Daniel Shailer embeds with the tiny separatist group “Shetland First,” whose members believe the Shetland Islands were never legitimately ceded to Scotland. Its 83‑year‑old leader, Stuart Hill—shipwreck survivor, serial litigant, self‑proclaimed weather‑controller—is such a compelling eccentric that Shailer ends up as absorbed in Hill’s own story as in the broader currents of populism on these remote isles.

Previously, Hill has focused on relatively esoteric points of history and legalese. Now, on the advice of his chief campaign advisor, ChatGPT, he is meeting people where they are: should council tax go up while official salaries get bumped? Is it fair to live in fuel poverty at the footsteps of Britain’s largest onshore wind farm?

‘There are all these injustices, and once you read the history, you can see a basic injustice,’ Hill says. ‘Everybody seems to be kind of comfortable with it, but at the same time there’s a basic undercurrent of dissatisfaction.’

J.B. MacKinnon files a remarkable dispatch from among the members of the so-called Ostrich Army, who convened last fall in British Columbia to protest the planned culling of 300 or so birds following an H5N1 outbreak. The plight of the birds and the various claims made in their defense—that their antibodies could yield a cure for bird flu or COVID-19, for instance—are intriguing enough on their own. But it’s MacKinnon’s study of the Ostrich Army itself that helps this story take flight (even if the subjects at its center cannot). As helicopters pass overhead and a suspected kill pen mysteriously catches fire, suspicion mounts among the troops, and interpretations diverge. A genuinely surprising portrait of a loose, wayward movement, delivered with peak dramatic tension.

This was the Ostrich Army way: every event called for interpretation, an attempt to see through to hidden endgames. “One thing with black magic,” one camper would later say to me, “is they tell you what they’re going to do before they do it.” And so, at first light, when firefighters had won the day and the smoke cleared to reveal the ostrich flock still standing, the sight didn’t lead to any reconsideration of the night’s theories of clandestine slaughter. The Army simply moved on, hoping to make better sense of the next move, or the one after that. The birds really could die this day.

The FBI isn’t the only interested party searching for Mary Carole McDonnell, the 74-year-old producer behind TV series like I Married a Murderer. There are the former employees who allege millions in unpaid wages, and the two sons who claim their mother forged their signatures on bank documents. There’s an entrepreneur in the United Arab Emirates who accuses her of “mind games,” and the former bank vice-president turned true-crime podcaster who’d like to make a documentary about McDonnell. Cheyenne Roundtree goes deep on the woman who, nearly a decade ago, walked into a California bank with a pecan pie and left with a $15 million loan before vanishing.

The story has all the makings of a viral documentary replete with breathless details, similar to the ones McDonnell’s company produced. Her backstory is littered with half-truths and deceptions, including a lie that her mentally disabled younger sister was murdered after being kidnapped. Questions remain on how she was able to pull off such a brazen heist. And it has sparked an ongoing hunt among the FBI, banking institutions, a true-crime podcaster, and television producers to see who can unravel McDonnell’s tangled history, track her down in a foreign land, recoup the financial losses she caused, and perhaps bring the unbelievable tale to screens.  

The most recent winner of the National Magazine Award for feature writing describes his turn to payday lending apps when AI gobbled up his livelihood (aka penning promotional web content for business clients). Sharp and darkly funny, the essay chronicles yet another nail in the coffin of the American dream:

