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

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

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

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

David Kushner first met Anthony Curcio nearly two decades ago, to tell the story of how Curcio masterminded a $400,000 bank robbery and escaped on an inner tube. His latest on Curcio is every bit as outlandish: After his release from federal prison, Curcio waded deep into the trading card industry, dealing in top-rated Michael Jordan and Nolan Ryan cards and coming under scrutiny for suspected fraud. Curcio contends that the real villain is Collectors Holdings, a private company that owns Professional Sports Authenticator, which evaluates and assigns value to trading cards. A thrilling piece of reporting about authenticity—as an idea, a value, and maybe even a front.

Three months later, on the early morning of May 23, 2024, Curcio was walking through his neighborhood in Redmond. It was quiet — what he called “raccoon hours.” Then he heard cars coming up behind him. FBI agents stormed him, guns drawn; he counted around 20. “What the fuck is this about?” he said. “You’re here for sports cards?” He told them about the judgment he’d just won against Captain Ticket. They said they knew all about it.

In July 2025, a protester shot a cop outside an ICE detention facility in North Texas. The federal government alleged the incident was the result of an “antifa” terrorist plot involving a network of friends and acquaintances united in leftist beliefs. The case that ensued was chilling:

It didn’t matter that little evidence of a premeditated attack on law enforcement ever emerged. It didn’t matter that every defendant, except the actual shooter, was exonerated of the original attempted murder charges. It didn’t even matter that prosecutors struggled to show the defendants belonged to an “antifa cell.” In the end, they convinced the jury that Batten and most of her co-defendants were guilty of rioting, conspiracy, using explosives, and supporting terrorists.

In a Fort Worth courtroom in June, a right-wing judge sentenced Batten to 50 years behind bars—a stark warning to others who might challenge the president’s agenda. 

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

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

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

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

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

“Like, a monkey?” I say, confused.

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

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

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

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

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

For The New Yorker, Shayla Love writes about how GPS—a military technology turned daily necessity, and the subject of Katherine Dunn’s new book, Little Blue Dot: How GPS Shaped the Modern World—has changed the way we move through the world. To test her own skills, Love navigates from North Brooklyn to a park in Queens with a paper map, then sets off on an orienteering course without the trusty little blue dot, where she discovers how rusty her sense of direction really is.

Surprisingly, I still felt an urge to pull out my phone and look at my dot, to confirm what my surroundings were showing me. I started to feel that the true value of orienteering was more akin to that of reading a long book, or baking from scratch, or attending a long classical-music concert. I wasn’t necessarily tapping into my inner homing pigeon. I was practicing more general skills that get rusty when I over-rely on technology: paying attention, being patient, accepting uncertainty. We made our way to No. 7, on a “prominent tree, east side.” We didn’t find No. 6—a small blow to the ego—but my confidence soared when we found five, four, and three. The desire to check my dot faded to a low simmer.

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

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

With no secondary school in the southern half of the Isle of Mull, children must leave home for the mainland at the age of eleven, living in a youth hostel during the school week. It’s a system that has existed for generations—but what does sending children away so young do to a community? Fernando Pinho gently follows the families who must navigate this rite of passage, and explores the political decisions that have kept this structure in place.

You know that Monday morning dread, she said, when you hate your job and you can’t face going back? The children get that on a Sunday.

Sunday is the day of washing, drying and ironing, because the clothes that came home on Friday have to be packed again for Monday. And then the bag sits at the bottom of the stairs. You come down, and you see it, she said, and it’s this little reminder of what’s coming.

Sometimes there’s an invitation, a barbecue at someone’s house, all of them welcome, just a couple of hours, you’ll be home in time. But her son doesn’t want to leave the house on a Sunday, and she won’t leave him. How do I say I can’t go, she told me.

Pat Caldwell is 69 years old and, as Chris Stanton gushes in this uproarious Q&A, “a legend to IMAX nerds.” Caldwell loves Vision3 film stock, hates Joker: Folie à Deux, and has discovered more than one dead body in a movie theater. His decades-long career as a projectionist includes a stint at a Tennessee porn theater with “very good equipment,” and he once spent half a year screening Lawrence of Arabia four times daily. When Stanton reached out to Caldwell on the occasion of The Odyssey, he may have landed the year’s most entertaining interview.

So Sam taught me how to run the projectors, and he got drunk, passed out on the couch. And after the concession stand in the box office closed, I would go up and run the rest of the movies for him. This went very nicely until one night there’s a knock at the door. I opened the door and here’s this old man standing there. And I said, “Well, who are you?” He says, “I could ask the same question. Who are you? I’m the business agent of the local projectionists’ union.” I explained what was going on. He woke up Sam, chewed him out. And the next day they made me an apprentice. I trained for a year with no pay at all the local theaters in Nashville.

