| Longreads | February 2020 | 20 minutes (8,310 words)This story was produced in collaboration with .As Peter Basil remembers it, the week leading up to Father’s Day, in June 2013, began like any other; he’s since replayed the events in his mind like a recurring bad dream. Peter recalls standing in the kitchen of his modest split-level home in Tache, a First Nations village that lies deep in the wilderness of northern interior British Columbia. His younger sister Mackie, then in her late 20s, followed him around as he made a pot of coffee.“Promise me you’ll take care of my baby,” Mackie...…| Longreads | February 2020 | 20 minutes (8,310 words)This story was produced in collaboration with .As Peter Basil remembers it, the week leading up to Father’s Day, in June 2013, began like any other; he’s since replayed the events in his mind like a recurring bad dream. Peter recalls standing in the kitchen of his modest split-level home in Tache, a First Nations village that lies deep in the wilderness of northern interior British Columbia. His younger sister Mackie, then in her late 20s, followed him around as he made a pot of coffee.“Promise me you’ll take care of my baby,” Mackie...WW…

This photo was snapped at a picnic Chaya hosted at the park. The purpose of this gathering of friends was to celebrate her surviving “trigeminal neuralgia [and] CML,” as she put it in the email invitation, using the abbreviation for chronic myelogenous leukemia, a cancer of the bone marrow.“I still have a road ahead but I have a lot to celebrate, and be grateful for,” Chaya wrote. The picnic was scheduled after Sabbath morning services at a nearby synagogue where she would be “benching gomel,” which is a prayer one recites after surviving something potentially fatal. A car accident. An...…This photo was snapped at a picnic Chaya hosted at the park. The purpose of this gathering of friends was to celebrate her surviving “trigeminal neuralgia [and] CML,” as she put it in the email invitation, using the abbreviation for chronic myelogenous leukemia, a cancer of the bone marrow.“I still have a road ahead but I have a lot to celebrate, and be grateful for,” Chaya wrote. The picnic was scheduled after Sabbath morning services at a nearby synagogue where she would be “benching gomel,” which is a prayer one recites after surviving something potentially fatal. A car accident. An...WW…

|  | December 2016 | 51 minutes (10,117 words) Some years back, an unusual and astonishing album began circulating among record collectors and fans of lo-fi music. Will Louviere was one of the first to hear it. A Bay Area vinyl dealer, Louviere is an authority on private-press LPs from the 1960s and 1970s—records that were self-produced and released by amateur musicians and destined, in most cases, for the bins of thrift stores and flea markets. In a year, Louviere and his fellow collectors across the country might buy one thousand of these obscure albums between them. Of...…|  | December 2016 | 51 minutes (10,117 words) Some years back, an unusual and astonishing album began circulating among record collectors and fans of lo-fi music. Will Louviere was one of the first to hear it. A Bay Area vinyl dealer, Louviere is an authority on private-press LPs from the 1960s and 1970s—records that were self-produced and released by amateur musicians and destined, in most cases, for the bins of thrift stores and flea markets. In a year, Louviere and his fellow collectors across the country might buy one thousand of these obscure albums between them. Of...WW…

At OneZero, author and media theorist asks: , fancy devices, and fully wired houses to insulate themselves from the troubles of today’s world?The pool for my daughter wouldn’t have gotten here were it not for legions of Amazon workers behind the scenes, getting infected in warehouses or risking their health driving delivery trucks all summer. As with FreshDirect or Instacart, the externalized harm to people and places is kept out of sight. These apps are designed to be addictively fast and self-contained — push-button access to stuff that can be left at the front door without any human...…At OneZero, author and media theorist asks: , fancy devices, and fully wired houses to insulate themselves from the troubles of today’s world?The pool for my daughter wouldn’t have gotten here were it not for legions of Amazon workers behind the scenes, getting infected in warehouses or risking their health driving delivery trucks all summer. As with FreshDirect or Instacart, the externalized harm to people and places is kept out of sight. These apps are designed to be addictively fast and self-contained — push-button access to stuff that can be left at the front door without any human...WW…

