So far, the project has met ambitious fundraising goals and received support from philanthropists, companies, and architectural firms, and Graham hopes to expand to nearly 2,000 homes across multiple locations. But is it the right solution in Austin, where the homelessness crisis is getting worse?

But Community First is pushing the tiny home model to a much larger scale. While most of its homes lack bathrooms and kitchens, its leaders see that as a necessary trade-off to be able to creatively and affordably house the growing number of people living on Austin’s streets. And unlike most other villages, many of which provide temporary emergency shelter in structures that can resemble tool sheds, Community First has been thoughtfully designed with homey spaces where people with some of the highest needs can stay for good. No other tiny home village has attempted to permanently house as many people.

Like Mr. Johnston, many residents have jobs in the village, created to offer residents flexible opportunities to earn some income. Last year, they earned a combined $1.5 million working as gardeners, landscapers, custodians, artists, jewelry makers and more, paid out by Mobile Loaves and Fishes.

Steven Hebbard, who lived and worked at the village since its inception, left in 2019 when he said it shifted from a “tiny-town dynamic” where he knew everyone’s name to something that felt more like a city, straining the supportive culture that helped people succeed.

The sale of alligator snapping turtle meat was banned in Louisiana in 2004 (and has long been illegal in Texas), but Colo, Viola, and other local sellers had no trouble finding a wide array of buyers for their catches, including a former starting pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, an auto mechanic, and a local businessman who has since been elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives.

Guidry asked him to estimate how many turtles weighing more than one hundred pounds he had caught in Toledo Bend. Without hesitation, Colo answered “five hundred.” “There ain’t nobody gonna ever catch as many turtles as I caught, because you could wipe out all the rest that they’ve got in Louisiana and Texas and never have as much as I caught,” Colo boasted. “That’s all I used to do. Twice a week I’d go.”

Isaacson is a particular type of biographer. His book is driven by listen-to-everyone-he-can access. It is not the Robert Caro approach with granular, yearslong reportage on the nature and implications of Musk’s power. Washington Post’s Will Oremus wrote in his September 10 review that “the larger concern is whether Isaacson’s heavy reliance on Musk as a primary source throughout his reporting kept him too close to his subject. Swaths of the book are told largely through Musk’s eyes and those of his confidants.” The book is scrupulously unsnarky — don’t expect the tone of the book Joe Hagan wrote on Jann Wenner. “It is pure narrative storytelling; there’s not preaching in there,” says Isaacson. “People will come away from this book, if they admire Musk, with more evidence that they would like. If they hate Musk, they’ll come away with more evidence to reinforce their dislike of him. Hopefully, there will be a large group of readers who’ll say, ‘Wow, I get it, it’s more complex, and there’s not simply one way to look at it.’”

There’s a scene in Torn where Max interrogates his mom about falling in love with Anker so soon after Alex died. It’s tense to watch, and it strips away any sense that Max is going to be delicate or easy on his subjects. “I was surprised, and thought, How dare you ask me that?” Jenni says. “But I was able to answer because I’m just as forthright as he is.”

Human ingenuity in the face of crumbling infrastructure. One man’s quest to save a bird that might already be extinct. The cultural schism dividing a major musical genre. A personal essay braiding space and family. And a jungle trek gone horribly, horribly awry. These are our editors’ favorite reads of the week.

1. The Balkans’ Alternative Postal System: An Ad-Hoc Courier’s Tale

Ilir Gashi | The Guardian & Kosovo 2.0 | July 13, 2023 | 4,061 words

In 2012, I lived in Pristina, Kosovo for a few months. Much to the chagrin of my mother, I couldn’t receive mail at my apartment. I had no postal box or number; as far as I could tell, no one in the brutalist residential complex did. I informed my mom, who wouldn’t take “no address” for an answer, that she should send mail to the nearby NATO base; I had met someone posted there who offered to serve as a middleman. (Thanks again, Drew.) I had the privilege of being an American with a connection to a powerful institution. Still, I did what many people in the Balkans do when they need to get something from point A to point B: I asked a friend. Ilir Gashi’s essay—a runner-up for a European Press Prize—details how informal networks that move packages, letters, and passengers have developed in response to the Balkans’ disputed borders and entrenched poverty. Gashi worked as an ad-hoc courier, delivering medicine, documents, homemade food items, and even a doll, which a little girl on a trip to Belgrade left behind when her family returned to Pristina. “While the weather map on Radio Television of Serbia shows Pristina as part of Serbia,” Gashi writes, “as far as the Serbian postal service is concerned, this city doesn’t exist, just like other places in Kosovo where Serbs aren’t the majority. Private delivery services are way too expensive. The only way the doll could reach Pristina was for somebody to take it with them.” This is a beautiful story of everyday resilience. —SD

