A real-world Jurassic Park scenario. The puzzle of immigration, and the immigration of puzzles. The Mapplethorpe x Doolittle collaboration you never imagined. Finding solace in poetry. The inner lives of farm animals. All that—and more—in this week’s edition.

1. What Kind Of Future Does De-Extinction Promise?

Sabrina Imbler | Defector | December 6, 2023 | 5,436 words

Ever imagine what it would be like if a long-lost species roamed Earth once again? Colossal, a well-funded company at the forefront of the de-extinction business, plans to make this a reality. On the surface, this sounds like an ecological dream, as well as a way for humans to do good and reverse some of the destruction we’ve caused on this planet. But what does de-extinction entail? In this fascinating read, Sabrina Imbler explains that a recreated dodo would not actually be a dodo, but a genetic hybrid of the dodo and its closest living relative (the Nicobar pigeon). What, then, would teach this lone dodo how to be a dodo? Or, in the case of the mammoth, which would be developed with the genetic help of the Asian elephant, how would the animal physically come into being? The uneasy answer: a surrogate elephant mother who would never be able to consent to carrying another species. (In the hope of an alternative, Colossal has a team focused on developing an artificial womb, which—depending on your perspective—might be even creepier.) There’s a lot more to ponder here, including the key question of who, ultimately, de-extinction is for. As Imbler asserts, it’s not for the animals, but for Colossal’s VCs and investors, who include Paris Hilton. (Yes, you read that correctly.) Always, always click on a link with a Sabrina Imbler byline. They write my favorite kind of science writing: curious, thoughtful, and accessible. This piece is no exception. —CLR

2. Can Crosswords Be More Inclusive?

Natan Last | The New Yorker | December 18, 2023 | 4,675 words

So here’s something about me: I take crossword puzzles seriously. I’ve done them since I was old enough to hold a pen. I’ve written about them. (More than once!) I don’t say this to establish any nerd bona fides, but to make clear that I know from good crossword stories. And in a week when multiple national magazines ran longform pieces about puzzles, Natan Last’s New Yorker feature—which ran in print under the far better headline “Rearrangements”—became one of the best crossword stories I’ve ever read. A longtime crossword constructor and writer, Last is currently working on a book about you-know-what. Still, this piece contains multitudes in the best way possible. On one level, it’s a profile of Mangesh Ghogre, a man from Mumbai whose love of crosswords increased his English fluency and ultimately earned him a so-called Einstein visa to the U.S. On another, it uses Ghogre’s story to interrogate the cultural history and linguistic conventions of American-style crosswords—and on a third, it contends with the current movement trying to push those crosswords out of their Western rut and to be more expansive in both their clues and their fill. This conversation has been going on for years among constructors and editors, and the resulting sea change is evident everywhere from the iconic New York Times puzzle to outlets like The New Yorker and USA Today. Yet, Last wraps a human-interest story and a thorny bit of discourse into a bundle that’s accessible to non-solvers while also being sharp and nuanced enough to satisfy obsessives like me. If you didn’t have a clue, now you do. —PR

3. A Work of Love

Lulu Miller and John Megahan | Orion | December 7, 2023 | 3,100 words

This utterly winning Q&A is about “the Noah’s ark you never heard about,” as Radiolab host Lulu Miller puts it in her introduction. Miller talks to John Megahan, an illustrator who spent years secretly drawing detailed pictures of animals engaging in queer behavior: “male giraffes necking (literally, that’s what scientists call the courtship behavior); dolphins engaging in blowhole sex; and rams and grizzlies and hedgehogs mounting one another in such intricate detail you can almost feel their fur or fangs or spines.” The illustrations, which eventually filled the pages of the seminal 1999 book Biological Exuberance, are entirely based on fact—they’re inspired by “well-documented cases of same-sex mating, parenting, courtship, and multivariate, rather than binary, expressions of sex (like intersexuality and sex-changing) in the animal world.” This interview about art as activism is a bright light at the end of a challenging year for so many of us. It is as funny as it is earnest, filled with laugh-out-loud anecdotes and eloquent articulations of important truths long sidelined by opponents of queer existence. “It definitely did not stay a day job,” Megahan says of his illustrations. “It became a work of love for me, in a sense. I became really committed to it. Once we got going and I saw the scope of the project and what it was all about, I basically wanted to pay respect to these animals.” —SD