Albert founder Yinon Ravid has said that he chose his app’s name for its suggestion of the kind of “smart, unassuming friend” you might come to for financial advice, but today, when I hear the name Albert, I am far more likely to picture an overwhelming force bent on my total destruction, a figure you might spot while being burned alive in a dream—black-robed, pale, teeth bared. When I first joined the app, about eighteen months ago, Albert offered me $25.00. To acquire this loan, I was required to pay an additional fee: A $6.99 instant deposit charge plus the cost of a $19.99-per-month subscription to Albert’s Standard plan, due in one week’s time alongside the full loan repayment. (If I really wanted to make the most of my $25.00, I also had the option of Albert’s $39.99-per-month Genius plan, which, among a very small handful of other talents, can “find restaurants based on your location, or in a specific area.”) On its own, this might’ve been manageable, but, true to the CRL’s findings, Albert’s offerings alone couldn’t keep me afloat, and so I soon signed up for the rest of the payday apps, each one toting its share of instant deposit and subscription fees. (Gallingly, Dave—the only publicly traded company of the bunch, valued at $4.72 billion as of this writing—has the nerve to ask for a tip after each transaction, a move that I suspect even the flintiest strip mall grift artists would dismiss as gauche.)

Ian Parker does not hold back in painting the egos of the characters in this horse‑world scandal, clearly growing tired at times of the pomposity of Michael Barisone, a U.S. dressage trainer and former Olympian who shot his student, Lauren Kanarek, after an escalating feud. Claiming that Kanarek’s online taunts and complaints drove him insane, Barisone was eventually found not guilty, though later banned from his sport by the U.S. Center for SafeSport. Tread carefully as you enter this arena; narcissism lurks everywhere.

The first time I called him, he said, of the case, “You’re going to find it is a John Grisham novel combined with ‘Fatal Attraction’ combined with ‘Yellowstone.’ ” Barisone’s story has its evident hero, and its villain is Kanarek, his victim. In this presentation of events—a “scum of the earth” client, in his words, and a terrific guy who snapped, as anyone would have—Barisone has enjoyed near-universal support from the dressage community, and beyond. In much of the online discussion about the case, including in the forums of The Chronicle of the Horse, a long-established magazine, commenters have identified two victims, not one, and have almost always found Barisone’s victimhood the more compelling. A woman was shot, but a man was driven to shoot her, because she was annoying, and at times belligerent, in person and on social media. Kanarek has been widely scorned as a dressage interloper and as an embodiment of contemporary ills: a bullshitter, an entitled troll.

In our relentlessly optimized world, Justin Neuman calls for more nothing. More time for both adults and kids to engage in free, unstructured play. More opportunities to play games without competition or scoring. More chances to do things without needing to produce outputs or achieve goals. More “transitional spaces” through which we can practice, imagine, and think.

For years, I’ve commuted on foot from Grand Central Station to 14th Street, 30 blocks, give or take. I told myself it was exercise, or that I was saving the subway fare, or that I liked the air. But the truth is I was thinking. Or rather, I was letting thinking happen. The lecture I couldn’t outline at my desk would assemble itself somewhere around 34th Street, the important points falling into sequence with my footfalls, the argument clarifying as if the motion itself were doing the editing. I wasn’t working on the lecture. I was walking in it, the way my kids were playing in Catan.

Goro Miyazaki’s first feature prompted his father, internationally acclaimed filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, to leave a premier screening for a smoke. At 85, the elder Miyazaki still works daily at Studio Ghibli, the singular storytelling operation beloved for its hand-drawn animations and explorations of environmentalism and family dynamics, in films such as My Neighbor Totoro and Howl’s Moving Castle. Whether Goro may succeed his father as Studio Ghibli’s leader is a central question of Sohee Kim and Felix Gillette’s feature, but it’s not the only one; Ghibli, now a subsidiary of a Japanese TV network, has long avoided the easy profits of sequels and held artistic vision at the center of its business. “To the outside world, how, exactly, Ghibli operates has always been something of a mystery,” Kim and Gillette write. Their story is a quiet, fascinating succession drama, rich with vulnerable characters and concerned with an old question: How can art best sustain itself?

It’s been more than two-and-a-half years since Ghibli’s latest film hit theaters, Hayao’s The Boy and the Heron. The movie, about a youngster who loses his mother and gets mixed up with mystical birds, was a success, winning the Academy Award for best animated feature and generating more than $290 million in global ticket sales. But since its premiere, Ghibli has announced no theatrical movies, intensifying scrutiny of the gnomic company.