| Longreads | March 2020 | 28 minutes (7,033 words)You can listen to our four-part “Cat People” podcast series on , , or wherever you get your podcasts.It’s a gloomy April afternoon in rural Oklahoma, and I’m sitting on the floor of a fluorescent-lit room at a roadside zoo with Nova, a 12-week-old tiliger. She looks like a tiger cub, but she’s actually a crossbreed, an unnatural combination of a tiger father and a mother born of a tiger and a lion. That unique genetic makeup places a higher price tag on cubs like Nova, and makes it easier, legally speaking, to abuse and exploit them....…| Longreads | March 2020 | 28 minutes (7,033 words)You can listen to our four-part “Cat People” podcast series on , , or wherever you get your podcasts.It’s a gloomy April afternoon in rural Oklahoma, and I’m sitting on the floor of a fluorescent-lit room at a roadside zoo with Nova, a 12-week-old tiliger. She looks like a tiger cub, but she’s actually a crossbreed, an unnatural combination of a tiger father and a mother born of a tiger and a lion. That unique genetic makeup places a higher price tag on cubs like Nova, and makes it easier, legally speaking, to abuse and exploit them....WW…

Robert Isenberg | Longreads | April 2022 | 10 minutes (2,788 words) “I am bowling along beneath overhanging peach and mulberry trees,” recalls Thomas Stevens, in the 19th chapter of Around the World on a Bicycle, “following a volunteer horseman to Mohammed Ali Khan’s garden. Before reaching the garden a gang of bare-legged laborers engaged in patching up a mud wall favor me with a fusillade of stones, one of which caresses my ankle, and makes me limp like a Greenwich pensioner when I dismount a minute or two afterward….” Like many travel writers, Thomas Stevens wrote in the first person....…Robert Isenberg | Longreads | April 2022 | 10 minutes (2,788 words) “I am bowling along beneath overhanging peach and mulberry trees,” recalls Thomas Stevens, in the 19th chapter of Around the World on a Bicycle, “following a volunteer horseman to Mohammed Ali Khan’s garden. Before reaching the garden a gang of bare-legged laborers engaged in patching up a mud wall favor me with a fusillade of stones, one of which caresses my ankle, and makes me limp like a Greenwich pensioner when I dismount a minute or two afterward….” Like many travel writers, Thomas Stevens wrote in the first person....WW…

 This Longreads essay, published in 2020, evolved into a chapter in Sarah Fay’s book, , published in March 2022 by HarperCollins.It’s decidedly male and often nationalistic, a symbol of American independence. It’s Thoreau, who writes inLooking back, that time I spent in solitude is bracketed; that’s how it’s punctuated for me now.What about other media? Television? Radio? Do these media release us from solitude, rescue us from isolation, save us from loneliness?Brackets emit a feeling of enclosure. Which is how I now see those four remote years: walled off, the self alone with the...… This Longreads essay, published in 2020, evolved into a chapter in Sarah Fay’s book, , published in March 2022 by HarperCollins.It’s decidedly male and often nationalistic, a symbol of American independence. It’s Thoreau, who writes inLooking back, that time I spent in solitude is bracketed; that’s how it’s punctuated for me now.What about other media? Television? Radio? Do these media release us from solitude, rescue us from isolation, save us from loneliness?Brackets emit a feeling of enclosure. Which is how I now see those four remote years: walled off, the self alone with the...WW…

On April 15th, 2019, a fire started in the attic of Notre Dame, an 850-year-old cathedral housing priceless art in the form of paintings, stained glass, and an organ boasting 8,000 pipes.In this fascinating piece at Science Magazine, describes the multi-disciplinary effort to decontaminate the structure and its artifacts from lead released during the fire and to evaluate every limestone block to determine whether, after the porous stone releases water absorbed during the blaze, it can be re-used to restore the structure.where the limestone blocks were quarried, as well as how 13th century...…On April 15th, 2019, a fire started in the attic of Notre Dame, an 850-year-old cathedral housing priceless art in the form of paintings, stained glass, and an organ boasting 8,000 pipes.In this fascinating piece at Science Magazine, describes the multi-disciplinary effort to decontaminate the structure and its artifacts from lead released during the fire and to evaluate every limestone block to determine whether, after the porous stone releases water absorbed during the blaze, it can be re-used to restore the structure.where the limestone blocks were quarried, as well as how 13th century...WW…