Abe Streep deftly takes us on a journey into the somewhat bizarre world of shed hunters — whose lives revolve around elk and deer antlers.

Nearby, a coed group from Kansas was huddled around a pickup truck, where a twenty-seven-year-old Pfizer employee was holding court. He told his friends that he had run more than seven hundred miles in the past nine months to prepare for antler season.

The weirder things get in the world, the easier it is to believe that what we know as reality is in fact happening within the confines of some sort of program. Physicists, despite their love of ideas like quantum entanglement, tend not to agree. But in this shaggy, personable essay, Jason Kehe — under the auspices of reviewing David Chalmers’ recent book, Reality+ — begs any doubters to loosen the hell up. You might, too.

It’s been said that the simulation hypothesis is the best argument we moderns have for the existence of a godlike being. Chalmers agrees: “I’ve considered myself an atheist for as long as I can remember,” he writes. “Still, the simulation hypothesis has made me take the existence of a god more seriously than I ever had before.” He even suggests Reality+ is his version of Pascal’s wager, proof that he’s at least entertained the idea of a simulator. Not that he’s sure such a being deserves to be worshipped. For all we know, it’s some little xeno-kid banging away at their parents’ keyboard, putting us through catastrophes the way we might the citizens of SimCity.

An amazing story of perseverance and resiliance — “Cyborg Mike” has not let 12 broken bones, a dozen or so concussions, and the loss of a leg stop him from competing in the sports he loves.

He had no idea that he’d keep stretching those goals until he would eventually refashion himself into a new athlete, competing on an even larger stage with equipment he’d created—and, remarkably, outfitting his opponents with the same. That old Monster Mike? He was nothing compared to the Cyborg Mike to come.

Journalist Shannon Gormley weaves an astonishing narrative and beautifully written (and at times, very personal) meditation on one family’s escape out of Afghanistan as Kabul fell to the Taliban.

I’d never written Asghar’s story as I’d said I would, and I’d buried the thought of contacting him, too, until foreign sections of newspapers began to describe the Taliban taking one village here, another there, and I thought of him riding through Kabul’s exploding streets on his MacGyvered child’s bike. I spilled out the contents of the suitcase and spread 34 jagged pieces of clay on the floor.

Nickole Brown reflects on how her inability to form memories as a result of childhood trauma had adversely affected her ability to survive.

Survival has to do with remembering what you most do not want to face. It has to do with not turning away, in believing your own testimony, in writing it down. Then, just like that, my memory was given back to me, whole and real, simply because she’d remembered it, because that’s what witnessing does.

How, for over 50 years and often through song, Sesame Street has been helping kids from every strata of society to comprehend difficult topics and learn how to behave compassionately when faced with racism, serious illness, death, and more.

The world was broken in half, but music, music could be the bridge.

This essay concentrates on describing small details about the people caught up in the war in Ukraine — and there is an incredible poignancy in that.

Two volunteer soldiers sat in a Volkswagen ahead of me, wearing uniforms cobbled together at army surplus. A man with ill-fitting fatigues and black boots stood next to one with tan boots and what appeared to be camouflage skinny jeans.

In this gentle, yet satisfying essay, Drew Magary discovers that in accepting the limitations that age and injury can bring to a sport, joy can still be found in it.

So I will ski again, despite my body and my southward migration doing their best to keep me off the mountain. I can’t ski as well as I used to, but it’s not always about ability. It’s not about conquering the mountain. It’s simply about going there. A mountain is a god.

Aviva Coopersmith delivers a candid first-hand account on uncovering the harrowing truth behind her conception at the hands of an unscrupulous fertility doctor.

The rest of the class-action plaintiffs are former patients: women like my mom who never consented to being inseminated with the sperm used to impregnate them; fathers like Rebecca’s, who have had to contend with the discovery that their children are not biologically related to them; and men like Sean, who stored their sperm with Barwin for safekeeping, only to have it used to conceive a stranger’s child.

Sixteen years after being released from Guantánamo Bay, Ayoob Mohammed is still trying to prove he’s not a terrorist. This powerful, tragic story by Annie Hylton traces an Uyghur man’s journey from northwest China to Guantánamo to Albania — and examines the complex politics that have kept him from joining his family in Canada.

