Jim Morrison has endured almost unimaginable loss—first his wife and two young children in a plane crash, then his partner and climbing companion Hilaree Nelson in a Himalayan avalanche. But rather than stepping back from danger, he kept pursuing ever more risky objectives, culminating in the first ski descent of Everest’s nearly unclimbable north face via the Super Direct route. This profile explores Morrison’s perseverance and shows how, for some people, a life defined by extreme risk can never be retreated from.

“It was a profound, transformational moment for me to know that when I found Hilaree, she wasn’t in her body,” Morrison told me. “I dug her out of the snow. I held her in my arms. I screamed, and I cried, but it was just her dead body. She was no longer there, and it was as clear as anything has been in my entire lifetime. I had been haunted so much by my wife and my children, and what state they were in when the plane crashed, and how they were recovered. I had been haunted by these visions of their half-burned corpses. Then contrast that with what I went through with Hilaree. There was so much more finality to it.” Morrison had her body cremated in Kathmandu, at a Buddhist temple.

In 1993, an audience member at the Citizen Cup tennis tournament stabbed Monica Seles, then a 19-year-old phenom who was then dethroned from the top of the world tennis rankings. The attack, writes Terrence Doyle, “was a physical manifestation of a logic that has since become our default: the idea that an athlete is not a human to be witnessed, but a data point to be managed, edited, or deleted.” I briefly mentioned Doyle’s disturbing essay a week ago, but it has stayed with me since: a worrying meditation on the ease with which athletes are abstracted into mere data sets. It deserves your deeper consideration.

Perhaps the most profound shift is the collapse of our ability to trust what we see. In 1993, we had the tape. We saw Parche reach over the rail and thrust his blade into Seles’ back. We agreed on the wound. Today, that on-the-ground truth is being eroded. We’re being told by powerful forces to disregard the evidence of our own senses—to see every physical trauma as a narrative threat or a potential deepfake.

Leo Kim’s piece is an ambitious mix of race‑track reportage, personal reflection, and theory‑driven critique. It braids together one night at a small Indiana speedway, the rise and collapse of Anderson’s auto industry and unions, and an abstract meditation on tech, AI, and “speed.” It poses a compelling central question—whether every technology invents its own kind of disaster—but does demand close attention to follow its dense imagery.

The dust doesn’t bother me much. By this point in the night, the round-and-round whirling of cars, combined with the alchemical mixture of exhaust, burnt rubber, and patriotic beer, has lulled me into a Midwestern trance. It must be the flatness that makes this region such a perfect catalyst for this kind of delirium. When Baudrillard drove through the expanse of the US, he wrote about speed as an erasing force whose “only rule is to leave no trace behind.” He was right to sense speed as a primal impulse in this unfurling stretch of country. Movement in the Old World is slowed by its narrow roads, latticed cities, and contested borders; it struggles to overcome the glacial pace of History. Drive a hundred miles and you’re bound to run into something. Not so in the Midwest. Nothing here interrupts the flow. There are no mountains to break the wind, no densities of skyscrapers to bisect the sky, no ravines to stop the sprawl. Everything moves towards terminal velocity. It is a landscape built for vortices and accelerating feedback loops: for flows of capital, weather, ideology, and machinery to intersect and (r)evolve into novel forms.

If there’s a Wikipedia page about yourself, you must be famous—some kind of celebrity—or an expert in your field, or a figure who’s made a prominent contribution to human history or culture. But what happens when that page is nominated by Wikipedia editors for deletion? In a quirky tech story for Wired, Duncan Fyfe reports on the strange experience of being told you’re just not notable enough.

There is, when you look for it, a careless and cocky tone that can creep into the verdicts of Wikipedia editors who have been doing the job for a long time. “This guy is a nobody. Delete him.” “I’ve got more followers on Instagram than he does.” “All we have here are stand-up comedy, opinion columns, being a guest or collaborator on some non-notable podcasts … This is more or less every twentieth person who lives in NYC.”

When Snigdha Poonam received a strange email from an organization seemingly interested in discussing a book she published seven years ago, she was intrigued, but apprehensive. As it turns out, her suspicions were well-founded. Poonam, after investigating, discovered she’d been the target of an author scam. Little did the grifter know, that Poonam has spent the last 10 years reporting on fraud. Game on!

This was undoubtedly a scam. Genuine book clubs don’t ask for money from authors. But who was behind it?

