Julian Lucas sets out to recover the contents of two hard drives that may hold traces of his late father. In the process, he effectively becomes an intern at DriveSavers, a “hard-disk heaven,” where he surveys an archive of elaborate technological wreckage and squints through a repair tutorial, laboring under watchful eyes to repair “a chip no bigger than a peppercorn,” in a scene reminiscent of a hospital drama.

Their handiwork was on display in the lobby’s Museum of Bizarre Diskasters, an exhibition of silicon carnage. “I remember opening this one out on the deck,” Cobb said of an ancient Toshiba laptop, which had burned shut in a fire. “It was like an oyster.” One successfully recovered smartphone had been shredded by a snowblower. Another had been sliced in two by a monorail, like a magician’s assistant. The company regularly buys brand-new devices and tears them to pieces. “It’s like the jaws of life,” Cobb said. “If a car gets absolutely demolished, you need to know what to cut and what not to cut.”

“Benches, like other public amenities, are places where optimistic visions of civic life meet messier realities.” In this thoughtful essay at Places Journal, Gabrielle Bruney examines the bench as public place and reflection of society, the politics of public and privately owned spaces, the idea of hostile architecture, and how accessibility is sometimes invoked in bad faith to justify designs that ultimately punish unhoused people or anyone who simply wants to rest. At the core of Bruney’s piece is a simple but powerful idea: A bench removed is one less opportunity to interact with another person. At a time when American cities remain profoundly inaccessible and our personal bubbles have only grown, her essay is a timely read.

The idea that benches are for some people and not others isn’t new. In 1908, a St. Petersburg, Florida real estate developer sparked a trend when he installed benches at a downtown intersection. They were so well-liked that other people installed their own, in a range of colors, until the city passed an ordinance permitting only green benches. Eventually, they numbered around 3,000 and St. Petersburg earned a nickname: “The City of Green Benches.” ⁶ They became staples of the city’s marketing efforts, seen on postcards and in ads as emblems of its winterless weather, friendly community, and unhurried retiree lifestyle. ⁷

Not everyone was welcome on the green benches. Throughout the Jim Crow era, police prevented Black people from using them. ⁸ “I can remember walking down Central Avenue with my mother, lined with green benches, and knowing we could not sit on them,” Gwendolyn Reese, a Black resident, told a local news outlet in 2025. “It wasn’t the law. It was the practice.” ⁹ Another Black local recalled in an interview for the Tampa Bay Times, “What green benches meant to me was racism … It meant ‘no.’ It meant, you’re not good enough.” ¹⁰ St. Petersburg’s green benches are reminiscent of benches in 1930s Vienna that were marked “Only for Aryans.” ¹¹

Deaths in donation bins, the Hardy boys, MAGA slop, billionaire playgrounds, and nostalgia for the complicated.

Last year, a conservative book publisher released two box sets of Hardy Boys children’s mystery novels; the announcement proudly declared that the books had been “restored” to their original (often problematic) form, and declared them “the perfect introduction for reading to young people. But as Daniel Lefferts discovered when he reread both versions, there’s more to life in Bayport than what those who bemoan the “woke mind virus” might assume.

From the perspective of the far right, the Hardy brothers serve as the ideal embodiments of this fantasy: strapping young white males who are strong of body and clear of mind, resourceful and courageous and self-sufficient, willing to go to any length to protect their community from enemies who are often “dark” in appearance and of foreign extraction. They live in a perpetual summertime, never aging, never changing, never failing to restore their lives to the way they once were, before the arrival of people with strange names and sinister motives. 

Under the second Trump administration, the Department of Homeland Security has become a prolific producer of images. Memes and propaganda are one in the same. But DHS’s aesthetic messaging is muddled. Mitch Therieau examines the visual world the department has crafted, seeking meaning in the murk:

We hardly need a decoder ring to see the images produced by this cadre as crude, jingoistic, and bloodthirsty. The images wear their malice openly, with shit-eating grins. One recent video shared to the White House’s X account—in which a clip of SpongeBob asking, “Wanna see me do it again?” is followed by night-vision footage of a drone strike, apparently on Iran—seems to respond tauntingly to Iranian cleric Shahab Moradi’s 2020 statement that SpongeBob and Spider-Man are the closest things the U.S. has to national heroes. Everything is right there on the surface. Already in the first Trump administration, debunking the government’s false claims was a losing game. Today it is utterly nonsensical: the penguin image cannot be “brutally fact-checked,” as one news organization purported to do to the post; it is not a claim to be awarded “Pinocchios” or designated “Pants on Fire.” It is something altogether different.

Trying to escape his alcoholic mother, Andrew Printer joins his carefree friend Dominic on a backpacking adventure, only to end up as a deckhand for another alcoholic authority figure: Tom, the unreliable captain of a small yacht. As Tom’s reckless drinking turns adventure into calamity, Printer wrestles with the person his chaotic childhood has trained him to be—and what pieces of himself he can salvage from the wreckage.

This was the summer of 1984. Dominic and I were 20. Tom was in his late 40s, ex-Royal Navy, tight and wiry like a featherweight fighter, with a bashed-in boxer’s nose. We’d met him in Athens while we were sleeping rough by the port. One night, he burst out of the Plum Pudding Pub, a way station for captains and crew, belting a sea shanty, tripped over our belongings and fell face-first into a bush. We helped him up. He launched into a far-fetched saga involving buoys, knots and his need for extra hands to get his yacht to the Atlantic.

For Mother Jones, Abby Vesoulis reports on the wave of embryo-editing startups, backed by a small group of extraordinarily powerful Silicon Valley billionaires—including Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, and Vitalik Buterin—who are also bankrolling the AI revolution. A primary goal for genetic optimization is to revolutionize disease prevention. But the dream, at least for some investors? To engineer children who are brilliant enough to outsmart the superintelligent machines they are building.

When I spoke with 26-year-old Nucleus founder Kian Sadeghi in February, his demeanor was gentler than his company’s brash marketing tactics suggest. ­Sadeghi, who dropped out of college before launching his startup, explained that a family tragedy had propelled his interest in genetic optimization: His cousin died in her sleep at age 15 from complications that doctors suspected were related to long QT syndrome, a serious but generally treatable heart disorder nobody knew she had. “How does this happen?” Sadeghi, then a second grader, recalls asking. “Bad genetics,” answered his dad, a physician.

Tweaking a single well-known gene is one thing. But trying to edit an ­embryo for more complex traits or ­conditions would mean meddling with dozens to thousands of sequences ­scattered widely throughout our chromosomes. It’s a bit like playing with the dials on an unlabeled control panel, a level of unknown that gives many scientists and bioethicists pause.

Will recommending Noah Shachtman and Robert Silverman’s investigation of Madison Square Garden’s sprawling surveillance system get me barred from “The World’s Most Famous Arena”? I guess we’ll find out. Their work, based on court filings and interviews with former staffers, positions Garden CEO Jim Dolan as a disturbing trendsetter for corporate surveillance practices and highlights a few targets of the Garden’s “biometric drift net”—among them, a transgender Knicks fan, a child, and seemingly hundreds of lawyers.