4. How the Poet Christian Wiman Keeps His Faith

Casey Cep | The New Yorker | December 4, 2023 | 5,978 words

Casey Cep profiles poet Christian Wiman who, nearly 20 years ago at age 39—newly married, his life before him—was diagnosed with a “rare form of lymphoma called Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia.” He imagined he had five years to live. As a child, his family’s anger and depression boiled over into violence in fits they referred to as “the sulls.” Wiman, so afflicted, used exercise to quell his feelings until he discovered reading as a way to change his life. He made poetry his obsession, “swallowing all of Blake, Dickinson, Dante, Dostoyevsky, Cervantes” and later John Milton, thinking that to write great poems, you first must consume them. Cep is nearly invisible in this piece; it’s so carefully researched and written, you feel as though you’re face to face with Wiman as he shares stories and what poetry has meant to him at various stages in his life. Poetry, he has written, is a salve “for psychological, spiritual, or emotional pain. For physical pain it is, like everything but drugs, useless.” Despite that, as Cep notes, when Wiman was in “the cancer chair” undergoing treatment and its excruciating side effects, he turned to verse. “In the cancer chair, Wiman would recite every poem he could remember, and, when he ran out, try to write one of his own,” she writes. Cep’s nuanced profile is a testament to dogged determination, coming to grips with faith—both in God and the power of poetry—and the feat of sheer will against despair. —KS

5. What Are Farm Animals Thinking?

David Grimm | Science | December 7, 2023 | 3,694 words

A couple of years ago, my downstairs neighbors kept chickens. (Finger, Tender, and Nugget. I take no responsibility for the names.) These sassy ladies realized that I was a soft touch, and every day merrily hopped up the stairs to my deck to peer in through the patio door, awaiting kitchen scraps. I soon noticed that when I got up and opened my bedroom curtains, the chickens peered up from the yard. Curtains open, they would race up the stairs: the café was in business. These girls were so on the ball that I have not eaten a chicken since we became acquainted. It’s little wonder, then, that I pounced on this investigation into research on the complexity of thinking in farm animals, an area I have mused on since the food-savvy chickens but that is often ignored by scientists. David Grimm bravely faces the “cacophony of bleats, groans, and retching wails” and “sour miasma of pig excrement” to enter the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN) and learn about the questions being asked there, such as do cows have friends? (Considering that scientists have potty-trained cows here, I think they probably do.) Grimm keeps the tone light—sliding in a few quips between the science—but still provides a comprehensive overview of the work. With a staggering 78 billion farm animals on Earth, it is time we gave them more thought. —CW

Audience Award

What editor’s pick was our readers’ favorite this week?

As the asterisk implies, the dodo* wouldn’t be a real dodo, in the strictest sense. It would be a genetic hybrid, a calculated reinterpretation of a dodo—ideally bearing some traits of its namesake but perhaps also those of the Nicobar pigeon, the dodo’s closest living relative, whose cells will be manipulated to express the physical traits of the extinct species. A Nicobar pigeon in all its gothic iridescence is certainly beautiful, but it is not a dodo. And with no real dodos around to teach this new bird how to be a dodo, it may behave like a different bird. Is this dodo* worth it?

If we reach a point where native ecosystems have been restored, conservation is abundantly and globally funded, governments have taken meaningful and equitable action against climate change, no species are endangered by our presence on the planet, and people no longer live in poverty that makes poaching a rhino horn or mammoth tusk a necessary trade-off for survival, then sure: Let the dodos* and mammoths* frolic. But in the world we live in, spending lots of money to inflict unknown degrees of suffering on living and dying animals in pursuit of creating hybrids that will require immense and expensive assistance to survive on their own amid vanishing wilds does not just seem misguided. It seems funereal.