Had these individuals actually read my work, they would have wanted to stay away from me. I have spent the last 10 years reporting on transnational fraud. My first book, Dreamers, closed with a chapter on fake call centers in India; my second, Scamlands, traveled to other low-income countries in Asia to portray an invisible empire that thrives on inequality, technological change and the erosion of trust.

Along the way, I met and interviewed the scammers whose labor keeps this empire running. For some, fraud was a route to upward mobility; for others, an act of revenge against the privileged. Though I have formally emerged from this underworld, I can never delete a scam email without wanting to know more.

For Emergence Magazine, James Bridle writes about artificial intelligence; carpentry and chair-making with ChatGPT; and Enzo Mari, a famed Italian furniture designer from the 1950s and ’60s. Bridle asks: “What if we used AI for something actually useful?” They offer an interesting take on AI, and why the extractive way we’re using it is far from satisfying.

What we have here is, quite literally, a chair designed by someone who has read a lot about chairs but never actually sat in one. They know what a chair should look like, what it should do, the mechanics of how one is put together, the physics of holding you up. But they have no embodied experience of the world, no history with chairs or any other object, no physical memory. They don’t know how it feels, not merely to sit in a chair, but to encounter one in the world, to place it among other things in a home, to live with it, to be around it every day as one goes about the mundane business of life. This is the idea of a chair brought to life; but things—objects, beings, relationships—are not mere ideas, and you certainly can’t get every aspect of them from books. The chair is low stakes, but, once again, you wouldn’t want to run a society, or a culture, or a planet this way.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, it was summarily booted from one of the world’s greatest—or worst, depending on your taste—pop-culture celebrations: Eurovision. When Israel launched its genocidal campaign in Gaza, it was allowed to keep competing. And it’s done very well. Lisa Borst goes into the pulsing belly of the gaudy Eurovision beast to interrogate the competition’s politics:

One word that comes up a lot in attempts to describe the Eurovision aesthetic is “camp.” In a blog post for the London Review of Books, Andrew O’Hagan pronounced that Eurovision 2009 was “the biggest, campest carnival yet.” The following year, Anthony Lane, in The New Yorker, characterized the contest by its “reliable deployment of camp, whether sly or unwitting.” I’d brushed up on my Sontag before heading to Vienna and thought I’d prepared for artifice, for schlock, for the pileup of off-kilter theatricality and post-disco schmaltz that inspired Carl Wilson, in Let’s Talk About Love, to label Eurovision the “Cheeseball Olympics.”

But as the hook to “Ferto” lodged itself further in my head and Eurovision’s physical presence continued to intrude, it was becoming harder to see all this as properly winking, witty, and “disengaged, depoliticized—or at least apolitical,” as Sontag puts it in her second Note on Camp. What was emanating from the Stadthalle seemed closer to “kitsch,” that nice German loanword for camp without wit. Kitsch is politicized and shaped by residual history; its precondition, Clement Greenberg wrote in 1939, is “the availability close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition” whose familiar formulas could be recycled by reactionary regimes toward the aim of mass appeal. 

Gus Garcia-Roberts follows Belfi Rivera, a Major League Baseball prospect from the Dominican Republic, through an unregulated recruitment system that exposes young athletes to a network of predatory figures (and at least one former World Series MVP and prominent Fox Sports analyst). It’s a system that operates in plain sight and has for years, but Garcia-Roberts’s superbly reported narrative, which centers on Rivera and his vulnerable family, make those operations positively harrowing.

As a child, Belfi never cared for baseball. He started playing at 7, he told me, because a local coach would drag him from his house and cuff him on the head if he tried to escape to a nearby river to be with his friends. But even as a young boy, he understood the sport likely represented his family’s one shot out of grinding poverty. During that video call in 2021, it seemed that he had clinched it. 

But in two and a half years, the $1.8 million Belfi was promised would be almost all gone. Carmona received $630,000, which represented his 35% commission. But more than $950,000 went to someone who had no hand in teaching Belfi how to play baseball. His name is Santo Caraballo, one of the most notorious moneylenders profiting from Dominican baseball. His business partner is a national hero and, 10 years after his retirement, still a commanding figure within Major League Baseball: David Ortiz, known universally as “Big Papi.”