After they stop working for the Garden, veterans of Dolan’s operation continue to look over their shoulders. One of us—Shachtman—spent years covering national security and never encountered people taking such elaborate steps to avoid being outed as a source. There were warnings about being tailed; an insistence to meet outside during New York’s worst winter in decades; even a brush pass, just like when spies in the movies pretend to bump into one another to plant information.

In The Sydney Review of Books, Jane O’Sullivan takes a skeptical look at creative writing education and its prevailing wisdom: that a story must hook the reader immediately and reel them in like a fish. Moving through a wide range of first lines—from Robbie Arnott’s Dusk to Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel—she surveys how the writing advice industry’s fixation on immediacy and tension reflects a broader cultural anxiety about shrinking attention spans and an evolving publishing industry. Ultimately, O’Sullivan’s lovely piece is less a critique than a meditation: on what it means to ask a reader for trust, and on why reading—and writing—remain beautifully human acts.

Yet I do find it surprising – maybe naively – to see fiction-writing advice so reliably framed in terms of bait and resource scarcity. Seen this way, writing is a race against time. The readers are already leaving the room; if you are good enough, and also very lucky, you might catch one of the last. Part of what I dislike about this is how depressing it all is. Why bother, et cetera? (Though being an emerging writer is a bit like being six months pregnant. With the choice already made, you rely on ignorance and hope.) Mainly though, it feels like a very constrained picture of what fiction is and can be, and beyond that, what we can be to each other. When did we get so transactional and impatient about everything?

Last year, during a talk at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, Vauhini Vara spoke about “Ghosts,” her groundbreaking 2021 essay for The Believer, about the death of her sister. “Ghosts” was written in collaboration with GPT-3, a forerunner to ChatGPT. “I was curious, as a journalist, about what this technology could mean for my own job,” Vara told her audience. “But, to be honest, I was also curious as a writer and an artist about what it would feel to use something like this to produce language.” 

Since “Ghosts,” Vara’s curiosity, remarkable for its scope and depth, has made her a must-read correspondent on the shifting borders between technology and humanity. While working on her latest book, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, Vara provided sections to ChatGPT, OpenAI’s generative chatbot, and asked it for feedback. “In the ensuing exchanges,” Vara later wrote for The Atlantic, in an essay about a wrongful-death lawsuit filed against OpenAI, “ChatGPT used all of its telltale tricks of engagement: wit, warmth, words of encouragement framed in the self-anthropomorphizing first person.” There is no credulous boosterism in her stories, and no breathless exhortation to make your life more legible for large-language models. Concerned as it is with technology, Vara’s work is fundamentally and essentially human. She is interested in the powers that shape our searches and queries; the demands we make of technology are real parts of us, and deserving of thoughtful investigation.

“Tech is a subject that can be easy to get moralistic about, but Vauhini has an open and inquisitive mind, always,” Camille Bromley, Vara’s editor at The Believer, says. That openness is “an essential quality for finding truth in the world.” It also makes Vara a dynamic presence on the page: a nimble thinker and a distinctive wit, playful with the shape of a story, a thrill in any genre she explores. 

—Brendan Fitzgerald

Where did you grow up?

I was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, in Canada, and we lived in other places in the Saskatchewan prairie (Balcarres, Saskatoon, Prince Albert) ’til I was 10. Then we moved to Oklahoma (Edmond, a suburb of Oklahoma City) and lived there ’til I was 12, and then to a suburb of Seattle (Mercer Island). That’s where I finished middle school and went to high school.

What places feel like home?

I still orient everywhere I’ve lived in terms of its distance to Seattle. My mom stayed there for a long time after I left for college, and a lot of my close friends are still there, including my best friend from high school. 

Fort Collins, Colorado, is where I’ve lived for the past 10 years. It’s the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere, by far, and it’s the place where I found a long-lasting community and finally became an active person who loves being outdoors. Also, my mom lives here now, and my sister-in-law and her family live an hour away. 

We’re in Madrid, Spain, every summer for a month, and it’s where I started learning and loving Spanish; some of my closest friends are there, too. And Hyderabad, India, is where a lot of my extended family lives.

In addition: any public library, any place that feeds me dosa or idli, my karate dojo.

Other than family members, who or what has shaped you the most?

My two best friends, Sophie—the one in Seattle—and Dana.

What is your favorite time of day?

Biking my son to school in the morning and then biking from there to my mom’s house for breakfast and then biking home; right after dinner when I’m full and satisfied and have topped it off with a square of chocolate and am changing into my pajamas to go sit on the couch and read while my husband’s putting our son to bed.

What are you really good at?

Falling asleep quickly and sleeping well. Quickly responding to emails (but not texts). Seeing the best in people. Giving my husband the set-up so he can make a joke that will amuse me. Mentorship. Multitasking. Remembering my dreams. Writing for magazines—may they keep existing for my lifetime and beyond. 

What’s the best gift you’ve ever received?

When I turned 5, we were on vacation in South Dakota, and my parents got me a little traditional drum. When I turned 30, my husband and I had just gone on our honeymoon to Turkey, and he surprised me by cooking a dinner with, like, 20 of those Turkish mezes we’d loved. Dana, one of the aforementioned best friends, gives the greatest creative gifts to my kid: Multiple times, she’s sent him games that she’s designed herself, with the instructions written in Sharpie on index cards.

Describe your favorite meal.

Pappu, charu, and rice. Pappu is the Telugu word for lentils and for the dish made of lentils—it’s better known by its Hindi name, dal. Charu is the Telugu word for a brothy soup with tomato and tamarind—it’s better known by the name of rasam. For me it’s comfort food, the equivalent of chicken noodle soup or congee.

Sound or silence? (And if sound, what sound?)

Ambient nature sounds.

Where do you do your best thinking?

Long drives or walks.

What journey—physical, creative, intellectual, or otherwise—has meant the most to you?

Living, in general?

Where do you like to read?

In bed, on the couch, on our deck, and in hotel rooms while traveling alone.

What’s the last rabbit hole you disappeared into?

The history of how the human species has done gray whales wrong. In this book about whales by Charles Melville Scammon, one of the most notorious whalers of the nineteenth century, he wrote, “The scene of slaughter was exceedingly picturesque and unusually exciting, especially on a calm morning, when the mirage would transform not only the boats and their crews into fantastic imagery, but the whales, as they sent forth their towering spouts of aqueous vapor, frequently tinted with blood, would appear greatly distorted.” 

Name three publications you enjoy reading these days.

New York blows my mind with how successful they are at grabbing my and everyone else’s attention and how lively their stories always are. There’s a writer named Audrey Watters who has a Substack about how technology is being pushed into schools—it’s called Second Breakfast—which consistently features some of the most delightfully written and smart tech critique I’ve read, in general, school-related or not. And then there’s the most underrated publication out there, The Week Junior, from which our 10-year-old reads highlights to us nightly at dinner.

What’s one longread that you can’t stop thinking about?