2. Chasing the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker

Lindsey Liles | Garden & Gun | May 24, 2023 | 4,371 words

Does the ivory-billed woodpecker still exist in Arkansas? If you ask Bobby Harrison, the answer is yes. If you ask pretty much everybody else, the answer is no. That hasn’t stopped Harrison from 2,000 sojourns into Arkansas swampland to find a bird that hasn’t been officially sighted since 1944. At any time, the U.S. federal government may declare the bird extinct, ending all environmental protections for the species; Harrison is trying to prove everyone wrong and the clock is ticking. Lindsey Liles’ piece for Garden & Gun is much more than simply a superbly written profile of Harrison and his majestic quarry. It is more than the story of one man’s quest. It is a paean to faith and perseverance, to belief, and above all, hope. “As it turns out, searching for the ivorybill feels exactly like buying a lottery ticket,” writes Liles. “Rationally, you know it won’t happen, but the if and could of it all—plus the mystery of the deep woods, where anything can be lost or found—keeps your heart racing and your eyes combing the landscape.” Take a chance and spend some time on this piece. It won’t take long before you’re rooting for Harrison to hit the jackpot. —KS

3. Country Music’s Culture Wars and the Remaking of Nashville

Emily Nussbaum | The New Yorker | July 17, 2023 | 9,528 words

I’m not what you’d call a country music fan. I’ve never been to Nashville. So in many ways, I’m exactly not the audience for Emily Nussbaum’s grand unpacking of the schism currently wracking the genre and the city. But I love a good cultural shift, and I love having my expectations upended—and her feature accomplishes both of those without breaking a sweat. It feels cheap to call what’s happening an ideological divide, but nothing else feels like it comes close. For years, Nussbaum demonstrates, country music has been ruled by the so-called “bro” variant of the genre, facile cosplay of working-class platitudes performed by wealthy suburbanites; yet, as more queer and Black and female and politically progressive artists find success, in part by pushing against the prevailing mores, they’re inevitably shunted into the country-adjacent genre “Americana.” In the long run, that means less radio play, lower sales, and ultimately a ghettoizing: y’all over there, us over here. Again and again, Nussbaum finds people and places that underscore this struggle; her scene work is effortless and plentiful, whether gathering with members of the musical collective Black Opry or soaking in the atmosphere at bro-country star Jason Aldean’s Nashville club. It’s tempting to write this off as parachute journalism, but Nussbaum has been a country fan for decades, so there’s little baggage to weigh down the keen eye that made her such a dynamite TV critic for The New Yorker. What emerges is a memorable, hopeful, and sometimes maddening portrait of a machine in flux. It might not have made me a country fan, but it made me a fan of the people who are pushing that machine in long-overdue directions. —PR

4. Black Hole Paradox

Erica Vital-Lazare | The Baffler | July 19, 2023 | 3,914 words

Do you feel a certain tingle when you’ve stumbled on a great piece? I do. Erica Vital-Lazare’s beautiful braided essay on black holes—both those in space and the void her father created in deserting his family for the lure of Las Vegas—exacted a gravitational pull on my reading brain. Vital-Lazare doesn’t blame, chastise, or attempt to excuse her father’s neglect; she simply tries to understand. “Black holes are remnants,” she writes. “Their absence creates unfathomable weight…where no-thing can exist or escape. It is the uncreated space, where what was can never be again.” Humanity exists in the space where she cares for her aged, ailing father, in cooking turkey sausage instead of pork and serving unsugared jam to a man who abdicated his responsibility to take care of her as a child. For an essay that mines absence, it’s Vital-Lazare’s thoughtful observation and incisive prose that will fill you up. —KS