Leave it to Arundhati Roy to deliver a scorching, dizzying essay on the perils of artificial intelligence that references Greek mythology, Francis Ford Coppola, the Bible, India’s industrial history, and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! Plus, Emily Dickinson features in the lede:

The auguries are raining down hard. Think or Sink. Comply or Die. Look Up or be Left Out. And so, with these not-so-gentle threats, it has come to pass that the Age of AI—Actual Idiocy, Actual Super Idiocy, Recursive Snowballing-Idiocy—is upon us. Heck, I’ve already used two dashes in this opening paragraph. That, as they say, is a tell. So, perhaps I haven’t written this essay at all. You’d have to use an AI app to check if it’s actually AI, and whether I’m really, or not really, or only partially me. You can no longer use your instincts. You have to use the App. Now that AI owns the em dash, what will future generations make of Emily Dickinson and her love of them? Has she been fed to the machine, too? Will they love her less? Are we being gradually locked out of language? Does it matter anymore?

Since transitioning, Lane Michael Stanley has struggled with his interactions with straight men—especially the classic ‘man-hug’: brief, side-angled, all back slaps and no stomach touching. As he navigates this new territory, he reflects on his other relationships and forms of physical intimacy, examining his life and gender norms from both sides of his transition.

Straight men are generally more standoffish with me than I remember them being before. They make less eye contact, they touch less, they smile less. Do I not know how to read their friendship cues? Maybe straight men befriend other men differently from how they befriend women: no more touch of the arm that they swear is innocent, no more questions they feel entitled to ask or basic facts they appoint themselves to explain. Maybe I should learn to read a curt nod as a sign of camaraderie from men now, replacing whatever a straight man’s sly smile was supposed to convey before.

Or are they more standoffish because they can tell I’m gay? Maybe straight men want to keep me at a distance. Maybe there is a reality to the coldness I read from them, a hostility they throw my way unconsciously. Most of the gay men I know are friends with other gay men, so I’m not sure how gay/straight male friendships function, or if they really exist. My partner (a cis gay man) did have a close straight male friend, but they went barhopping and ended up trading blow jobs, so that doesn’t really count anymore. 

Palmeros harvest medjool dates by hand by leaping into the crown of a tree “full of thorns sharp enough to puncture a tire—or, say, a human limb.” For Offrange, Ashley Stimpson introduces us to the workers who carry on a proud, 6,000-year-old farming tradition that’s in danger of dying out, just as date sales take off in the United States. (Photos by Siri Kaur.)

As far as harrowing job descriptions go, the palmero is up there with trapeze artist and surgeon. Must like heights, must work well in punishing heat, must feel comfortable yielding lethally sharp hand tools. In addition to brute labor, the job also requires an aptitude for botanical minutiae: the pungency of a ripening spadix, the dusky translucency of a perfectly ready date.

Palmeros spend most of their year in the top of the palm trees, which are dioecious plants, meaning male and female reproductive organs grow on separate trees. While the wind can carry pollen from tree to tree, it results in an unpredictable and uneven yield. Around 4000 BC in the Persian Gulf, our ancestors got wise and started cultivating the date palm by hand, kicking off a tradition Medina and Patino still carry out today.

There is virtually no way I could have resisted Sylvie McNamara’s dispatch from her journey to a disreputable McDonald’s in Stafford, Virginia. I’ve listened to my share of the Doughboys podcast, and regularly debate burger rankings with my son. What’s more, I went to high school just two miles down the road from this particular location, whose aggregated Google reviews won it dubious distinction in a nation of interchangeable fast-food franchises. Thankfully, McNamara’s lighthearted investigation, which invites readers to consider Robert Caro and teenage commitments to the social contract, will satisfy you no matter your relationship with the Golden Arches. It reminded me of tongue-in-cheek alt-weekly features, a few pleasurable Paris Review web essays, and that episode of Mystery Show where Starlee Kine goes deep with a Ticketmaster employee. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba, I loved it.

I asked the employee for an explanation. “I think I can give you real insight,” he said. “It be the certain workers we got.” He himself is a high schooler, but he said that “we’re starting to get more younger managers. As soon as they turn 18, they’re getting a manager spot. I think my general manager’s 20. It’s a lot of kids getting these manager titles and positions, but they’re not really managers.”

I told him that to be honest, that environment sounded kind of fun.

Forrest Welborn had nothing to do with the Yogurt Shop Murders, the grisly killing of four young women in Austin, Texas, in 1991. His buddy, Maurice Pierce, had been under pressure to confess by investigators who wanted a collar for the crime. Eventually, Pierce caved under questioning. He implicated himself and his best friend, Forrest, along with two others, in a crime they did not commit. For Texas Monthly, Michael Hall covers the case and its horrific aftermath.