I prefer cats to dogs. They’re smaller, you don’t have to walk them, and they generally like to be left alone. I also like that you seem to have to earn their attention. And once you make friends with a cat, it is a stream of cuteness. Detective now sleeps next to my chest or behind Jan’s legs, purring throughout the night. In the wild, cats only really meow to their mom when they’re kittens; it’s how they ask for food. But they do meow at humans, whenever the spirit moves them. The way I see it, the cats I meet are intentionally being cute in order to get me to do things for them—give them food, pet them nicely, the usual. I accept the terms of this agreement.

Here are five standout pieces we read this week. You can always visit our editors’ picks or our Twitter feed to see what other recommendations you may have missed.

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1. Disaster at 18,200 Feet

Kelsey Vlamis | Insider | July 22nd, 2022 | 6,612 words

On an attempt to summit Alaska’s Denali, the tallest peak in North America, Adam Rawski fell 1,000 feet down the Autobahn, a dangerous slope that has claimed more lives than any other part of the mountain. Incredibly, he survived. But as Kelsey Vlamis recounts in this story, there’s much more to that day. How did Rawski end up climbing with three strangers? Why weren’t they roped for protection? The physical conditions alone on Denali — the high altitude, the extreme cold, the exhaustion — are a challenge for even the most seasoned mountaineers. But Rawski’s party also included a mix of inexperience and overconfidence, and was plagued by a lack of communication and odd team dynamics. Inevitably, their expedition was a total recipe for disaster. I’m not at all into mountain climbing, but Vlamis’ account of this adventure-gone-wrong gripped me ’til the end. —CLR

2. The Secret History Of The Internet’s Funniest Buzzer-Beater

Brian Feldman | Defector | July 19th, 2022 | 3,407 words

Back in 2015 — remember the innocence? — Vanity Fair ran a piece by Darryn King called “Ermahgerddon: The Untold Story of the Ermahgerd Girl.” I don’t know for sure whether this was the first longform journalistic investigation into a meme, but I do know that it was a) the first I remember, and b) an absolute joy. That said, I have to say that Brian Feldman’s recent Defector feature surpasses it. The meme in question isn’t even a meme in the current sense; it’s neither photo nor GIF, but a video clip. And that video clip of an errant fullcourt basketball shot connecting with a small child’s head, which has been circulating online since the heyday of Limewire and eBaum’s World, is so ancient, so pixilated, that identifying the people within it feels like a futile endeavor. Not for Feldman. In opposition of “Erhmagerddon,” the journalist-turned-software-engineer starts not with the solution, but with the mystery. He solves it, of course, but he also delivers an evocative tour of the internet as it used to be. To describe is to spoil, so I’ll let him take you the rest of the way. You’re in good hands. —PR

3. Glen McCurley Strangled Carla Walker in 1974. Was She His Only Victim?

Skip Hollandsworth | Texas Monthly | July 19th, 2022 | 9,164 words

Always read Skip Hollandsworth. It’s really that simple. He’s one of the best storytellers in the business. Exhibit A: his latest piece about a possible serial killer in Fort Worth. It’s the best kind of true crime yarn, with no frills, no fuss, and no salaciousness. Hollandsworth’s portrayal of death, grief, and justice is humane at every turn. It features a rich cast of characters, a couple of left-field surprises — a trip to CrimeCon, for instance — and a fascinating face-to-face encounter with the killer in question, now serving time for the 1974 murder of a teenager named Carla Walker. I read this piece eating popcorn (literally). And as a writer and editor, I was taking mental notes. —SD

4. The Surrogacy State

Tessa Somberg | The Cut | July 28th, 2022 | 3,760 words

New York legalized surrogacy in 2021. And what a time to do so: in the midst of a pandemic, on the precipice of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, during an upswing of anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry and panic over “family values” — in short, when so much about personal health and agency over one’s body feels more fraught than ever. Tessa Somberg profiles three women who chose to be some of the first surrogates in New York, and the result is as intimate and compassionate as you’d hope. “What’s more powerful to a woman,” asks Portia, one of the surrogates, “than the choice to do what she wants with her uterus?” What, indeed. —SD