If a podcast counts as a longread, I’m binging one called Adults in the Room from the Seattle public radio station KUOW. Multiple Seattle friends shared it with me, and it’s phenomenal: It’s about an unsolved, decades-old sexual abuse scandal at Seattle’s most storied high school, hosted by an investigative journalist who was a student at the high school when it happened—and played a central role in it. It unfolds with such sensitivity and complexity; I can’t say too much without giving it away. (I’m slightly biased, because I met the host, Isolde Raftery, when we were both in a journalism summer camp for high schoolers around the time that the scandal was unfolding; we’ve stayed in only intermittent touch, but I’ve admired her career since.) Also: John Carreyrou’s Satoshi Nakamoto investigation. He never definitively solves the riddle of who Nakamoto is, but the ingenious structure of the narrative—bringing us along for the ride—makes it an excellent read despite, or even because of, the inconclusiveness. 

What was the last book you read?

Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow. I’ve read almost everything of hers.

What piece of nonfiction are you most proud of writing?

Well, my book! It’s called Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age. It has epigraphs from Audre Lorde and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o about the politics of using language—about how language can’t be divorced from its source (people, their communities). The book itself tells the story of how big technology companies have co-opted our language to enrich and empower themselves, and investigates our own complicity in that. I also use my own conversations with those companies’ products to enact the dynamic on the page: my Google searches, my Amazon reviews, and a very meta ChatGPT conversation in which I pretend I’m looking for advice on the book itself and ChatGPT proceeds to try to persuade me to write more positively about the company behind it—OpenAI—and its CEO, Sam Altman. “A visionary and a pragmatist,” it says I should call him. 

What’s your most reliable way to get creatively unstuck?

Go interact with other people’s art—at a museum, a concert, a reading, whatever.

Who’s a writer you turn to when you need some inspiration?

César Aira for fiction. Rachel Aviv and John Carreyrou for journalism.

What words do you overuse?

Delightful.

What’s your favorite guilty pleasure?

Gossiping.

What superpower would you like to have? 

Mindreading, no question.

What animal or nonhuman being do you most identify with?

I don’t identify with them at all, but I am in awe of whales. Blue whales, especially, but also, more recently, gray whales. (See above.) Moby-Dick is my favorite novel, and I will take any and all recommendations of books featuring whales.

If you have a free solitary hour in your day, what do you typically do?

Text my friends Sanam and Kristy to see if they want to go for a walk. Do laundry. Go use the auto-belays at the climbing gym. See if my son wants to play a board game. Take all the junk strewn around my office and organize it into neat piles. Eat. Respond to months-old text messages that I’ve neglected.

What five items would you place in a time capsule?

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the Microbiota Vault, the Dorrance Hamilton Cryo Conservation Laboratory, a really gigantic tank of water, and the Library of Congress (the latter so that whatever species come after us—with the help of the first four items—might be able to decode our languages and learn where we went wrong).

What does your writing space look like? 

A haphazardly organized desk in my little office, usually. On it: a bowl made by my aforementioned friend Sanam—Sanam Emami—containing my and my son’s International Shotokan Karate Federation cards, the punch cards that give me a free day pass to the climbing gym for every 10 times I bike there, and the business card of a man I once met at a reading whose life story I promised myself I’d write but never did. Three half-alive succulents. A tealight candle holder in which I keep pens. Post-it notes that my son uses as scratch paper when he’s in my office using my computer for the algebra practice site he likes. And my computer. That said, I’m not sentimental about writing in any particular place. If I have my computer, I can do it anywhere.

Vauhini Vara is the author of Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, named a best book of the year by Esquire, Slate, Vox, and Publisher’s Weekly and a winner of the Porchlight Business Book Award. Her previous books are This is Salvaged, which was longlisted for the Story Prize and won the High Plains Book Award, and The Immortal King Rao, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the Colorado Book Award. She is also a journalist, currently working as a contributing writer for Businessweek.

Millions of Americans are taking GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Zepbound for more than weight loss. As Julia Belluz reports in this interactive New York Times story, people are finding unexpected relief from a variety of diseases and conditions, including traumatic brain injuries, long Covid, arthritis, addiction, and irritable bowel syndrome. But these surprising results outpace science’s ability to explain them. With roughly one in eight Americans now having taken these drugs, a vast and unregulated medical experiment is already underway—fueled by Reddit threads, fitness influencers, and telemedicine companies—while the US medical system scrambles to keep up. (Subscription may be required.)

On Thanksgiving she ran a turkey trot with her daughters — her first race since the accident. She described the turnaround to me as “miraculous.” Like so many other people who are taking these drugs for intractable and varied symptoms, Ms. Schmidt had joined what we might call the great American GLP-1 experiment.

“There’s just so much medicine happening outside of the actual medical system,” said Dr. Beverly Tchang, an assistant professor of clinical medicine at Weill Cornell, who works as an adviser for the telehealth company Ro. “It’s happening within these telehealth companies, within the internet, over the gray market, and no one has any insight into it.”

Even if you’ve never enjoyed Noah Hawley’s television work—Fargo, Legion, Alien: Earth—this chronicle of his time at Jeff Bezos’s annual gathering known as Campfire demonstrates that he knows how to instill a creeping sense of dread. Here are dozens of people, most of them prodigiously accomplished in their fields, invited to spend a few days listening to other prodigiously accomplished people. All that brainpower and ambition, and yet most of them seemed flummoxed, if not outright discomfited, by their own presence. Was this TED by way of Bohemian Grove? Yaddo for the stratospherically successful? Or was it simply, as Hawley makes clear, a playground for a man who has effectively isolated himself from life as most people experience it?

How was your Campfire? Bezos asked me an hour later, and because I am an honest person, and because I have been a host myself, I decided he would want to know that there had been a problem, but that his team had reacted quickly and been extremely helpful. To be clear, I was in no way blaming him, nor was I shaking down the richest man on Earth. Instead, I was simply offering Bezos, also a husband and father, a brief human connection.

But when I told him what had happened, Bezos looked horrified. He did not say “I’m so sorry.” He did not say “Do you need anything?” Instead, he made a face, and in an instant, an aide came and whisked him away. When presented with the opportunity for empathy, even performative empathy, he chose escape.

We’ve all gotten a bump on the head. Fewer of us have fallen out of a moving minibus and directly onto our heads. Fewer of us still are doctors who have experienced such an event, and the fewest of all are also, in addition to the other three things, very funny writers. Thankfully, that sub-sub-sub-sub category contains Adam Boggon, whose Pangyrus essay about [see above] made my dreary Monday afternoon much more enjoyable.

I lay on my back in the scanner. It is sometimes observed that there are two types of doctors: those who study every disease and conclude that they have it, and those who assume that because they know pathology, they are invulnerable to it. Both positions are insane. I incline toward the latter. This is in part because I’ve admitted patients to hospital for years and know that most hospital doctors are defensive and risk-averse, so request large numbers of tests even when the prior probability of a positive finding is low. As a consequence I have seen hundreds of CT scans ordered after head injuries, and barely a fistful of major bleeds. Admittedly I had never seen a patient ejected sideways out of a retro camper van. I chose not to dwell on that.

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Jordan P. Hickey | Longreads | April 21, 2026 | 5,415 words (20 minutes)

I came home so I can feel like this
Take a chance in a place that my parents miss 
Will rise with the tides and then we’ll reminisce 
I came home so I can feel like this.