Both boys were taken to a juvenile detention center, and at around midnight, Maurice was transferred to the police station. A couple of hours later, his questioning began, directed by Senior Sergeant Hector Polanco, a fifteen-year veteran with a reputation for getting confessions. Polanco was known to walk into an interrogation room and announce that his nickname was “El Diablo”; he would threaten the death penalty and grab a man’s arm and show just where the needle would go.

Maurice was terrified. He later told his girlfriend, Kim, that Polanco had claimed that his pistol was the murder weapon—and showed him graphic photos of the dead girls. “They were throwing them in his face, saying, ‘This is how the girls look now,’ ” Kim told me. (Polanco later denied doing either of these things.) In a statement Maurice wrote later that afternoon, after several hours of questioning by Polanco, he admitted to having the gun the night of the murders but insisted he didn’t have anything to do with the crime. Instead, he claimed that Forrest had borrowed the gun, had been acting oddly (“I think he was on some kind of drugs. . . . He was jumping around and acting crazy”), and had boasted that he and a friend had shot the girls in the back of the store and started a fire with their bodies. Maurice said Forrest told him, “I enjoyed watching them burn.”

John Berger spent a meaningful portion of his life thinking, with precision and care, about how to look at the world—an effort he detailed in numerous essays and books, among them Ways of Seeing and About Looking. “Reading them, you often feel you’re standing next to him in the museum or even looking through his eyes at a painting or a sculpture,” writes A.O. Scott. “You pay attention to his attention.” Scott, an attentive reader himself, brings Berger’s lifelong project into our famously distractable era; his consideration of Berger is a primer for observation and study, a gentle nudge to focus, lest we lose sight of something essential.

Right now, we’re in the midst of an attention crisis, individually and collectively snared in an infinite scroll of disruption and distraction. Berger saw this crisis coming and foresaw its consequences. In 1978, writing about photography and its impact on the modern world, he argued that the dominance of images “creates an eternal present of immediate expectation: Memory ceases to be necessary or desirable. With the loss of memory, the continuities of meaning and judgment are also lost to us.” That diagnosis seems even truer today, as the functions of remembering, judging and interpreting are increasingly offloaded from human minds and communities into the ether of social media feeds and artificial intelligence. We’re in danger of forgetting how to look.

Thousands of small, often obsolete dams are blocking fish migrations across the United States. In this piece, Ben Goldfarb explores the growing movement to remove these barriers—despite political, economic, and emotional obstacles. He asks, “Can government agencies and conservation groups pick up the pace of dam removal while fish are still around to benefit?”

The Eastern Seaboard’s most enthusiastic purger of dams has long been Plymouth, Massachusetts, and one weekend I visited during its Herring Festival, a celebration of the resurgent alewife population that annually runs up Town Brook, the stream at Plymouth’s heart. The day was cool and damp, and I followed a posse of dads in Red Sox sweatshirts and kids in rainboots up the path that paralleled the creek. Someone had chalked “LOOK FISH” on the asphalt, and I glanced streamward to find alewives holding in small pods, weaving around each other in their effortless way. 

“As a child, I thought of the burrito as something predictable, filling, and reliable. It would be years before I saw it as a source of political conviction; something that once split my family’s loyalty between their hungry children and a revolutionary cause.” In this essay at Orion, Victoria Blanco writes about her Abuelita, whose family had owned a burrería in downtown Juárez during the Mexican Revolution, and how she worked hard there through childhood, making burritos for Pancho Villa’s troops—an army fighting for a better life for the next generation. “The food we ate was built for movement,” she writes, “the same way we were.” Blanco reflects on the burrito as a symbol resistance, the borderland, and belonging.

I found the unspoken parts of Abuelita’s childhood when I was working in a university archive as a student, examining photographs no one in my family had ever seen. One image stopped me completely: a rooftop terrace at the Paso del Norte hotel, where well-dressed Americans held cocktails and binoculars, watching the war across the river as though it were a form of entertainment. On the other side of that same river—a river with two names, Río Bravo on one bank, Rio Grande on the other—men were falling from gunfire while children went without food so that revolutionaries could have the sustenance they needed to keep fighting. I sat with that photograph for a long time, thinking about my abuelita, a girl somewhere in that city while Americans sipped cocktails and watched her world from a hotel roof.