As we sat together around a table, the men spoke of the indelible stigma they carry from Guantánamo and of the history of Uyghur oppression. China has consistently sought the men’s extradition, claiming they are terrorists.

Ringer writer Jonathan Tjarks veers from his usual NBA beat to unpack his cancer diagnosis and the shadow it casts over his experience as a son and a father. Unblinking and plainspoken, he somehow manages to strip the emotion out of his writing — but not the emotional impact.

I was 12. That’s the age when your parents go from authority figures to actual people. That never happened for me and my dad. We never got to know each other. What did he like doing? What were his experiences growing up? What were his goals in life?

And there’s the simpler stuff too. How do you tie a tie? Or grill a burger? Or fix a car?

I had to figure it all out on my own. Now it looks like my son might have to do the same. It was the one thing that I never wanted for him.

Did her grandpa meet Bonnie and Clyde? In this emotional essay, Lauren Hough attempts to find out — but eventually realizes it doesn’t matter either way.

Downstairs, in a hallway, are the framed newspaper clippings to remind me why I’m here—Bonnie and Clyde and Grandpa Chuck. My grandpa, thankfully, isn’t mentioned in the clippings. He wouldn’t be. From what I can tell, if his story’s true, he was just a little kid.

You may remember the Syrian government’s chemical attacks on civilians. You may also remember the international deal struck to destroy President Bashar al-Assad’s weapons’ stockpile. What you almost certainly don’t know is how the deadly chemicals were actually destroyed, or who figured out how to do it. This is the behind-the-scenes story.

The unlikely solution would ultimately involve the cooperation of 17 countries, the warp-speed work of a small cohort of U.S. Army chemists, and squabbling and infighting within the highest echelons of the U.S. government. It headed off U.S. military intervention in Syria and helped earn the Nobel Peace Prize for the intergovernmental organization under whose banner it was carried out. But before all that, the kernel of the idea — to destroy Assad’s chemical arsenal on a boat in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea — and the duty of seeing it through began with a team of anonymous young women in a dismal office, burrowed deep inside an obscure federal agency.

Lisa Miller profiles Brandon Stanton and explores the evolution of and the power imbalances inherent in “Humans of New York,” which Stanton has recently turned into a grant-giving operation, going beyond images and words on social media to offer financial assistance to those he profiles.

Stanton has raised nearly $8 million over the past 18 months for, among others, a retired burlesque dancer ($2.7 million), the immigrant owners of an organic bakery with a chronically ill child ($1.2 million), a man blinded by a screwdriver in a subway attack ($677,000), and a woman undergoing breast-cancer treatment who was behind on her rent ($498,000).

Sonia Paul explores the cloying nature of caste: proving it can follow you wherever you go and whoever you become.

“Anonymous, self-identified Dalit tech workers kept their videos off as they described how they had lost jobs and faced casteist slurs. Residents from dominant-caste backgrounds spoke of witnessing bias in their communities and in the region’s tech companies.”

“My scars are too deep, too wide, too fucked up to be smoothed over.” So writes Nicole Shawan Junior in this moving, deeply personal essay about their experience with dermatillomania, a cousin of obsessive compulsive disorder.

At Smith, these wealthy, mostly white, women make me realize I’m piss poor. I try to believe the American meritocratic promise: despite the racism and classism that grip my neck like a vise, I’ll escape poverty as long as I earn top grades while among these women who’ve attended top private schools their entire lives and have trust funds larger than Mama’s life earnings. But this shit is making me hate myself.

I go to Gillett’s third floor communal bathroom, stare at my reflection in the mirror, and pop the zits that are increasingly showing up on my face, chest, back, and arms. I’m obsessed. I pick my pimples while picking at my intelligence, personality, my socioeconomic class, my Blackness: You don’t belong here. Why did you say that in class, dumb ass? Why didn’t you check that professor? Why couldn’t you just let that racist-ass statement go? Why didn’t you call out that classist statement for what the fuck it was? Why can’t you just shut your ghetto ass up?