—“Homecoming,” MARK Harmony

Fall nights during football season, Jarrell Williams Bulldog Stadium in northwest Arkansas, the home of the Springdale High School Bulldogs, is a living place. A roaring crowd, a lively marching band, an electronic scoreboard casting the field in red LED light. Even when the stands are empty, though, the energy is palpable. The stadium is a hub for this Springdale community—one with a gravity all of its own, the kind of place to which the stars in the sky might lead you if you were looking for home. 

It seemed only natural, then, that a particular group of young men were drawn here, one late afternoon as the sun beat down and cicadas whirred, to play a different game on this field under these lights.

On August 9, 2025, just days after the last whistle blew at the Bulldogs’ summer football camp, a charter bus parked in the lot of the stadium and opened its doors. A visiting team stepped down and walked to the field. A few of them could have passed for high-school age; most appeared older than 17, while a few others looked to be in their mid to late 30s. They unshouldered their bags on the metal benches along the sidelines, laying claim to the surrounding astroturf with their soccer balls and water bottles. Ditching their street shoes, they laced up their cleats and formed lines in never-worn practice kits: blue shorts and white shirts. Moments before they started drills, one of the players, Matt John, ran along the side of the field. 

“This is a special team, man,” he said, without breaking stride. “It’s a special team.”

It was indeed. Aside from Matt, none of these players were from Springdale. Half the team had flown in from places like Virginia and Washington and Pennsylvania. The others had made significantly longer journeys, traveling nearly 6,300 miles over two full days from map-dot islands in the Pacific Ocean. Much of the coaching staff had flown in from the UK. 

A passerby peering through the bars of the metal fence would not have thought much of this scene—just another soccer team practicing at a high-school stadium—but had they zoomed in on the intricate blue logos on the breasts of the players’ jerseys, they would have realized the oddity of the team’s presence: This was the Marshall Islands men’s national soccer team. Had the spectator stuck around to watch a few drills, they would have also noticed that these young men, despite their matching uniforms, clearly did not know one another. 

“You stay, you stay, you stay!” shouted one player during a high-speed drill, pointing his finger at another line. Pointing at another teammate, he said, “You’re good.”

“I don’t know your name!” another player exclaimed in a different line. Gesturing to a teammate across the divide, he shouted, “Come back!” Then, as another player advanced, he said, “No, you stay.”

Among the handful of people watching this unfold from the sidelines was Scott Hill, a board member of the Marshall Islands Soccer Federation (MISF), who’d made the 35-hour journey with seven players from Kwajalein Atoll and another three from the capital, Majuro—two of whom were his sons, Ben and Zach. 

As the team finished drills and began to scrimmage on a 20-yard block of the field, Hill pointed out different players, describing their far-flung origins. Some had been born and raised on the islands—Jaya Corder, who is Marshallese, lived on Kwajalein but was about to start classes at Arizona State University. Others had lived on the islands long enough to qualify for the team. “[Danny Razook] was mostly there throughout his school age,” Hill said, “and then left and then came back recently with an entire family.” Still others were ethnically Marshallese but had never lived there—or even visited, for that matter.

A significant number of players appeared to be white. Hill noted that they were aware of this and hoped to bring more players from the islands. “In your heart of hearts, you want it to be predominantly from that nation,” he said, adding that the practice of countries recruiting players with tenuous roots was fairly common for teams on the international stage. This was a first step. “You have to start from somewhere,” Hill said.

In the months leading up to this moment, a few tentative steps had been taken. Over Instagram and WhatsApp, group chats had formed, DMs had been exchanged. The players, recruited over the past several months from all over the world, discussed their training schedules, their shoe preferences, and the sheer wonder of knowing they would soon represent their home country. In the days ahead, everything they did—from the drills and scrimmages at the stadium to the downtime hours of communal meals and ping-pong—built on the cornerstone of that shared intention and purpose. 

All of this, as Hill said, would take time. But there was one complicating factor, a twist that could have been lifted straight from the tropes of reality television: The nascent bonds the team was working so hard to develop and strengthen would face a very real challenge in less than a week. Ready or not, on August 14, they would take this very field against the US Virgin Islands in the Outrigger Challenge Cup. Two days later, they would face off against a squad from Turks and Caicos.

As practice drew to a close and the Arkansas sun descended over the stands, the high-beam stadium lights powered on to illuminate the field. The coaches gathered the players into a large semicircle on the 30-yard line. Head Coach Lloyd Owers, a white British man from Oxfordshire, gave a few remarks, saying that he was glad to see them all in one place, and that tomorrow’s morning practice had been rescheduled so the players could attend church. 

Assistant Coach Dean Johnson, originally from Watford, England, addressed the team, acknowledging the challenge that lay ahead. “This is the first time you guys have ever been together, and the first time is always the hardest,” he told them. “You’ve all been in a Marshall Islands national team training practice, officially. . . . You don’t have to worry about that anymore. You are already national team players.”

His words seemed to lift a great weight, giving the team permission to breathe. Still, a thought lingered as they packed their belongings and left the field. Matt John was right: This team was special. The Marshall Islands had never fielded a national soccer team. With this 11-a-side tournament, these young men would be the first to carry their nation onto an international stage. It seemed fitting that it would happen here in Springdale, home to the largest population of Marshallese anywhere outside the islands.

The Republic of the Marshall Islands, or RMI, is situated roughly halfway between Hawaii and Australia and comprises 29 atolls, five islands, and 1,151 inlets, spread across 750,000 square miles of the Pacific Ocean. In December 2020, a man named Shem Livai, who was born and raised on Ebeye Island, founded the MISF to give his son and other youth opportunities to play soccer. The New York Times first wrote about the foundation’s effort to bring the world’s game to the island nation, but it wasn’t until early 2023, after a segment on BBC Breakfast, that the world really started to take notice.

“Welcome to football’s final frontier,” a voiceover began. An image of a kidney-shaped tropical island filled the frame, replaced moments later with a spinning 3D globe. Panning first over Australia and New Zealand, the camera’s eye then cut northeast, heading out into open water until a small cluster of land masses resolved into focus. These, the reporter said, “slapbang in the middle of the Pacific Ocean,” are the Marshall Islands. “Out of 195 nations on earth, they are the last without a football team.”

Similar to the news stories in the months that followed, the story cast a spotlight on the  nuclear legacy of the islands (between 1946 and 1958, the US had detonated 67 nuclear and thermonuclear bombs in the northwestern atolls) and the threats posed by climate change (rising sea levels will likely render many of the atolls uninhabitable beginning in the 2030s). And it posed an important question: 

How on earth do you go about starting a football organization in a place that has never had one before?

After all, the challenges were legion: For starters, there was a lack of soccer infrastructure and the increasingly well-publicized lack of real estate on which to build it. (The ​​Majuro Track and Field Stadium had been approved in 2019 under the condition that it double as a seawall for the capital, where half the population lives.) There was also, notably, the lack of soccer programming on any level, which meant the normal pipelines that would contribute to elite-level players were all but nonexistent. Although the US military had maintained a presence on Kwajalein Atoll dating back to the 1940s, sports like basketball and volleyball had been the favorites—though Hill noted that it wasn’t unheard of to see 9-on-9 games played on base. 

This was to say nothing of the numerous logistical hurdles that an organization would need to contend with before setting its sights on the grand stage of a World Cup appearance (the current goal is to become FIFA members by 2030). For starters, the team would first need to join a local confederation—likely, the Oceania Football Confederation. 