It’s been a month since the story of the Cornell Seven case became national news. Ruby Cramer documents what she describes as “an ever-expanding blast radius of online abuse, threats, and vigilantism which has touched virtually every person connected to the case, along with people who have no immediate connection to it at all.” Among those closest to the center is the accuser herself:

Jane Doe explained to the police that her phone number and address had been leaked on the internet, and that she’d been receiving harassing phone calls, including that evening. She had recorded one such call. In the recording, the man says, “I’m probably just gonna, like, pull up to your house and shoot. . . .” The caller speaks in a deep, throaty voice that at times sounds almost garbled. In response, Jane Doe says nothing. The man says, “I can hear you breathing.”

While officers were still at the family’s house, dispatch reported that the initial caller was back on the line, saying that he had an AR-15 assault rifle and was going to kill everyone at the house, then himself. About an hour later, police reported another call, this one saying that the house was on fire. In yet another phone call, a man stated that he had explosives and that the family would die—“either now, midnight, or tomorrow.” Jane Doe was receiving additional threats via text message and D.M. Her phone had hundreds of unread messages on it, but some of them she opened. “Typical white btich whore crying ‘rape,’ ” one of the messages read. “Hopefully someone does the world a favor and 🔫🔫🔫 you, nothing of value would be lost.” Officers advised her to keep her phone turned off. The next day, according to her attorney, she started taping pieces of paper over the windows at the house.

Paul Rankin’s account of a father-son camping trip and an exchange with an inscrutable stranger reads like it was plucked from an anthology of Southern gothic tales. It’s a tense, slightly spooky meditation on how private faith can grow wild and unruly, how isolation breeds suspicion, and how readily we project our fears.

The more I affirmed my faith, the more suspicious the man became, as if he hadn’t come to share the good news but to catch us in a damnable lie. As the interrogation persisted, I couldn’t help thinking of how Flannery O’Connor once described the South as a Christ-haunted place. I love Jesus, but, good Lord, his ostensible followers can be irksome and even sinister at times. Clearly unconvinced by my profession of faith but out of ideas—or maybe just weary with the effort—the stranger finally walked the three steps back to his camp site.

For lack of a better idea, I relit the stove and was adjusting the flame when the man returned, holding one hand behind his back.

With a flourish he brought out a cross fashioned of two sticks and thin binding wire. This he presented to Fish, then added that he’d have a big surprise waiting in the morning. With that, he turned and walked away, into the woods and out of sight.

Eve Livingston sensitively draws us into the worlds of two women who share a similar past: abusive partners who committed suicide. Through powerful scene‑setting, we’re there when each woman hears the news, and we feel the complex emotions these deaths provoke. This is a difficult, complicated subject—not often tackled. Livingston bravely shines a light on how, in these particular circumstances, suicide can bring both grief and relief.

Things started as they so often do: he was older, professionally successful in a similar field to Siri’s, and there was something “magnetic” about him. There was also, she came to realise, a darkness beneath the surface. A tragic bereavement in his past had left him struggling with his mental health, something which immediately evoked sympathy in Siri and made him seem a deeper and more sensitive person, qualities she was drawn to. At the beginning of their relationship, he would often turn up uninvited to her home or events she was attending, or bombard her with messages — behaviour she now views as stalking, but found flattering in those hazy early days of a new relationship.

Krill, writes Gordon Peake, are “the least zeitgeisty creatures imaginable”: small, shrimp-like crustaceans whose total population numbers in the hundreds of trillions. Until recently, krill has mostly served as a snack for whales. Now, however, krill is “the latest iteration of capitalism on the frozen frontier,” a health supplement whose market is valued at roughly a billion dollars. Peake spends weeks aboard the Allankay with a crew of vegan activists devoted to ending the krill trade. His dispatch is a brisk history of extractive capitalism in the Antarctic, a fascinating study of an utterly uncool creature, and an uproarious account of a reluctant sailor earning his sea legs. Take the journey with him.

I contemplated the fillets of pink salmon defrosting on my kitchen counter, not too far from the shelf where I keep my supplements, including krill oil, part of my long-established daily routine of taking elixirs with vague but impressive claims about “improved heart health” and “enhanced brain function.” Labels depicting regal seabirds and majestic trawlers and a barmy sense that the more expensive the supplement, the more potent it must be also guided my “decision-making.” I told Hammarstedt I was the sort of fellow who enabled such an industry to exist. He responded with an offer: I should go down to Antarctica to see the krill business for myself.