5. How I Survived a Wedding in a Jungle That Tried to Eat Me Alive

Melissa Johnson | Outside | July 18, 2023 | 4,273 words

I defy you not to squirm as you read Melissa Johnson’s account of her Guatemalan trek. Her visceral descriptions conjure up the sticky, itchy, sweaty reality of the jungle until you feel enveloped by it; a written Jumanji, if you will. The only romance here lies in the purpose of the trek: A marriage at El Mirador, the ruins of a Mayan city. (The ultimate in an inconvenient destination wedding.) Ten friends attend, and each struggles on the trek, but only Johnson gets bitten on the vagina by a tick, an incident she describes with as much eloquence as she does the wedding ceremony. It’s fun and funny but also an honest reflection on aging and lost time—not to mention a brutally effective reminder to remember bug repellant spray on your next jungle trip. —CW

Audience Award

Now for the piece that our readers loved the most this week:

Instead of a finished mural, at the Wednesday night vigil Marquez offered up his incomplete panels to the mourners, inviting them to take paintbrushes and add their own messages of grief or love. “He really gave them a place to express their feelings,” Jackson says. “Nobody else thought about it or even tried to do it.”

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American children who are ripped away from their families. The people who run for 24 hours. The dark side of an ancient city. A man who treats water like wine. A surprising response to a bad trip.

1. They Followed Doctors’ Orders. Then Their Children Were Taken Away.

Shoshana Walter | The New York Times Magazine and Reveal | June 29, 2023 | 7,167 words

I’m not sure that there’s anything more American than making it difficult for a person to be a mother. I don’t mean physically giving birth—thanks to anti-abortion zealots and the Supreme Court, many states are now literally forcing people to do that, with horrific consequences. I mean being a person, with everything that alone entails in a country defined by inequality, precarity, and prejudice, who also has a child. Exhibit A: As Shoshana Walter found in a feat of investigative reporting, people swept up in the opioid crisis, who’ve done exactly what they’re supposed to do—who got clean and take prescription drugs to stay that way—are now having their babies seized by the government. “They don’t want you on illicit street drugs,” one of Walter’s subjects says, “so here, we’re going to give you this medicine. But then if you take this medicine, we are going to punish you for it and ruin your family.” The injustice doesn’t end there. “We also found women who were reported after taking antidepressants, anxiety and ADHD medications and even over-the-counter cold medicine during pregnancies,” Walter writes. “Some women were reported after testing positive for the fentanyl in their epidurals.” The emphasis is mine; my jaw dropped at the Helleresque insanity of that detail. —SD

2. Running Wild

Stephen Lurie | Slate | July 1, 2023 | 4,505 words

You might not think a 24-hour race run around a 400-meter track would make for a compelling longread. It sounds grueling and monotonous. Dangerous, even. Everyone runs at their own pace. How can you even tell who’s excelling? Enter reporter Stephen Lurie who crafts a fascinating story by describing the tiny details of the racer’s experience in Pennsylvania’s Dawn to Dusk to Dawn ultramarathon. He takes a sport most know nothing about and puts the reader on the track, alongside the runners. “Gagz had been running for 17 hours and 20 minutes when he made it to the southeast corner of the loop,” he writes. “He’d already chugged past this spot 370 times, but on his 371st lap, he started walking across the lanes. He reached the edge and laid down, propping his tattooed legs up against a waist-high chain-link fence, long gray beard falling toward the damp red track. He planned to sleep for exactly five minutes.” Before you read this story, you might question the point of this ultra-endurance experience. But as Lurie shows us, anyone who has pushed themselves hard to do something challenging—regardless of what that something is—understands the invaluable education the very act of endurance gives you about you: the important subject of all. —KS

3. The Horrors of Pompeii

Guy D. Middleton | Aeon | July 4, 2023 | 4,000 words

Although I have not been to Pompeii, I have visited Herculaneum—a city that fell to Mount Vesuvius on the same day almost 2,000 years ago. Wandering the miraculously preserved streets, I imagined the lives of its residents, whose footsteps would have echoed on the stone so long before my own. Guy D. Middleton does more than imagine in this piece; he pulls in research, clawing away any romanticism to paint a picture of the brutality of Pompeii, a place where slaves would have endured sexual assault and violence, “being owned and being used,” as Middleton puts it. A pithy piece of wall graffito advertising sex is his jumping-off point: “Eutychis, a Greek lass with sweet ways, 2 asses.” (Clearly, we share a penchant for drawing on walls—and sex—with ancient Pompeiians.) Middleton smartly uses this line to turn detective and, in trying to uncover who Eutychis was, displays Pompeii’s wider underbelly. It makes for a dark story, but one deftly told. —CW