And yet, despite all of this, public enthusiasm for a Marshall Islands team had been overwhelming. Owers, who signed on to coach in December 2022, heard from people all over the world asking how they could be part of the program. Players with Marshallese ties looking for their shot at the national team sent videos of their speed and prowess. Others had no ties at all and simply wanted to lend their expertise to usher the program forward. All of them were excited about what this new sport could mean for the future of the nation.

Within months of the BBC feature, that future began taking shape. In summer 2023, Owers traveled to the Marshall Islands for the first time to develop a coaching course and to meet with the Olympic Committee and the Ministry of Education to develop a national curriculum. In 2024, MISF hosted the inaugural Outrigger Challenge Cup in Majuro, a tournament featuring squads from Kiribati and the Federated States of Micronesia. Eventually, the federation began hosting soccer camps, developed a women’s program, and started to create ties with the diaspora overseas, culminating with the Outrigger Challenge Cup in August 2025.

“People are now realizing that the world wants to help,” Owers told the BBC interviewer. “They want to be part of it and they want to see where it can take them. And ultimately, they do want to be part of the worldwide stage.”

The next evening, as the team’s second practice was underway, Coach Johnson observed from the sidelines. “I would say they’re still a little bit nervous, but still better than yesterday—a little bit more relaxed and calmer on the ball,” he said. “Even communication-side, they’re starting to talk to each other a bit more, which is great.”

Woody Watson, the MISF’s vice president of North American operations, stood beside him watching over the field. “It feels like they can string a ball together and actually go through and see a play develop from the back going forward,” he said. 

There’s something remarkable about seeing the beginning of a team like this—to witness their first steps down a path, long before they’re ready for competition, and also to sense, from the sidelines, the weight of being watched. Here was a team learning how to move in this space together, relying on the coaching staff for direction. It was fitting, then, to think back on something that Scott Hill had said the night before. He’d brought traditional stick charts from the Marshall Islands to give as gifts to the players, specifically the rebbelib, which mapped a zoomed-out version of the eastern and western atoll and island chains. 

For thousands of years, ri-metos—Marshallese for “people of the sea”—read the waves, relying exclusively on sight and touch to navigate the miles upon miles of rolling ocean around their islands. By placing one hand in the water and feeling its currents, they knew where they were. And as they did so, they relied on their memories of the charts: coconut midribs and seashells arranged to represent ocean swells, currents, and the islands themselves. They offered direction for the people navigating the waters, but still required careful interpretation. 

Watching the players on that second day of practice, you could see the progress that Watson noted, but also hints of something more. As the players sprinted across the field, judging the physical distance between themselves and their teammates, they were reading the space, reading one another, developing their own sort of wayfinding. 

“This sport is weird,” Coach Johnson said. “It takes more time than people think. They’re progressing—but it’d be nice to have a week.”

Despite playing under the same blue, white, and orange flag, there were subtler divisions the team needed to overcome. Many of the players hailing from the Marshall Islands had only ever played futsal. While it’s very similar to soccer, futsal—a portmanteau or futbol and sala—is played on a much smaller scale, with five players per side on a basketball-sized court. During both the first and second practices, players and coaches alike urged caution—they could not play with the same intensity at Jarrell Williams Bulldog Stadium, on a field that was nearly 10 times the space they were used to. 

Other challenges were harder to pin down. As he darted across the field during a scrimmage, Matt John, the lone Springdale resident, was already making a running list of things to do better the next time—the way he’d trained in the months leading up to this moment, the way he’d shed weight and what he’d prioritized during his self-imposed three-a-day practices. There was also the matter of his cleats: During the first practice, he’d worn firm ground cleats when he needed artificial ground cleats. He’d never slipped, but he’d given himself blisters and, on top of that, now needed to break in a new set of shoes. But if there was anything stoking the maelstrom of his nerves, it was knowing that the now-empty stands would be full in a few days. 

When it comes time to gaze into the stands, Matt’s eyes will catch on familiar faces—people who know, as he does, what it means to have made this journey, to see this team on this field. After all, Springdale was his hometown. This was where he’d moved with his mother and sister just over a decade ago and where he was welcomed into a sprawling extended family. Here, he’d begun to learn about his homeland and the ancestors who came before him, and where he started to understand what it meant to be Marshallese. He knew that he wanted to do right by all the people who showed up for him, and this team, time and again. This is where he was loved. This was his community.

In Marshallese, the islands are called Aelon̄ Kein Ad—our ocean, our sky, our land—a name that makes it impossible to separate people from place. For those in the Marshallese diaspora, that place now spans the Pacific; across the United States, especially in northwest Arkansas, the Pacific Northwest, and Hawai‘i; and in smaller communities elsewhere. You could say that what holds this scattered geography together is manit, a Marshallese word loosely defined as “culture.” Culture not as costume or tradition as artifact, but an understanding of who you are, how you honor and carry your ancestors, and how you treat yourself, the earth, and each other. For Marshallese people finding their place in the world, manit is the balance that keeps the canoe steady—a sort of inner compass that helps one honor their heritage while they navigate a future far from the islands.

For the thousands who have migrated to Arkansas, including Matt John, that future is in Springdale, where the Marshallese make up an estimated 10 to 15 percent of the total population—a figure advocates say the US Census routinely undercounts. On its face, landlocked Springdale was an odd place to hold such a distinction. A one-time sundown town that barred minorities with threats of violence, the northwest Arkansas community had been almost exclusively white for much of its history. Between 1990 and 2000, however, driven in large part by the growing meatpacking industry, the non-white population had soared 280 percent. Although much of this influx was from the Hispanic community, the Marshallese had seen a comparable trajectory as well, growing 294 percent between 2000 and 2010. In 2009, the RMI opened a consulate in Springdale. 

The reason for much of that growth can be pinpointed to the late 1970s, when a Marshallese man named John Moody left the islands to find new opportunities in the US, moving to Oklahoma on a Pell Grant. He eventually made his way to Springdale in the 1980s, where he took a position at a Tyson Foods poultry plant. Word of his success spread, and within a few years, emigration from the Marshall Islands to Springdale skyrocketed. In 1986, when the islands gained independence from the US, they entered into a pact called the Compact of Free Association, which opened the door for more Marshallese citizens to live and work freely in the US without a visa. Today, 30 percent of Tyson’s Springdale workforce is Marshallese. 

When you discuss the mass exodus from the islands in recent decades, it’s impossible to avoid discussing their tragic history. You can’t not mention 1954’s Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb test, which delivered an explosion on par with 15 million tons of TNT, and sent white flurries of nuclear fallout raining down over the people inhabiting the atolls of R​​ongelap, Ailinginae, Rongerik, and Utirik. You can’t not talk about the 350-foot-wide concrete dome on Runit Island containing 100,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil and debris, or the horror of children born without bones. When discussing climate change, you can’t not talk about the series of droughts and rapid sea-level rise that seized the islands in 2013 and 2014; about the RMI government’s plans to keep the tides at bay; or about 1.5°C—the rise in global temperature said to be a fatal tipping point, and the number that adorns the national team’s “no-home” jersey. And you certainly can’t ignore how these islands, even in the best of circumstances, may not exist within decades.