5. I Woke Up With an Allergy to Cold

Alison Espach | Outside | July 12th, 2022 | 3,687 words

“Sure,” you think. “I’m allergic to cold, too.” But this isn’t the always-need-a-sweater type of thing. It’s not that you feel cold; it’s that your body rebels against it. Itching. Swelling. Hives. And that’s just the beginning. When Alison Espach began experiencing the symptoms of what she later learned was cold urticaria, she doubted it too. Yet, the more she confronted the rare autoimmune response, the more she was forced to confront the long-past familial tragedy that may have been at its root. “Some people thought they were cured and woke up one day to find that they weren’t,” she writes. “When they least expected it, when they were out walking and a cold wind blew, their throat closed. I think of these people when I am packing for a hike, when I am headed by myself to the ocean. I wonder if I will become one of them. I wonder when tragedy will strike again.” A searching, confidently paced chronicle of a situation that’s somehow both unbelievable and all too relatable. —PR

Here are five stories that moved us this week, and the reasons why.

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1. Love and Longing in the Seaweed Album

Sasha Archibald | The Public Domain Review | March 9th, 2022 | 2,500 words

The news of 2022 is like an anvil weighing down on our collective psyche. This week, I found myself hungry for a read that felt like a relief — a collection of words that would inspire delight, not despair. This essay delivered. It’s the quintessential example of a factoid-filled piece you read and then find yourself immediately (and perhaps annoyingly) telling people about. Me to a friend: “Did you know that seaweed collecting in 19th-century England was a feminist activity?” Also me: “It’s possible that seaweed collecting inspired George Eliot to start writing fiction.” Me again: “Tweens once exchanged seaweed albums like kids now trade Pokemon cards!” Sasha Archibald writes with grace and humor, and she shows how, far more than just a charming pastime, the bygone practice of seaweed collecting intersected with the wider currents of history. It’s a breath of sea air. —SD

2. Night Shifts

Michael W. Clune | Harper’s Magazine | March 4th, 2022 | 6,731 words

I’ve always been fascinated by my dreams. I’ve made attempts to become more attuned to them over the years, but the books on lucid dreaming I’ve bought or the notepads I’ve kept on my nightstand to jot down middle-of-the-night notes end up collecting dust. These days, I’ve given up viewing sleep as a state I can control: my experiences with sleep paralysis — and my sleep apnea, whose treatment requires bulky hardware — make me feel completely powerless. So I read Michael W. Clune’s essay on dream incubation, the shaping of dreams according to a dreamer’s chosen words or images, with great interest. Clune takes us along for the ride as he tries a prototype of the Dormio, a device that enables you to shape the images that appear during hypnagogia, the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep. He explores thought-provoking questions about the mind and its potential for creativity once we’ve lost conscious control of our own thoughts, and what this might mean for the future — including more dystopian possibilities. I’ll end with a line I haven’t stopped thinking about: “Just below the surface of wakeful awareness, just a minute or two under it, everything is change.”—CLR

3. What Lies Beneath Hip-Hop’s Swagger

Danyel Smith | The New York Times Magazine | March 11th, 2022 | 2,391 words

The NYT Magazine‘s annual music issue hit a special gear this year, from Hanif Abdurraqib’s “sad bangers” paean to Jody Rosen’s exegesis of scam rap. However, one piece in particular was so dialed in, so sleek and powerful, that I had to get up and walk it off once I’d gotten to the end — and I’m not speaking metaphorically. Danyel Smith’s bonafides have long been indisputable: from running Vibe and Billboard to the recent Black Girl Songbook podcast, she’s been part of the music journalism firmament for more than 30 years. And here, she takes the measure of aggression and identity within hip-hop (“I am a fan, and I want all the smoke,” she writes early on), tracing it from today’s young nihilists back to her own early engagements with the genre. The magic isn’t simply in the threads she extends, yarn-mapping Moneybagg Yo and Kash Doll to Golden Age artists like LL Cool J and Queen Latifah, but in how she traces the underlying terrain that made that map necessary. “Spoiler alert: The bombast is a response, a defense, a pose, a stance,” she writes. “It’s magic, and it seduces. But it’s labor. Under threat of a variety of harms, you have to camouflage your soul. So if I’m tired — of always staying ready, so I never have to get ready — imagine the music-makers themselves.” Make time today. —PR

