This week’s top 5 long reads

real world Jurassic Park scenario. Immigration puzzles, and immigration puzzles. A Mapplethorpe x Dolittle collaboration that you never imagined. Find solace in poetry. The inner lives of domestic animals. This week’s issue has all that and more.

Sabrina Imbler | Defector | December 6, 2023 | 5,436 words

Have you ever imagined what would happen if a long-lost species roamed the earth again? Colossal, a well-funded company at the forefront of the endangered species removal business, has plans to make this a reality. There is. On the surface, this sounds like an ecological dream, but also a way for humans to do good and reverse some of the destruction they have caused on the planet. But what does deextinction mean? In this fascinating read, Sabrina Imbler explains that the recreated dodo is not actually a dodo, but rather that the dodo and its living relatives ( It is described as a genetic hybrid of Nicobar pigeons. So how should she teach this lonely dodo? Get used to it Dodo? Or, in the case of a mammoth developed with the genetic help of Asian elephants, how does that animal physically come into being? I’ll never be able to agree with that. (Hoping for an alternative, Colossal has a team focused on developing artificial wombs, which could be even creepier, depending on how you look at it.) Here’s a look at who will ultimately create the womb. There is much more to consider, including the important question of whether -For extinction. As Imbler insists, it’s not about the animals, it’s about Colossal’s VCs and investors, including Paris Hilton. (Yes, you read that correctly.) Be sure to click on any link with Sabrina Imbler’s byline. They write my favorite kind of scientific writing: curious, thoughtful, and approachable. This work is no exception. —CLR

natan last | new yorker | December 18, 2023 | 4,675 words

Here’s a word about me: I take crossword puzzles seriously. I’ve been doing it ever since I was old enough to hold a pen. I wrote about them. (Many times!) I say this not to prove my geek sincerity, but to clarify what I know from good crossword stories.And in a week when multiple national magazines published long articles on puzzles, Natan Last’s new yorker This feature is far A better heading, “Relocation,” ended up being one of the best crossword stories I’ve ever read. Rust, a longtime crossword maker and writer, is currently writing a book on “What I Know.” Still, this work has a lot going for it in the best possible way. On one level, it’s a profile of Mangesh Gogle, a man from Mumbai whose love of crosswords helped him become more fluent in English and ultimately earn him a so-called Einstein visa to the United States. On another level, Gogre’s story is used to interrogate cultural history and linguistics. And third, it contends with the current movement to break crosswords out of their Western rut and make them more expansive in both clues and content. This conversation has been going on between builders and editors for years, and the resulting major changes are evident everywhere from the symbolic. new york times Puzzle like outlet new yorker and USA Today. Still, Lust packs together interesting human stories and troubling discourse into a bundle that’s accessible even to non-problem solvers, while at the same time being sharp enough to satisfy picky eaters like myself. It has subtle nuances. Even if you didn’t have a clue, you know now. —PR

Lulu Miller and John Megahan | Orion | December 7, 2023 | 3,100 words

This great Q&A is about “Noah’s Ark, which you’ve never heard of.” radio lab Host Lulu Miller said this in her introduction: Miller spoke to illustrator John Megahan, who had spent years secretly creating detailed drawings of animals behaving strangely. Dolphins engaged in squirt hole sex. And the way sheep, grizzly bears, and hedgehogs mount each other is recreated in such intricate detail that you can feel their fur, fangs, and spines. ” These illustrations eventually filled the pages of his 1999 seminal book. prosperity of living things, which are entirely fact-based and include “well-documented cases of same-sex mating, parenting, courtship, and multivariate rather than binary sexual expression (such as intersexuality and transsexuality) in the animal kingdom.” is inspired by. ” This interview about art as an activity is a bright light at the end of a difficult year for many of us. This book is as funny as it is serious, with hilarious anecdotes and eloquently stating important truths long ignored by those opposed to queer existence. “It was never a day job,” Megahan says of his illustrations. “In a way, it became a labor of love for me. I really started working on it. Once I got started and understood the scope and content of the project, I basically realized that I wanted to pay homage to these animals. thought.” –SD

Casey Sepp | The New Yorker | December 4, 2023 | 5,978 words

Casey Sepp introduces poet Christian Wiman. About 20 years ago, at the age of 39 and a newlywed, Wiman was diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma called Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia. He imagined he only had five years left to live. As a child, anger and depression in his family boiled over, erupting into violence in bouts they called “sulking.” Suffering so much, Wiman used exercise to calm his emotions until he discovered reading as a way to change his life. He was obsessed with poetry, “devouring all Blake, Dickinson, Dante, Dostoyevsky, Cervantes,” and later John Milton, who believed that in order to write great poetry, one must first consume poetry. Sepp is barely visible in this piece. So carefully researched and written that you feel like you’re meeting Wiman in person as she shares what the stories and poems meant to him at different stages of his life. Become. Poetry, he writes, “is a medicine to soothe psychological, spiritual, or emotional pain.” Like anything other than drugs, it doesn’t help with physical pain. ”Nevertheless, as Sepp points out, when Wiman was sitting in the “cancer chair” due to his treatment and its excruciating side effects, he turned to poetry. “Sitting in the cancer chair, Wiman recited all the poems he could remember, and when his strength ran out he tried to write one of his own,” she writes. Sepp’s nuanced profile is a testament to his faith in both God and the power of poetry, and his tenacious determination to face feats of sheer will in the face of despair. —K.S.

David Grimm | Science | December 7, 2023 | 3,694 words

A few years ago, my downstairs neighbor had chickens. (Fingers, Tender, Nuggets. I’m not responsible for the names.) These sassy ladies found me soft-touch and happily climbed the stairs to my deck every day. I peered through the patio door and saw what was left of the kitchen waiting for me. When I woke up and opened the bedroom curtains, I immediately noticed the chickens looking up from the garden. When the curtain opens, he runs up the stairs. The cafe is open. These girls were so energetic that I hadn’t eaten chicken since we met. It’s no wonder, then, that I jumped into research into the intricacies of farm animal thinking. This is an area I’ve been thinking about since I was a food-savvy chicken, but it’s often ignored by scientists. David Grimm braves a “cacophony of squeals, moans, and sickening cries” and “the sour miasma of pig waste” to enter the Farm Animal Biology Laboratory (FBN), where he is questioned. Learn about questions such as: Do cows have friends? (I think they probably do, considering the scientists here have toilet-trained cows.) Grimm interjects some jokes between the science. , provides a comprehensive overview of the research while keeping the tone light. There are a staggering 78 billion livestock animals on Earth, and it’s time to think more about them. —C.W.

audience award

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