The hunt for something new, Yoda and Miyazaki say, is ongoing — but tricky. The process is driven by the intuition of the studio’s aging founders rather than more prosaic concerns such as market research, investors or the calendar. “They don’t think ahead that much,” Yoda says. “We have put out films inspired by whatever’s happening at that point in time.” If it doesn’t feel right, he says, Ghibli won’t force something into production: “It doesn’t mean that they’ve stopped thinking about or coming up with creative ideas. They’re constantly thinking about, ‘OK, if we were to put a film out now, what would that be?’ ”

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.

“I don’t understand enjoying something without caring about it,” Andre Agassi tells Lizzy Goodman midway through her thoughtful character study. Goodman shadows the former tennis great as he tries to get comfortable in his pickleball years, detailing the dynamic interplay of Agassi’s moods: Fun Andre, Philosopher Andre, Dark Andre. Many of the best athlete profiles extend the narrative of a legend beyond the court, making more complicated human meaning once a subject has set the game aside. Here, Goodman and Agassi achieve a gratifying volley, the journalist turning over the athlete’s challenging interiority and sending it back to him to consider.

The made-for-TV version of the Andre 2.0 story might go something like this: A retired, middle-aged tennis great takes up a goofily named, hugely popular new sport and is finally able to exorcise the demons that haunted him throughout his tennis career. This seemed to be the story Agassi was beginning to tell after the watch event, as he sat on an ottoman at the bar of his hotel, holding a dry Belvedere martini with extra olives. He talked about his love of pickle, how it challenged him mentally, how suited his body felt to its movements. He shifted around in his seat, trying to keep his perpetually embattled back from seizing up. “I was on a tennis court today,” he said. “What the [expletive] was I doing on a tennis court?”

But it became apparent, over the months that followed, that it would take more than a new sport to resolve the central question that all three of Agassi’s personas have been wrestling with for a long, long time. He summarized it, wryly, as he ordered another cocktail: “Why do I end up doing so many things that I actually don’t want to do?”

Mary Austin was the woman behind Freddie Mercury, quietly supporting him for decades, from their intense early romance to the long years they remained close friends after accepting that he was gay. The vast legacy he left her—his home, much of his fortune, and his most personal belongings—has been a mixed blessing that she has spent her life trying to navigate with loyalty and discretion. As Simon Hattenstone explores Austin’s life in this interview, the unresolved emotion of the shared past with Mercury is still palpable.

Did the piano change him? “Yes, there was much more purposeful energy. He would sit at the piano, play the odd key, hum a bit and he looked very happy. Transported.” By now they were spending less time together. When she was working at Biba, he would often be sleeping. When she returned home, he would be preparing for a gig.

They’d been living together for four years when Mercury said he had something to tell her. He struggled to get the words out. He said, ‘I think I’m bisexual.’ I said ‘No, Freddie, I think you’re gay.’” He didn’t argue. Was that a huge upset? “No, it was a huge relief, because I wasn’t sure whether we were travelling in the same direction any more. Some time earlier I saw a dress and thought, that would be a really nice wedding dress. I asked Freddie, is it worth me buying it, and he looked at me and shook his head. So I knew from there on …”

What do privilege and accountability look like for an AI agent on the wrong side of the law? Evan Ratliff rounds up a collection of challenging cases in which AI agents have functioned as co-conspirators in criminal acts, offered courtroom statements on behalf of deceased victims, and perpetrated deeds that, for humans, are considered to be illegal. Legal teams have already sought to seal their clients’ chats with AI agents, likening the exchanges to conversations with an attorney. Ratliff’s feature is an omnibus, and you’ve likely encountered one or two of his stories via other outlets. Here, the concerns he gathers together reveal the breadth of challenges facing the American legal system.