4. The Shape Of Walking

Victoria Livingstone | Joyland | March 15th, 2022 | 1,524 words

As Victoria Livingstone recounts the early days of the pandemic and the uncertainties about being around people — even outdoors — she retraces the many steps she took in a local park, observing others as they too navigated a familiar communal space that at the time, felt like uncharted territory. As the pandemic continued, Livingstone walks and walks. As her young daughter emerges from a stroller to take her own first tentative steps, Livingstone mulls the varying shapes and directions her essay could take as well as the simple and oh-so-necessary pleasures of discovery: “By spring of 2021, when pandemic restrictions briefly eased, she was running: a bouncing toddler run, more up and down than forward. She ran towards the swing-set or to the dandelions or to someone walking a dog or to a park bench or to a piece of trash that looked like a treasure or to the geese sitting in the middle of the field. Her direction was often impossible to predict…I struggled to write this essay even when I believed I was the singular author. Now my daughter continually reminds me that our steps intersect with the movements of those around us in illegible patterns. The rhetoric of walking resists order.” —KS

5. Under The Big Sky

Drew Magary | Defector | March 7th, 2022 | 2,443 words

As a teenager, I loved the Baz Luhrmann song “Everyone’s Free to Wear Sunscreen,” but it was not until much later that I learned to appreciate the line, “Be kind to your knees, you’ll miss them when they are gone.” A couple of ski accidents and a knee surgery later, I sure do miss those springy youthful knees. These lyrics were in my head reading this beautiful essay. Like the song, it is a lesson on how to get the most out of life — even when your body does not work in the way it once did. It’s a gentle piece — Drew Magary simply reminiscing about skiing with his Dad, his friends, and his family — but the writing draws you in, letting you share his happiness. Over the years, this joy becomes peppered with frustrations as new limitations appear: “I could feel my thighs and spine ready to burst as I held crucial turns. When I felt myself going too fast, I reflexively dragged my poles behind me, as if that would slow me down any. Skiing will expose you like that.” But, even while dragging his poles, Magary is still awed by simply being on a mountain and declares he will keep skiing even as his body and ability deteriorate, “It’s not about conquering the mountain. It’s simply about going there. A mountain is a god.” A sentiment with which I concur — even with my dodgy knees, I also still ski. —CW

This week, we’re trying something new. In addition to our usual list of five great stories to read, we wanted to share a little insight into why we chose each one.

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1. Courtney’s Story*

Diana Moskovitz | Defector | September 13, 2021 | 13,800 words

Diana Moskovitz’s investigation of Ohio State’s handling of domestic violence allegations against one of its football coaches centers the survivor, a young wife and mother named Courtney Smith. It shows how some of the most powerful people in Ohio, and in college football, worked to protect themselves and their reputations, all at Smith’s expense. In the dictionary, “Courtney’s Story” should be found under the listing for “damning.” —Seyward Darby

*Subscription required.

2. A New Nurse Struggles to Save Patients in a New COVID Surge

Kathryn Ivey | Scientific American | September 16, 2021 | 1,757

Kathryn Ivey became a registered nurse on July 27th, 2020, and went straight into a COVID ward in Nashville, Tennessee. “I learned how to be a nurse with death constantly at my heels,” she says. Recounting the terror and dread of the ward, she remembers “every single 2 A.M. phone call to family members so they could hear the voice of the person they loved at least one more time.” Ivey’s first-person account is nearly surreal, it’s that terrifying. What’s worse is that so much of this suffering and death could have been prevented. Here in Canada, Alberta’s ICU is near capacity after a premature summer re-opening plan eliminated protections and restrictions. The provincial government only just admitted they were wrong. Now, Canadian nurses like Ivey will have to deal with the casualties of a government more concerned about freedom and economics than human lives. Ivey’s piece should be required reading for anyone who’s eligible, yet remains unvaccinated by choice. “We are haunted by failures now, starting with the failures of policy that allowed human lives to be sacrificed on the altar of the economy and ending with us telling a family that we can do no more. COVID has made martyrs of us all,” says Ivey. —Krista Stevens

3. Rain Boots, Turning Tides, and the Search for a Missing Boy

Katherine Laidlaw | Wired | September 9, 2021 | 6,900 words

I picked this essay because Laidlaw’s powerful, descriptive language pulls you in right from the start. This tragic story of a missing 3-year-old is also told with respect and sympathy toward the family — against the grain of an online community that has them marked as the prime suspects. —Carolyn Wells

