Toys that outlast the latest trends are a tough bunch: What is the secret to moving from fad to classic? Matthew Braga is on a mission to find out, in an essay sure to make you a little nostalgic.

Yes, the blonde, buff hero—an icon of ’80s machismo—has been updated and reimagined for a new generation. He-Man and his friends, the Masters of the Universe, still have adventures and wage war against the evil Skeletor, who is intent on conquering Castle Grayskull, the source of He-Man’s power.

A stunner of an ode to Serena, who came into the game on the heels of her older sister, but leaves it having changed it irrevocably. An exacting portrait of an unprecedented competitor.

Part of Serena’s genius—competitively, personally—is that she never can quite be anything but herself when she’s desperate. And she’s desperate every time she steps foot on a court. But another more conscious part of her genius is that she showed no shame in this, or any other segment of her being that she could not control. She sidestepped the trap, the one that predates her, Dr. Johnson, tennis itself. The American dilemma. Serena’s refusal to couch herself, to fit what the game was in order to be what the game is, recalls all the ancestors—breathing and not—who eyed down worlds meant to twist them and derived freedom from the revelation that there were places they could not be bent.

A generation of Europeans is now returning to Sri Lanka, a country from which they were adopted as children, to search for their birth mothers. What they learn about their families, and themselves, has deep consequences:

A shady network of hospital employees, court clerks, lawyers and social workers lubricated the baby pipeline to the West. In many cases papers were swapped, birth records were fudged and misleading information given to both birth and adoptive parents. Another aspect of this unregulated system were “acting mothers”: women hired to formalise an adoption in court without the birth mother present.

These duplicities have come to light in the last few years, complicating searches and feelings of selfhood. “A lot of adoptees feel very abandoned and they are dealing with a lot of grief and mental illness,” said Mirjam Bina de Boer, an Indian adoptee in the Netherlands, who runs a counselling service. “Some people feel disconnected with themselves and their families. We see a lot of suicides in the adoptee community.”

Not all adoptees want to find their birth families, and not all birth mothers want to be found. For many South Asian women, there are privacy concerns, or social stigmas around pregnancies out of wedlock. Searching can be tedious, expensive and draining. Even for the lucky ones that achieve a happy first meeting, other kinds of demons lurk on the other side of knowing.

In this essay, Beth Boyle Machlan writes about possibility, desire, real estate, finding one’s home, and coveting the Brooklyn brownstone. The piece is part of Machlan’s Catapult column, Unreal Estates, which explores issues of housing in America through a very personal lens.

To me, back then, that brownstone stood for everything I wanted: solidity and urbanity, possibility and permanence. I could see it, stand inside it, even sleep there. But it wasn’t mine, and I had no idea who or where or what I was.

For so long I was so sure that the right boy and the right brownstone would give me the right life, just as my parents believed that success required leaving the city and living in houses, even if—even after— those houses cost everything they had.

In this essay, Michelle Cyca asks questions about Gina Adams — and her claims of Indigenous heritage. It’s a gripping read that exposes the rise of the “Pretendians.”

The message was clear: being Indigenous was tragic or shameful. Or it was mystical and noble, a warrior on a horse, somehow untouched by colonization. Middle-class and easily sunburned, I didn’t fit with any of the stereotypes I saw or heard.

There are many different versions of the so-called teacher’s oath. Many of them mention education, support, compassion. None of them mention active-shooter training. Yet, to be a teacher in the United States these days is to confront that very nightmare — as Andrew Scott does in this understated gem.

This will be what I take away from the presentation: One day students will be bleeding out on my classroom floor, and I will have to stuff so much cloth into them. I will have to wrap more cloth around their extremities, stanching the awful bleeding. Where will I get so much cloth? Will I take off my work shirt, shred it into pieces? I’m not even armed with scissors.

This edited extract from Survival of the Richest by Douglas Rushkoff is a disturbing look at the mindset of billionaire preppers — who are as keen to distance themselves from other people as they are from disaster.

One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader.

As good as the headline is, the piece is even better — an essay about the actor’s afterlife plans that doubles as an elegy for privacy, nostalgia, and everything else we carry with us through this world.

His heart, inside his chest, inside the mushroom burial shroud, was pressed against the silty soil left behind by eons of flood cycles in what we now call Tennessee but that has only been known by that name for a short time. The soil teems with the organisms that will convert his death back into life. It will return—even now, is returning—back to the full embrace of the earth.

Reeves Wiederman reports on how the baby-formula shortage in the U.S. created an opportunity for new companies to enter an industry historically dominated by a few corporations. Laura Modi, a Google and Airbnb alum who founded the baby-formula startup Bobbie, is one such CEO hoping to transform an industry “that has grown complacent.”

As Modi paced the aisle of a pharmacy in San Francisco, where she worked as Airbnb’s director of hospitality, the decision didn’t feel so simple. She was fighting off a fever, her daughter was screaming, and she couldn’t kick the feeling that she had somehow failed. The cans on the shelf didn’t look like the kinds of products that parents like Modi — millennial, coastal, Whole Foods shoppers — were used to buying. The formula was packaged in primary colors and had a list of multisyllabic ingredients on the back: cholecalciferol, cyanocobalamin. And some of them used corn syrup? Forget about it. Feeding her child a can full of powdered ingredients she would never buy for herself felt like a betrayal. In the harsh fluorescent glare of a late-night drugstore aisle, Modi came face-to-face with the emotion that dominates much of 21st-century parenting: the feeling that no matter how much you are doing for your baby, it is never enough. Modi says she was so embarrassed by the can of Similac she bought that she hid it in the back of her cabinet.