. The Associated Press shares the stories of seven people suffering because of the war. Among them is Edgar Funelas, a jeepney driver in the Philippines who lives with his ten-year-old daughter:

He uses laundry soap—harsher, but cheaper—to wash his body and his clothes in the same motion, stretching what little money he has. Even before the war in Iran, he was living on the margins. A fire took their home and their belongings, forcing them to move into the brightly colored minibus he drove.

He’d hoped to be able to rent a room by now. Then diesel prices surged, and he could no longer afford the fuel to run his jeepney.

He hasn’t earned a single peso in days. There will be no breakfast. Hunger gnaws, but it’s the small rituals of privacy that he misses most: to be able to wash out of sight, to sleep behind walls, to keep his desperation from being laid bare.

Mark Seal is very fond of the phrase “Who Ya Gonna Call? Scam Busters!”—he uses it three times in this piece. Yet it’s still refreshing, despite being from last year, to read a story that focuses on the painstaking effort to trace scammers rather than lingering on the victim’s humiliation (looking at you, Netflix). Seal does explain how a French woman named Anne fell for “Brad Pitt” online and subsequently lost her fortune to the scammers, but her supposed savior, cyber‑detective Marwan Ouarab—sporting a cat‑in‑a‑trench‑coat T‑shirt—gets most of the page time here. Ouarab apparently found the scammers within 48 hours, but no charges have been made, and Anne is still fighting to recover any of her money. You can call the scam busters, but you’re still in for a long wait.

“All during the scam, Anne was suspecting something,” he says over a vanilla flan, a sweet treat for a very determined guy. “But every time, the crooks had fine words, the right words. They were really poetic. They knew what words were right for her. They really understood Anne’s psychological profile.”

It was a classic “sentimental scam,” says Ouarab—a carefully produced, all-encompassing “theatrical event” that uses love as the bait to hook the target and then envelops them completely in the con. (In this case, the divorced interior designer, Anne, whose last name has not been made public, and a convincing facsimile of Brad Pitt, achieved via A.I., deepfake technology, and, according to Ouarab, “ridiculous photoshop tools to create pictures of the fake Brad in his hospital bed.”)

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.

The genocide in Gaza has created some 60 tons of rubble. In doing so, it has released asbestos, lead, and other toxic materials, guaranteeing “an epidemic of cancer, lung disease, and brain damage,” Helen Epstein writes, “[that] could come to rival in lethality the war’s bombs and bullets.” Research is starting to make visible the scale of dangerous fallout, but there are limitations:

To confirm [scientist Yaakov] Garb’s estimates, it would be necessary to test soil samples from the areas he has identified as particularly likely to be contaminated. But the Israeli government seems to be obstructing efforts to carry out such tests, let alone assist the current and future victims of this environmental catastrophe. Aid workers and others entering Gaza attend an official briefing where they are informed that it is forbidden to leave the enclave with even small amounts of soil or sand. Once in the Strip, any scientists surreptitiously collecting research material risk being spotted by overhead surveillance drones. At departure checkpoints every piece of luggage is emptied onto a conveyor belt, and border guards carefully inspect each item. Several people told me they knew researchers whose soil samples had been confiscated. Palestinian researchers in Gaza have no capacity to conduct such experiments on their own, since the enclave lost all twelve of its universities and scores of scientists in the bombing. Without the Israeli government’s cooperation, only remote assessment and modeling like Garb’s can even begin to determine the scale and location of toxic contamination in which Gaza’s population now lives.

Daniel left school five years ago and still lives with his parents—pretty normal in a country where around a third of young British men haven’t moved out. What is different about Daniel is his identification as “hikikomori”—literally “pulled inward”—a form of extreme social isolation. Since leaving school, he has left his family home “maybe once a month.” Research into hikikomori is limited, though some links with social anxiety and autism have been drawn. In this piece, Eve Livingston explores what day-to-day life is actually like for the families living with this phenomenon, doggedly seeking access to a world built to avoid in‑person encounters.

Dip your toe into the world of hikikomori, and you’ll find that attitudes vary widely, even among the self-identified. Some, like Daniel, display a level of sensitivity and sometimes defensiveness about their lifestyle, while others are more open about a sense of sadness and sometimes hopelessness they felt towards their circumstances. 

“I am [a hikikomori]… it sucks and I hate my life,” reads one such comment on Reddit. “Every single attempt at recovery has ended up in an even deeper relapse and its [sic] so painfully boring and lonely… I fantasise about being free all the time but I know I’m probably just going to die this way.”

I’d be lying if I said I understand everything Michael Levin believes. But I’m also not alone; sometimes his own colleagues can’t even follow his arguments. Elizabeth Weil’s profile of the renegade (and genius) biologist bridges that gap, sketching out Levin’s research and claims in a way that’s just grokkable enough to blow your mind. I mean this as a true compliment: When’s the last time we had a genuine mad scientist on our hands?