4. Hawai’i Is Not Our Playground

Chris Colin | AFAR | September 2, 2021 | 2,943 words

Tourism has “tamed and reinvented [Hawaii] for the mainlander imagination,” writes Chris Colin in his latest story for AFAR. From countless sacred sites to Native Hawaiian traditions, the land and history of its Indigenous population have vanished and been forgotten over time. Colin’s view of Hawaii as a vacation destination unraveled as he toured Oahu in late 2019 with local activist Kyle Kajihiro. Kajihiro told him that even responsible, politically conscious visitors automatically slip into “vacation mode” as soon as they step foot outside of the airport, expecting no less than the idyllic “lei-draped, aloha-dispensing, honeymooner-welcoming” version of Hawaii. As visitors, what more should we be doing — and what does reciprocity in the context of travel look like? What does decolonizing tourism — and decentering the outsider — mean? And ultimately, how can we all support Native Hawaiians in their fight to reclaim their land? Colin’s piece is thought-provoking, pushing me rethink when and how to visit. —Cheri Lucas Rowlands

5. Revolt of the Delivery Workers

Josh Dzieza | New York Magazine | September 13, 2021 | 7,479 words

Convenience has always come at a cost; this we know. Yet for the class of delivery cyclists that has emerged in New York City over the past decade, ferrying Doordash and Seamless orders across bridges and boroughs, those costs grow ever steeper. If it’s not draconian apps like Relay pushing riders to the brink of danger, it’s bike thieves robbing riders of their transportation and livelihood — often inflicting injury in the process — and a police department that hasn’t exactly leapt to help. As Josh Dzieza chronicles in a vividly reported feature published in New York’s Curbed vertical, a patchwork of collective action has arisen from this fraught landscape. Riders band together to navigate attack-plagued routes en masse; they protest outside NYPD precincts and lobby for legislative protections from predatory employers; most jaw-droppingly, they track stolen bikes to their new homes and manage to get them back. “For Cesar [Solano] and many other delivery workers,” Dzieza writes of one organizer, “the thefts broke something loose.” His story doesn’t help put those pieces back together, but reading about these workers and the steps they’re taking ensures that you’ll think about what it really means to have a salad ferried crosstown. (And if you still can’t do without that Sweetgreen, then tip well — in cash, if possible.) —Peter Rubin

This week, we’re sharing stories from Gus Garcia-Roberts and David Heath, Melissa Gira Grant, David Owen, Geoffrey Himes, and Traci Brimhall.

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1. Luck, Foresight and Science: How an Unheralded Team Developed a COVID-19 Vaccine in Record Time

Gus Garcia-Roberts, David Heath | USA Today | January 26, 2021 | 35 minutes (8,808 words)

Credit for the COVID-19 vaccine “belongs to a series of uncelebrated discoveries dating back at least 15 years – and a constellation of unsung scientists.”

2. QAnon and the Cultification of the American Right

Melissa Gira Grant | The New Republic | February 1, 2021 | 24 minutes (6,170 words)

“The conspiracy theory has become a theology of right-wing rebellion.”

3. How a Young Activist Is Helping Pope Francis Battle Climate Change

David Owen | The New Yorker | February 1, 2021 | 27 minutes (6,802 words)

“Molly Burhans wants the Catholic Church to put its assets—which include farms, forests, oil wells, and millions of acres of land—to better use. But, first, she has to map them.”

4. The Poet Laureate of New Orleans

Geoffrey Himes | The Bitter Southerner | Febuary 2, 2021 | 33 minutes (8,266 words)

“Earl King’s lyrical blues and electric stage presence set him apart. But he’s never been properly honored as a Louisiana writer who penned songs for Dr. John, the Neville Brothers, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Jimi Hendrix. New Orleans doesn’t have a poet laureate, may we suggest this posthumous honor for the King?”

5. The Grief Artist

Traci Brimhall | Guernica | January 6, 2021 | 20 minutes (5,018 words)

“In the wake of a loss comes the urge to create.”