A Chinese man hired a Florida surrogate, then didn’t pick up his kids because of visas issues, sparking a custody battle that could upend the lucrative, largely unregulated industry. Emi Nietfeld spent more than a year reporting this rollercoaster of a feature. One particularly harrowing turn involves the father hiring people to retrieve the babies for him:

As the men continued knocking on her door, Simpson’s phone convulsed with notifications. Zhou messaged her nonstop. He called 53 times. “If you don’t give my babies to us, we have to report to the police. And you will be arrested immediately,” he warned. Then came pleas—or were they threats? “Think about your daughter,” he wrote, referring to Simpson’s 5-year-old. “I don’t think you want to have her be live without you for several years!”

Halfway across the world, Zhou paced in his apartment, chest seizing in panic. Over and over, he’d tried to explain his predicament to Simpson. He was still waiting for his visa interview; without her help, he couldn’t get his kids home. Running out of money and options, he’d hired the handlers as a last resort. Now, as his calls and messages went ignored, he feared she’d fallen in love with his children and would never let them go.

Award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv recently published a collection of essays about the relationships between mothers and daughters. She talked to Lucy McKeon about her longstanding interest in stories about families and about revisiting old topics through new lenses:

LM

You write in the preface about your own experience of this. Not only in your relationship to your own mother, which I want to ask you about, but you describe revisiting some of these stories, years after first reporting and writing them, now as a more experienced writer, and a mother yourself. Through new insight, and in some cases encountering details you’d previously overlooked, you decided to make some revisions. I wonder how it felt to look back on this work by a younger version of yourself.

RA

I think I was most surprised by how one’s curiosity changes—by the moments where I realized I had failed to be curious. And where my present-day self would have identified a particular episode or trauma as foundational, I had breezed past it [back then]. It was about age, it was about being a different kind of writer, maybe. I kept noticing that I had omitted lost babies or dead babies—in three different stories. It fundamentally wasn’t registering to me as a significant life event. Those are some of the things that I felt newly attentive to, that I couldn’t just leave be. I felt I needed to address [them].

Stormy Morse lost two partners to gun suicide. She didn’t know that the second one, Lewis Tabler, had made the National Rifle Association the beneficiary of his retirement savings through its planned-giving program. In this feature, co-published with The New Yorker, Mike Spies describes what happens when the NRA, which has long denied a connection between access to guns and suicide rates, comes to collect:

Fisher, the NRA’s planned-giving director … e-mailed Applied Industrial, pointing out that Tabler had been dead for two months, and that “accounts with properly designated beneficiaries” are “generally available for distribution within 7–10 business days.” He went on, “We want to do whatever is needed to make this a smooth process.”

Meanwhile, multiple debt collectors had filed claims against Tabler’s estate, and the register of wills informed Stormy that she also owed an inheritance tax, since she was now the sole owner of the home.

As a favor, a neighbor of Stormy’s who was a lawyer spoke to the NRA’s assistant general counsel, Sarah Gervase, on her behalf. The neighbor raised the possibility that the organization might give up some of the money, according to Gervase, who recounted the exchange in an e-mail with Applied Industrial in early June. Gervase wrote that she “informed” Stormy’s neighbor that the “NRA is not willing to settle this.” Tabler’s cause of death did not seem to have any bearing on the organization’s position.

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.”

Ahead of the 40th anniversary of Stand By Me, Alec Joyner takes up Rob Reiner’s classic film and considers it from a few dozen angles. It’s a canny piece of critical writing on time, memory, masculinity, and tenderness, forces that often work against each other. (Joyner doesn’t raise the subject of Reiner’s violent death last year, though he pauses briefly on Chris, a character “freakishly knifed to death . . . trying to break up a fight.”) Stand By Me‘s two days of summer are a “vital pause” in the life of its characters, a “portal . . . into the expanse of time.” Here, Joyner illuminates that pause, and captures some of its elusive grace.

Stand by Me was slapped with an R rating, for the boys’ profanity, as well as the prominence of child abuse and death. This may have hampered ticket sales, but it also made it the first R-rated movie that many ’80s and ’90s kids saw. It made it a fitting rite of passage.

Still, there’s something lamentable in the verdict, the MPAA telling a faulty story much like the fictional adults of Castle Rock. How many blockbusters have promoted horrendous violence, only to make the PG-13 grade because they feel safely unreal? Stand by Me was received as dangerous because its horrors and its dirt live at home.

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.