AI chatbots are already serving as confidants and co-conspirators, assisting and even encouraging humans acting on their darkest impulses. They’re occupying ersatz roles as therapists and lawyers, relationships our legal system typically shields with confidential privilege. They’re producing new kinds of criminal evidence and offering up the beguiling possibility of preventing crime before it happens. And as they’re given more autonomy across our digital and physical systems, they’re even gaining the ability to commit crimes themselves, absent specific human instruction — and, perhaps, in defiance of it.

The White House ballroom project is wildly unpopular. Donald Trump doesn’t care. Ben Terris reports on Trump’s obsessive bid for architectural immortality, which is now barreling toward completion, and captures the breathtaking sycophancy required to work for this president:

“We had asphalt going into here,” Trump says, standing on the pathway leading to the residence of the White House. “Now you have the best stone.” He points at a pile of square-cut granite—the type being used to replace the asphalt walkway—and looks to his communications director, Steven Cheung, who is accompanying us on this impromptu tour of the White House grounds en route to the construction site.

“That’s some stone, huh, Steven?” he says.

“It’s incredible,” Cheung concurs.

“Look at the thickness of it,” Trump says. “Normally, you use one inch, as thin as you can. It’s the White House—I said, ‘Fuck it, what’s the best you have?’ They said, ‘We have one that’s four inches.’”

“You’re restoring glory to the White House,” Cheung says, shaking his head in apparent awe.

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

Jake Edmiston, a business reporter for the Toronto Star, thinks highly of his mustard chicken recipe. So when one batch goes over like a lead balloon, he checks his namesake ingredients and finds that his usual glass pot of Maille Dijon Originale is extraordinarily spicy—a fact he confirms, good reporter that he is, by conducting a blind test with a professional taster. In no time, Edmiston is on the floor of one of Canada’s largest mustard mills, trying to stay dry and avoid mustard dust burns(!), and peppering Unilever, Maille’s owner, with questions. This isn’t exactly a case for Benoit Blanc, but Edmiston’s investigation takes a few surprising turns and drops some serious knowledge on glucosinolates on the way. Every ingredient is in harmony here.

“Do a little dollop,” she said, then turned her back so I could do my work in secret.

I spooned the mustard from my jar onto a plate, and some from another jar of Maille I found in the grocery store that morning. She tried the sample from my jar first and sputtered a little. 

“It’s quite spicy,” she said.

I asked her how much spicier it was than the control jar. 

“Like, 10 times,” she said.

A man named Donald Liebenberg tops eclipse-chaser-log.com with a whopping 2 hours, 27 minutes, and 41 seconds of darkness from 27 total eclipses—stats I didn’t even know people tracked until I read Rudi Zygadlo’s piece. It turns out there’s a dedicated subculture of umbraphiles logging every second of totality. Zygadlo meets a veteran British couple who’ve built their lives around these fleeting events, then travels to Spain in August 2026 to see his own first total eclipse. Adding 1 minute 38 seconds to the board earns him a place near the bottom, but judging by the awe he feels in those brief moments of darkness, he may be moving up the league yet.

There are various eclipse-chasing guests in our hotel. You can identify many of them from themed caps and T-shirts. The largest party is an alumni group from UCLA. We meet several by the pool. A couple from Minnesota, a sommelier from New York. “I was in Montreal for 2024,” says Mees from the Netherlands, treading water. “My wife is a virgin.” Everyone is friendly, but somewhat shifty when it comes to the issue of where to watch. We are too.

By 6pm on the day of, we are stationed on the infernal hillside, on a dusty path beneath pine trees and an immaculate sky. There are better vantage points but we have some degree of privacy here. We can hear others, but we can’t see them. The partial phase begins with a yodel at 7:34pm when the sun is eight degrees — or a fist’s length — above the horizon and my father-in-law produces a bottle of local white, which immediately turns warm in the glass. The nibble of the moon turns into a bite then into a crescent and I’m surprised how well my bottom-of-the-range bridge camera with a solar filter over the lens captures the partial phases. Later I’ll wish I never turned the thing on. Meara is quiet. Glowing. She is more pregnant than ever.