And yet, while these tragedies are inextricably linked and are vital pieces to this story, it’s hard when tragedy is the only thing that people outside your culture know about you. Joel Leban, a board member of Springdale’s Islanders Youth Athletic Outreach Program, which supports community youth through sports, said many young people have told him they don’t want to be defined by their people’s history.

“They want to have their own identity. They don’t want to be always living off that story,” Leban said. “Nowadays, these kids want to do things on their own. They want to pave their own path.”

Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, Matt John’s path unwaveringly hewed to soccer. His Marshallese culture, on the other hand, was a distant concept, one that didn’t have much resonance beyond the statement, “I am Marshallese.” He felt the magnitude of his heritage—and his disconnection from it—during visits to Springdale, where his extended family spoke a language he did not know. When his family moved to Arkansas when he was not quite 13 years old, he immediately felt adrift. 

On the soccer field, a place where he’d always felt most at home, he felt out of place as the only person of color, and soon left the team. At school, the administration initially put him in an ESL program because they assumed he didn’t speak English, but it was the only language he spoke. There were other Marshallese kids, more than he’d ever been around before, but his inability to speak Marshallese created barriers. In Springdale, he found he was not Marshallese enough, but also not American enough. 

Eventually, Matt began to ask himself who he really was. In his junior year, he started to sing in an a capella Marshallese boy band, MARK Harmony. At first, the band was a way to explore his identity. Over time, music, along with his position at the Marshallese Educational Initiative, which was dedicated to spreading awareness about Marshallese culture and education, became an outlet to share stories about the islands with others. 

For his entire life, the Marshall Islands had largely been an idea, an inheritance: composites of stories, passed-down photographs, fragments of knowledge. In 2023, when his band was invited to travel to the islands for a monthlong trip as part of a documentary film, he was finally able to see them for himself. He embraced the music around him in the form of language, elders’ stories, and the voices of young people. In the vastness of the Pacific, he realized how little there was separating land, ocean, and people. And that everything he did—as an educator, musician, and soccer player—could help others find their paths, too.

Gradually, the connections among the players took hold, especially in the moments of levity and easy laughter, when the pressure was off. When Matt Perrella, the goalie coach-slash-goalie, yelled at the top of his lungs for Patrick Phelon to get his butt closer to the ground during post-practice stretches. In the chance meetings on the Mount Sequoyah campus, where the coaches hung the flags of the participating countries from the eaves of the dining hall where they had meals. And in the quieter moments, like when one guy returned to the main house while a teammate was FaceTiming with his girlfriend, and he asked, Hey, do you want to meet her? 

On the field, these connections began to translate into patterns. The players began to anticipate each others’ runs and where the ball would go next before it even arrived—the kind of instinct that comes not from diagrams, but from time spent together.

At the time, he may not have been able to find the words, but Matt John would eventually see in this team echoes from the past—how previous generations of Marshallese launched their outrigger canoes into the water, each person with a specific function as they navigated the open ocean, much in the same way that they each had roles on the pitch. 

At the start of their time together in Arkansas, the team had naturally separated into cliques like scattered islands. By the time they celebrated Aaron Anitok-Brokken’s 18th birthday—after several days of getting to know one another on and off the field—they clustered around one table in the dining hall to sing “Happy Birthday.” Under the same banner, together. 

On August 14, 2025—five days after the team’s first practice—a crowd filled Jarrell Williams Bulldog Stadium. Feet slammed on the bleachers, Marshallese flags of every size unfurled in the stands, and an announcer’s voice ranged through a wave of static. There were signs that the rest of the world had noticed as well. A printout taped to a brick column near the entrance advised guests that a film crew was on site. Local media bustled about the sidelines, snapping photos and recording B-roll, alongside a handful of soccer bloggers and influencers who had come from all around the world.

One of them, Matthew Eide—a blogger who highlights remote footballing outposts in far-flung places like Bhutan and Seychelles—described the night’s match as “a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”

That sentiment echoed throughout the stadium in excited conversations, joyful flag-waving, and great whooping call-and-responses. Scott Hill dug through his bag for the stick charts, each roughly the size of a sheet of printer paper, and said he could almost feel himself tearing up in anticipation of this moment. Looking up, he noticed the game’s three referees walk by. 

“History!” Hill exclaimed. “You guys are the first to officiate!”

Just steps away at the southern end zone, a woman in the second-story VIP section dropped a bundle of miniature RMI flags from the balcony. “Make sure I get these back,” she said with a loud laugh. As the flags were handed out to some 20 Marshallese kids—mostly boys with a few girls—who stood waiting with Joel Leban near the entrance to the field, the teams emerged from the locker room. Although the Marshallese players were mostly stone-faced, their eyes—briefly flitting over to the crowd and the many cameras that followed them onto the field—belied both their excitement and anxiety at the gravity of the moment.

“Everybody around the world,” the announcer shouted, “please welcome for the first time . . . Team Marshall Islands! Make some noise! Make some noise!”

As the crowd spoke as one, the stadium’s speakers were filled with the upbeat tropical  sounds of “My Island,” featuring the artist Yastamon, who’d been flown in for the occasion. The boys and girls—some in cleats and jerseys, others in street clothes, all of them undoubtedly soccer fans from this moment forward—waved their miniature flags. At the song’s lilting refrain, the kids led the teams onto the field, the crowd growing still louder.

“Let me take you to my roots
Take you to my islands I’m talking palm trees
Beautiful horizon
Sunshine and blue skies we vibe’n
692 yeah that’s my island.”

“You are part of history in the making!” the announcer shouted as the Marshallese players reached the center of the field and stood over the Springdale High School Bulldogs logo, facing the crowd. A videographer slowly made his way across the line of players with his camera canted up, capturing their nervous yet proud faces, as the Marshallese anthem resonated through the speakers—the first time it had played for this international team. 

Just a few minutes into the game, a free kick from roughly 30 yards back passed over the fingers of Marshallese team keeper Matt Perrella. It was the sort of shot, the live broadcast commentators agreed, that couldn’t have been placed any more perfectly. But in that play, there was something of a silver lining. “Not the start the Marshallese wanted,” said commentator Carter Henson, “but it’s happened—you can take a collective exhale. It’s not going to come easy in your first-ever international fixture.”

The US Virgin Islands, coming off a match against Turks and Caicos the night before, appeared vulnerable at times, and there were moments when the Marshallese team outplayed them. Their futsal roots sometimes showed in the way they swarmed the ball in the middle of the field. But in time, the Virgin Islands took control of the game’s tempo, slowing it down and keeping possession of the ball. 

Shortly before the half, the Virgin Islands scored another goal on a penalty kick. In the second half, they scored another two. 

Under normal circumstances, you’d expect a team shut out 4-0 to be disheartened, especially one built up so much over the last several weeks. And yet nothing about the atmosphere suggested failure. Even as the clock wound down, seven players subbed in within the last 14 minutes, each getting a brief chance to play for their country. The crowd poured down the bleachers and stood at the front railing, cheering on the team that had given it their all.

“Marshall Islands!” the announcer yelled as the crowd burst into cheers. “Give it up for your first national team playing their first international match!” 

