“The elegant science of turning cadavers into compost.”

“I don’t control anything in the real world. But in my dollhouse, I own everything. I make the horrors happen. I am the one.”

“He got lost climbing a 13,000-foot mountain. Could his family, his friends and a bartender named Destiny save his life?”

“What the history of a gesture can tell us about Black creative power.”

“Cases peaked, then fell, then rose again. ‘It is so much worse this time.'”

“Watching the disciples pay their last respects, it struck me how even for the most devoted and grief-stricken, Joshua’s death might be experienced, in part, as a liberation.”

“How do you survive when life as you know it is falling apart? What do you do when it seems like every institution, nearly every person in a state of more than 11 million people, and even a member of your own family doesn’t want to help you? Courtney Smith learned how.”

“Agreeing that books are a thing you read is easy enough. But what it means to read, what the experience of reading requires and entails, and what makes it pleasurable or not, is not so easy to pin down.”

“For Cesar and many other delivery workers, the thefts broke something loose. Some started protesting and lobbying, partnering with nonprofits and city officials to propose legislation. Cesar and the Deliveryboys took another tack, forming a civil guard reminiscent of the one that patrolled San Juan Puerto Montaña, the small, mostly Indigenous Me’phaa village where they are from.”

“The anxieties that Teen Vogue seems to awaken in the general public have proved to be analogous to how America sees teen girls, so frequently flattened into either Greta Thunberg–like saviors or overly woke children who need to be saved.”

“Culture warriors had shaped dueling narratives from an incident that, while horrific for the few people involved, would not have been a blip on the national consciousness if it had occurred anywhere but the U.S.-Mexico border. Even now, nearly five years later, the question of who shot Walker Daugherty still feels like a political Rorschach test.”

“Visitors to Appalachia are seeking out fireflies and finding solace in these dark times.”

“To most outsiders, Hawai‘i is defined by the lei-draped, aloha-dispensing, honeymooner-welcoming image of the place. There’s no room for another version to emerge.”

“He has a story he wants to share, about what life looks like afterward. It does not offer Five Easy Steps to Bury Your Pain. He knows how deeply loss can cleave a person. But he also learned that we need other people to help pull us clear of the wreckage.”

“When Jason and Ashley put up a memorial for Dylan in Bible Hill’s Holy Well Park—a blanket laden with teddy bears, a toy fishing rod, the boy’s first-ever pair of rain boots hanging from the tree overhead—locals tore it apart and dug a hole beneath it, looking for bones.”

In a period of trying to sell her novel, Danielle Lazarin reflects on art, waiting, and the space between grief and hope.

“When members trickle out of a commune but retain their stake in the property, ownership can become a tricky issue. Often co-owners will refuse to sell their share because of ideological reasons—many members of Northern California’s communes acquired land to liberate it from logging and developers. This is why large, expensive swaths of land sometimes remain uninhabited even after all members of a commune have long since decamped.”

“In the countryside, the endless killing of civilians turned women against the occupiers who claimed to be helping them.”

“The public and political reaction to the crash has been driven by a fundamental and, perhaps, ultimately unknowable question, one that will cast a shadow long after Ravnsborg emerges from the criminal and potential civil litigation: Was he really unaware that he hit another man?”