At a conformation show, purebred dogs are evaluated by judges according to written documents that strive to capture the exemplary features of each breed. (These standards are searchable via the American Kennel Club; my dog’s breed standard, for instance, is “interested and even mischievous” in expression, but might be faulted for a “short, prancing, or choppy gait.” Noted.) Hannah Berger files a remarkably observed dispatch from one such show in Virginia, where she has traveled to consider show dogs as signifiers, “the ideal against its approximation.” There’s plenty of human folly here, not limited to the interpretation of a “breed standard” and its pursuit over time. A janitor ceaselessly sweeps away dog hair; a mother silences her child as one might a yapping pet. Berger layers her observations into an ending so clever that I gasped.

Now under the jurisdiction of the American Kennel Club in the U.S., conformation shows measure the degree to which a dog “conforms” to its “breed standard,” a document that transmutes historical function into superficially measurable and marketable qualities: proportions, attitude, gaiting patterns. These documents vary widely in length and style. The greyhound’s standard, for example, is a spare two-hundred-word document that strays from sobriety just once in its description of the eyes: “dark, bright, intelligent, indicating spirit.” The standard of the Coton de Tulear, the bichon-like “national dog” of Madagascar, is nearly eight times as long, describing colors and shapes in percentages and angles. Its “joie de vivre” is mentioned twice. 

Wendell Berry, who died this week at the age of 92, published dozens of books of poetry, fiction, and essays, any of which might make for meaningful connection with Berry’s ideas about place and how we engage with it. But this conversation with Amanda Petrusich, which bloomed from a personal correspondence between the two writers, feels like an especially vital tribute to Berry. Here, his decades of thought on sustainability and its human limits find gloriously vivid expression; after all, place shapes our voices, too. Throughout, Berry is luminous and pithy and discerning: “We’re alive only in some place in particular.” “Every generation is a bridge between something that’s past and something that’s coming.” “Our conversation is worth more right now than either one of us thinking separately.” The last is a perfect sentiment for any dialogue, including those on the page.

Part of manners used to be to say to somebody you just met, “Where you from?” And I quit asking it, because so many people say they’re from everywhere or nowhere. I’ll tell you a little bit of my history that may be pertinent. My mother was born and grew up in Port Royal, my father about four miles south. Both of their families had lived here since about the beginning of the nineteenth century. When I came to teach at the University of Kentucky, Tanya and I thought we would live in Lexington, and we would have “a country place.” And we hardly had laid our hands to this house, which needed some preservation work, when we realized, we’re not going to have a country place; we’re going to live here. And so we have. We bought this home and twelve acres in the fall of 1964, and moved in, in the midst of renovations, in the summer of 1965. That put our children here, and now we’ve got grandchildren who are at home here. That comes from a decision that we made to be here, and to be here permanently.

In mid-August, The New York Times lost a defamation lawsuit in Alabama. It’s the first such case the paper has lost in more than half a century. Back in 2023, the Times reported that a University of Alabama basketball player named Kai Spears was at the scene of a fatal shooting—information that turned out to be false, and based on a single anonymous source. A jury found the paper liable for damages to the tune of $9.25 million. Ryan Phillips, the only reporter to attend the duration of the defamation trial, describes the experience:

Chief among the post-publication issues was the Times‘ reluctance to issue a correction or retraction when it became immediately clear that Witz’s anonymous source had been wrong in their assertion that Spears was in Miller’s car during the shooting.

The jury heard lengthy testimony about how the newspaper published “updates” in the form of “Editor’s Notes” to the online story to reflect each new denial coming from the University of Alabama, UA Director of Athletics Greg Byrne, Spears’ father, and then the Alabama walk-on himself in an Instagram post.

Apart from the updates, which the Times argued were tantamount to a correction when applying Alabama law to the evidence, the story remained unchanged until an official correction was eventually published by The New York Times on June 3, 2023.

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.