The team clustered a short distance from the bleachers, as if uncertain what they should do. Then a few players, Matt John among them, broke from the fray and led their teammates toward the stands. What followed was inevitable, like the flow of an ocean current: The team surged forward and leaned over the chainlink fence, where they were wrapped in embraces, cheered on by people they did not know. Nearby, Matt stepped onto the metal benches, where just days before he’d laced up his cleats for the team’s first practice, hugged his 8-year-old nephew over the railing, and then raised his hands above his head to form a heart.

The score didn’t matter; nor did the sport, really. This crowd—which shows up all year long for this school, for this community—cheered them on wildly not because they were the first, but because they represented a nation scattered across land and sea, united by something no distance could undo. Whatever barriers had existed a week ago were now gone. 

The next day, the team hosted a free skills clinic for the community at a field a few miles down the road. 

It lacked the stadium’s fanfare—just well-worn grass, a single goal, a chainlink fence, broken in but not neglected. Still, there was a magnetism here, too, subtler though no less real. Shortly after 6 p.m., the field filled with younger players, most of whom were no taller than the players’ chests. Some were familiar faces—kids who’d held flags the night before as the teams took to the field. Some were dropped off by their parents; others arrived with Joel Leban and other dads from the Islanders Youth Athletic Outreach Program, who all watched from the sidelines. 

The kids took turns shooting on goalkeeper Matt Perrella. When one of their balls sailed past him, his teammates applauded. 

“You guys don’t clap for me when I make a save!” Perella said.

“That’s because it’s your job!” Matt John yelled, smiling.

As the clinic continued, déjà vu kicked in: The kids lined up and did the same warm-ups that the national team had done just days before. 

“Alright, you guys have now completed the first half of the pro warm-ups,” midfielder Lucas Schriver said, unintentionally echoing what Coach Johnson told them after their first practice. There was talk about the importance of communication (“make sure you’re talking”). A good bit of pointing and not-knowing of names (“white shirt, white shirt, you guys are the white team”). And lots of encouragement and fist bumps—all of it steadily building something between these kids, even if they were just connecting for a 90-second game. Watching them, you could see it: another beginning.

And yet, the future comes at a steady clip. The following day, the team will square up against Turks and Caicos for their second and final matchup in the Outrigger Cup. They will fall 3-2, but consider it a victory as defender Josiah Blanton scores the team’s first-ever goal and Aaron Anitok-Brokken lands a penalty kick.

In the months ahead, members of the men’s national team will host a beach cleanup on Ebeye and then make their way back to Arkansas for a national team training camp. The women’s team will hold its third national team training camp and continue to build toward their own historic debut. Off the field, the picture will grow still larger: Roughly a month after the tournament, Matt John and the Marshallese Educational Initiative will host Manit Week, educating visitors about all aspects of Marshallese culture, including the harder-to-hear truths about climate change and the islands’ nuclear legacy. The future keeps moving forward, headlong. The waters will rise, and the world will continue its steady march into increasingly uncertain times. 

But for this moment, the future looked very bright. Watching these young Marshallese players carom around the field in red and yellow pinnies, tripping over the ball as they try to steal it from one another in a tightly cordoned space, you can’t help but wonder whether some of them might fill Matt John’s or Lucas Schriver’s or Aaron Anitok-Brokken’s shoes one day—that maybe they’ll help future generations navigate these strange waters as well. 

As the evening drew to a close, Matt John jogged over to the sidelines where the guys from the Islanders Youth Athletic Outreach Program watched from a low fence. After a few jokes, Jomar Dela Peña, the program’s director, looked out at the young players buzzing around the field. He hadn’t seen much soccer in his community before, he said—no one had really put a spotlight on it. 

“Well,” Matt said, “here it is.”

Jordan P. Hickey is a Northwest Arkansas-based freelance journalist whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, Garden & Gun, VQR, Investigate Midwest, and Southern Foodways Alliance, among others. He is a 2025-26 Food Systems and Public Health Fellow at Johns Hopkins, and was a 2025 James Beard Award finalist in profile writing for his 2024 Longreads story, “The Expanding Table: Honoring Palestinian Culinary Tradition in Arkansas.”

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copyeditor: Peter Rubin

That concrete box off the freeway wasn’t designed for storage so much as capture—of markets, workers, and, now, people detained by immigration agents. It’s a disappearing machine. We need to see it clearly:

Picture the warehouse, then another: each one marked by indistinction. From the air, they resemble data chips, casting sharp shadows on the hard parking lots. We could be in suburban Chicago, or San Bernadino, or a floodplain south of Dallas—any flattened periphery where distance is abstracted into commercial time. How quickly can a thing get from here to a zip code of consumers, or simply the next delivery node? The warehouse is a place where placelessness is produced. Or it wants to be…. [F]ew building types have a larger footprint and a greater impact on landscapes and lives. If warehouses are missing from the collective cultural atlas of North America, that’s by design. Logistics companies track everything that passes through these loading doors, but they don’t want to be tracked themselves. They don’t want to be perceived, known, situated, emplaced, by journalists or workplace safety officers or labor activists. Invisibility is efficient.

For The New Yorker, Hanif Abdurraqib considers the cost of what he calls “relentless convenience,” our ability to stream content of every kind, be it movies, music, and even potential mates on dating apps, and what we lose when we live in this frictionless existence. There’s so much to learn and to savor in friction, he suggests, be it waiting for a song on the radio to complete a prized mixtape or the deep connection we can find if we go through the time and trouble to ditch electronic communication and actually meet others, face to face.

Maybe what my pal who insists on finding love the old-fashioned way is saying is that it shouldn’t be as frictionless as browsing Amazon from your couch. If you believe, as she does, that the next person you fall in love with could be the last partner you ever pursue, and the last who ever pursues you, then that pursuit should find you thrown fully into the world, eager for the beauty and discomfort of spontaneous human interaction. And I tell her that I mostly agree, though I generally just avoid dating apps because the onslaught of visual information overwhelms me. Still, I understand her desire, because so many of my own desires are detached from the reality of the times we live in. I am still inventing inconvenience in order to bolster my desire to feel alive.

Read this one with your earbuds in. Sophie Abramowitz gives a close listen to Mavis Staples, studying the movement of the legendary singer’s voice through an album’s worth of tracks, from her transformative a capella rendition of “Stand By Me” through “You Are Not Alone,” her collaboration with Wilco bandleader Jeff Tweedy. Staples, whose family soundtracked the US civil rights movement, is a powerhouse who knows how to dissolve her voice into the choir. Abramowitz does real justice to her range, thoughtfully attuned throughout to Staples’s “presence in the permeable foreground—a player in a human drama, not its only star.”

The performance stands out in Mavis’s career, but by troubling the opposition between background and lead, chorus and soloist, Mavis was doing what she has done since she first performed professionally onstage (as a child, standing on a chair to reach her microphone). Like most soul, doo-wop, R&B, and Motown artists, she started singing in her local church, where soloists often move in and out of the choir. In Greek theater, one function of the chorus is to link the stage and the seats, responding to and occasionally guiding the drama. The gospel choir is connective in its own way: its singers are also congregants, people who stand onstage and sit in the pews. Much popular music reverses this formation. It’s the frontman, the soloist, the lead who reaches into the audience’s hearts, the other vocalists harmonizing behind them. Mavis’s singing suggests a more horizontal mode of musical creation, even when she’s at the front of the stage herself.