4. Waterworld

Katherine LaGrave | AFAR | October 28, 2020 | 4,042 words

People who have fascinations tend to be the most fascinating people. For AFAR, Katherine LaGrave profiles Martin Riese, America’s first water sommelier, a man who has been obsessed with water since he was four years old. This piece could easily have devolved from profile into caricature, but it’s LaGrave’s restraint that keeps you reading. (Ok restraint and the wonderful water puns and wordplay sprinkled throughout.) “Riese is taking cues from the element he considers most beloved, going with the flow and flowing where he’s able, taking opportunities as they come, and sharing why we should care about water with anyone who cares to listen,” she writes. Take the plunge and read LaGrave’s piece. You’ll not only be awash in new knowledge of sustainably sourced high-end water, but you’ll also satisfy your thirst for a well-written piece on a little-known topic. And that’s something I can raise a glass to. —KS

5. Meet the Psychedelic Boom’s First Responders

Chris Colin | Wired | June 29, 2023 | 2,924 words

Recent psychedelics coverage tends to focus on four primary categories. There are the drugs’ benefits and/or dangers, as well as stories focusing on their creators and wielders: those who use them to help people and those who seek to profit from their use. Chris Colin’s fascinating Wired feature skirts that tetrad, instead tracing the evolving norms around supporting a person when their inward journey goes to dark places. From the opening graf, you know it’s going to be a fun read: “Everything was insane and fine. The walls had begun to bend, the grain in the floorboards was starting to run. Jeff Greenberg’s body had blown apart into particles, pleasantly so. When he closed his eyes, chrysanthemums blossomed.” Using Greenberg’s trip, his own psilocybin experience, and a solid dose of cosmic-cowboy history, Colin shows how the way we respond to a person’s “psychic distress” speaks volumes about how we respond to one another in general. That we’re in the midst of a psychonautics surge is not surprising; that we’re responding to the moment with care and common sense is. —PR

Audience Award

Here’s the piece that bowled our readers away this week.

What you know of your mother’s childhood can be summarized in a single story that is about not her childhood but her father’s:

There once lived a little boy, the son of impoverished tenant farmers. One day, he was invited to the village fair by the child of his richer neighbor. The neighbor gave the boy a few coins to spend at the fair. Ecstatic, he bought himself the first toy of his life, a wooden pencil, which he hung proudly around his neck the whole day. When he returned home, his parents beat him within an inch of his life. Those coins could have bought rice and grains! Enough to feed the family for a week!

This was the only story your grandfather told your mother of his childhood, and the first time she told it to you, you recognized the echo of every hero tale you were taught as a child. A Communist cadre till the end, your grandfather had run away at age sixteen to join the Party, which had given him the first full belly he had known. Just as important, the Party had taught him how to read, inspired the avidity with which he had marked up Mao’s Little Red Book: his cramped, inky annotations marching up and down the page like so many ants trooping through mountains.

The second time your mother told you the story, you were ten or eleven and she didn’t have to tell it at all. The two of you were at Staples, shopping for school supplies. “back-to-school sale,” the posters all over the store screamed. Four notebooks, four mechanical pencils, your mother had stipulated, but you wanted more. You always wanted more. When you persisted, she had only to look at you and utter the words “You have more than anyone” for you to know exactly whom she was referring to.

The story was growing inside you, just as it had grown in your mother: a cactus whose spines pierced their way through your thoughts.

Maybe goggles can recover some of what the internet has lost. One might use them not to foster or exploit connections (as in the old—and failed—mission of social media) but to slow down and go somewhere rather than tapping and scrolling and posting into oblivion.

The American West is full of these once-violent places now polished for tourism and consumption. On my way here from California, I passed a marker for the site of the last camp of the Donner Party, a notorious group of pioneers caught in a winter storm. More than 40 of them died, and some of the survivors consumed the dead. The tragedy is now memorialized in a park, a museum, a ski resort, movies and a musical.