"Through our phones, we are under perpetual surveillance by companies that buy and sell data about what kind of person we are, whom we might vote for, what we might purchase, and what we might be nudged into doing."
"The rise of avocados from a delicacy to an everyman’s lunch on toast has launched cottage industries in home delivery that specialize in offering perfectly ripe fruit, or unique varietals grown throughout the year." —Cathy Erway for Taste Magazine
"I felt like the world stood still for a beautiful moment, and then a new worldview snapped into place, containing real worlds that just might be like ours." –Lisa Kaltenegger for Nautilus
“It’s, like, some people play Candy Crush on their phone. I play ‘Dinner Reservations,’ ” he said. “It’s just a way to pass the time.” Last year, he made eighty thousand dollars reselling reservations.
"It raises questions about how the AI boom is impacting young people and their social development and what the future could hold if teenagers — and society at large — become more emotionally reliant on bots." —Jessica Lucas for @verge
"The real understanding for me, years now in the making, is that a tree in blossom is more than the fruit it yields, more than its own fleeting beauty. It is a network, a living system of relationships."
"Simply by the numbers, Madonna is the best-selling female recording artist of all time, and the only woman of the five all-time best-selling recording artists—a category that includes the Beatles, Elvis, Queen, and Michael Jackson." —Joanna Biggs for @nybooks
"As I dive, a wetsuit clings to my body, forming a second skin that allows me to stay in the water longer without getting cold. Long fins morph my human legs into a mermaid-like tail." —Sally Montgomery for Sapiens Magazine
" Most jobs in North Carolina prisons pay 40¢, 70¢, or $1 per day—so a streaming bundle could cost a prisoner two weeks’ worth of income, or more. We simply can’t afford the price of entertainment."
"Where the banks end, the land plateaus, rolling out under the sky with a cover of black spruce, their trunks narrow from the effort of growing in permafrost. The peak of Arctic summer in the north Yukon is just beginning to tilt toward autumn yellow and red." —Bathsheba Demuth for Emergence Magazine
"He became known around New Orleans’s Ninth Ward as Robocop, but that wasn’t his only nickname: People also called him the Desire Terrorist."
Congrats to our sister publication, The Atavist Magazine, for publishing its 150th issue! Here's an excerpt from the story, which is about a corrupt cop in #NewOrleans:
"She pulls out what appears to be a large metal caliper, the kind that was once used for dragging fresh-sawed blocks of ice out of lakes in New England. She measures. 'I just want to make sure that Mother Cabbage is fully dilated to 10 cabbage leaves,' she explains." —Joshua Rigsby for Thrillist
"His mum worries about how dangerous it is for Potts to take strangers into his home, some of whom have serious issues. But she can see how it gives him a level of stability and purpose that seemed impossible a few years ago." —Samira Shackle for The Guardian.
"Way back when I was writing Midnight’s Children, there’s a passage there in which optimism is referred to as a disease ... And I think that’s what happened to me: I got infected by the optimism disease, and have never entirely lost it, in spite of many reasons to do so, such as the nature of the world." —Salman Rushdie in conversation with Erica Wagner at The New Statesman.
"The water grab described in a federal indictment allegedly happened cat burglar-style, siphoned through a secret pipe, often after hours, to avoid detection."
"'Those kids, that school, they got the best of Richie,' she said with pride and not regret."
Joe Sexton writes a New York Times feature about a beloved crossing guard that embodies the best of the genre: sadness, hope, and a feeling that humans still look out for one another.