The hunt and the hunt saboteur have a long history in the UK, one that continued even after the ban on fox hunting in 2004. With the ban riddled with loopholes, saboteurs have remained necessary to help protect British foxes. They are a dedicated and eclectic bunch, now embracing new technology such as drones to catch hunters who push the limits of the law. With the UK government moving towards a complete ban on trail hunting, this tumultuous relationship may finally be drawing to a close—although I suspect some unfinished business may linger for years to come.

For most of their history, hunting was legal, so the police responded with covert infiltration and mass arrests. Meanwhile, the hunters responded with violence, trampling sabs with horses, blasting shotguns at vans, and assaulting them with blunt instruments. As tensions escalated in the 1980s, a handful of animal-rights activists adopted more extreme tactics, raiding kennels and launching firebombing campaigns. In 1984, one group, the Hunt Retribution Squad, even plotted to exhume the 10th Duke of Beaufort and post his head to Princess Anne.

Elena Saavedra Buckley recounts her two-week stay in the Mars Desert Research Station, a nonprofit research facility in Utah whose residents pay a few thousand dollars to immerse themselves in a simulated Martian colony. There, she puts a few of the “Big Questions” to her fellow researchers: “Why go in the first place? Were we really so sure it would be a good idea? What would be the worst consequence of not going?” I’m not interested in going to Mars, but I’m fascinated by the varied human perspectives, flawed and earnest, that shape the idea. Buckley’s dispatch is humane and richly observed; it’s also the best way I’ve found to explore the minds of would-be Martian colonizers and explorers. (If you dig the day-to-day at the research station, check out The Habitat, Lynn Levy’s podcast for Gimlet Media.)

I got the sense that what motivated my crewmates was, above all, a conviction that Mars would transform us, no matter what kind of society would eventually take hold there. This belief was rooted in cynicism about the prospects of radical change ever happening on Earth, but they held out hope that if such change could happen on Mars, it would somehow trickle back down to the rest of us. The Martian dream posited that the future, which felt prematurely foreclosed, could open back up, and that the entropic path our species seemed to be on could still change course for the better. Maybe this was why it was difficult to talk about what we would find once we got there.

In this lyrical Orion essay, which is excerpted from The Evolution of Fire: Essays on Crisis and Becoming, Angela Pelster blends science, archaeology, and personal experience to argue that older women—grandmothers—are responsible for everything the human species is today. Pelster writes about the discovery of a 9,000-year-old female hunter buried in Peru, whose tools archaeologists initially assumed must have belonged to a man. Looking to evidence in our ancient past, Pelster finds hope in the fact that all bodies were once valued, that we once had equality, and that, perhaps, the same evolutionary force that made us will continue to move us forward.

If I were a chimp and not a human, I’d be dead or dying in the next few years, but instead, maybe thanks to our grandmothers, I am packing Jack up for college and have stopped dyeing my hair so the white will show. How could I not cry to learn that? This forgotten story of the grandmothers gifted to me inside my fearful nights. Because that’s how it felt—an unexpected narrative shift where I was yanked midair from my scheduled hurtling toward mid-life invisibility and tucked deep inside something meaningful instead. Into a story that’s foundational and ancient and necessary. Because who else is telling that story? Of how our grandmothers saved us and made us? Of how much we owe older women? How necessary they are? Because look around. The stories are gone—if they were ever even recorded. But I want my stories, damn it, and what have they done with our fucking tools?

Record numbers of US citizens are leaving America, or are seriously planning to relocate. In The Bitter Southerner, Lindsey Tramuta, an expat who has lived in France for 20 years, examines the structural failures that push people out: unaffordable housing, a broken healthcare system, eroding civil rights. Tramuta also explores the unsettling perspective on America that only distance can bring. “Some departures are driven by necessity,” she writes, “others by longing, ambition, or a sense of adventure.” All of them, however, raise the same question: Does leaving the US mean you’ve given up?

Around the same time, I started fielding more and more inquiries from Americans about visas to France and read stories of Americans giving up everything to leave. Abbigail Nguyen Rosewood, a novelist born in Vietnam who immigrated to the U.S. with her family, wrote about returning home to pursue the Vietnamese Dream and to be free of anti-Asian hate. The one-time Congressional-hopeful and anti-Trump resister Laura Moser left Houston for her grandfather’s former neighborhood in Berlin, the source of her Jewish family’s trauma. And I read about Dr. Judy Melinek, an esteemed forensic pathologist, who moved with her family from California to New Zealand during the pandemic to be part of a culture that respects and prioritizes science. In Paris, I befriended a photographer and former Marine who, like many Black Americans before him, saw the city as a refuge where he and his husband could create and build a future without fear.

In this edition: the jaws of history; war and piece(s); the last day of camp; stay a while; picture me rollin’.

Craig Fehrman was working on a book about the Lewis and Clark expedition when he was attacked by a dog. He recovered, but the violent experience—which was something the expedition crew was no stranger to—ruptured the boundaries between his life and his subjects’ lives. Names and dates were important, but they were also an abstraction of sorts; his solution was to dig for the crux of what people actually experienced.

I was trying to find the human side of history, and humans were often my best source. When I thought about Sacajawea in the Rockies, trying to keep her infant son alive, I thought about my own kids at that age—about my wife breastfeeding them, both parties always hungry, always thirsty. Breastfeeding burns an extra 500 calories a day, and the Rockies were a time of serious hunger for the expedition. The men ended up killing and eating some of their horses. When I interviewed Shoshone people, though, they told me that eating horse flesh was a Shoshone taboo. 

Rebecca McCray reports that the number of incarcerated women in the US increased by 600 percent between 1980 and 2023, and as this population grows, so too does the number of people behind bars going through perimenopause and menopause. In this story, a collaboration between The 19th and The Marshall Project, McCray explores this largely invisible health crisis unfolding in prisons, where inadequate medical care forces women to self-diagnose and improvise.

In Texas, Harris said women are often denied an adequate supply of menstrual products — a particular problem for the subset of perimenopausal women who experience heavier than typical bleeding during their periods. Lacking sufficient pads and tampons, Harris said women have ripped up sheets and folded them to absorb menstrual blood, a hack that is then punished and written up as “destruction of state property.” These infractions add up.

What links ranches in Montana and the Brazilian Amazon? The ultra-rich—who extract monumental wealth from one landscape and then store and protect it in another. In this tale of ecological hypocrisy, Joseph Bullington explores the radically different standards imposed on two ecosystems. One is being lost, the other we can never enter. The ultimate case of “Not In My Back Yard.”

Outside the car windows, fields of barren red earth unfurled for miles beneath the glare of the Amazonian sun. These manufactured deserts ended abruptly against dark, squared off walls of the forest from which they were carved. In the growing season, these fields, which dominate the planalto, produce soybeans and corn in rotation, largely animal feed for export to Europe and Asia. When I visited, in October 2025, the only signs of life were some roadside weeds, the broken gray stalks of harvested corn and the occasional lone figure of a Brazil nut tree, illegal to cut under Brazilian law and a reminder of the kind of forest and foodways that lived here before the onslaught of monocrop agriculture.