Critics accuse Levin of all kinds of teleological crimes — making unfalsifiable claims, using words in ways that render those words meaningless. Levin is unfazed. In his talks, he tries to disarm his detractors by preempting the accusation that he’s nuts: “I have some unusual things to say and then I have some crazy things to say”; “So this is a kind of crazy claim I’m making.” His true retort is his wet lab. There, at the bench, he’s working to prove his metaphysics by running old-school (in a way) biological experiments. He studies flatworms with two heads. Frogs with eyes on their stomachs. Little round creatures called xenobots, synthesized from frog skin cells. They swim like tiny Pac-Men. They do not exist in nature.

“The only thing that ever settles arguments is technology,” Levin tells me, a line he borrowed from biophysicist Chris Fields. “People have been saying for thousands of years what they think” about minds, consciousness, souls, energy fields. “What I can contribute is ways to test some of those things.”

Linni Kral has always been preoccupied with her bowels, but as a food writer, it hasn’t usually been that end she’s focused on in her writing. Now, as the internet explodes with “scat chat,” Kral is ready to investigate whether obsessing over our bowel movements has any merit. The result is a giggle fest—though you’ll need the stomach for some serious poo talk.

One day, it seems, the internet woke up and chose BMs, and suddenly the hottest girl you know is posting about scat. Now you have to go out of your way to not eat fiber—prebiotic supplements are in our soda, our candy bars, our cold foam. The beverage case is dominated by the likes of Olipop and Poppi and Culture Pop, all offering varying degrees of digestive assistance. The other day, I saw a smoothie blend in the freezer aisle called “Fiber Supremacy,” and earlier this year, Frito-Lay launched a fiber-packed version of both SunChips and Smartfood popcorn. Kraft is making a purgative macaroni and cheese that boasts six grams of fiber per serving (or 15 grams if you eat the whole box—which is, let’s be honest, how most people consume Easy Mac). Outside the retail space, home cooks are finding ways to fit chia and flax into not just their breakfasts but their meat loaf. They’re pureeing beans into sauces and veggies into puddings and cakes. Literal doctors are posting their #fibermaxxing menus to TikTok. And while this may sound like just another wave on the ocean of content we surf daily, it gets…weirder.

Frustrated that law enforcement and government officials are unable to help them, Venice property owners have called upon a private company, staffed by former gang members, to remove encampments in their neighborhood. For L.A. Material, Hayes Davenport talked to one of the company’s owners—lifelong Venice resident Bobby Luna—as well as dozens of locals, from homeowners to unhoused folks, about the company’s presence in the community. Homeowners are satisfied with Ghost Town’s service, while some unhoused people who have been forced to relocate report harassment and physical force from its employees. “Ghost Town has stepped in to address a decades-old problem with an unconventional approach,” writes Davenport. “Are they an inspiring story of neighborhood reclamation, filling the void left by an insufficient, hobbled government response? Or mercenary enforcers, contracted to speed along the neighborhood’s gentrification?”

One homeowner — who said she has paid between $100 and $300 a month for Ghost Town’s services, with the cost going down as more neighbors became clients — told me she signed up after multiple people trespassed on her property while she was pregnant, triggering their security system. “Police didn’t come for an hour and a half,” she said. “Ghost Town shows up in five minutes.”

“They’re the reason we still live here,” she added.

But Andrew’s contention that “most people in the homeless community have had some kind of negative interaction with Ghost Town” had also been supported by the people I talked to on the street.

For Eater, Bettina Makalintal reports on a refreshing trend in the restaurant industry: businesses embracing lo-fi, handwritten communications and announcements in response to the ceaseless AI slop we’re served across social media these days. From a grocery store’s hand-illustrated flyers to a burger joint’s Sharpie-scribbled menu specials, restaurants are choosing advertising with a human touch and rejecting polished AI-generated graphics.

It’s hard to think of a path of more friction than choosing to run a restaurant; why add even more friction to that? In these conditions, yes, it costs more to hire a photographer to promote your new menu than to generate one with AI, but it’s also increasingly clear that many people would rather see a badly taken, lo-fi photo than an engineered AI image. For one thing, it feels like a reflection of one’s values. To me, a restaurant that employs AI art is capitulating to the culture of slop, akin to reheating premade food from Sysco. It’s impossible to square with a value system that cares about craft and integrity.

By the time I encountered the fifth photo in Matt Seaton’s contemplative essay about New England’s stone walls, I found myself participating in the image, trying to figure out the maneuvers that had made the structure cohere. That’s a lot of the gratification here—”striving for coherence,” as Seaton, a former Atlantic editor, describes the work of walling. This is a quick read, and Seaton makes every word count, fitting a bit of Robert Frost and a lot of rock knowledge together just like he was building a . . . well, you know.

Bit by bit—which is the way with walls—my interest and knowledge deepened until what had begun as recreation morphed into a hobby job, mending other people’s walls. Eventually, I realized not only that I liked building walls, but also that I could scratch a subsistence living at it. In what probably struck friends and family as an act of lunacy, I quit my day job as an editor at this magazine and became a part-time waller.