The Unparalleled Daily Miracle of Tap Water: “It is cheap and plentiful, and it connects you to the ecosystem around you — the shared resource pulling you into contact with all the other plant and animal life around.” www.nytimes.com/2025/05/27/m...

Screen Names, BBM, and MP3s: The Oral History of Millennial Tech: “The internet used to come in the mail. On shiny, gorgeous discs, distributed by the fine people at America Online like street drugs — just a taste to whet the whistle.” www.theringer.com/2025/05/09/p...

What Desi Arnaz Could Teach Hollywood Today: “He looked and sounded nothing like the preconceived notion that the entertainment business had of a successful star. So he changed the way Hollywood did business, and whom we can imagine as stars.” www.nytimes.com/2025/05/18/o...

‘In America, Every Generation Is Better Off Than Their Parents’: “You’ve never put money first. You’ve always believed — you were taught to believe! — that there are more important things. So why do so many of your thoughts revolve around money?” www.theringer.com/2025/05/09/n...

Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives: “Bregman, who is something of a professional optimist, is willing to admit that the arguments in his first two books ... land less persuasively now than when they were published.” www.nytimes.com/2025/05/17/m...

Where Four Loko Art Thou? A Search for the Last Original Cans of the 2000s’ Most Loved and Loathed Forbidden Alcohol.: “Cheap, energizing, and boozy enough to reliably launch a big night turned out to be a value proposition that interested many.” www.theringer.com/2025/05/09/p...

Can Whitney Wolfe Herd Make Us Love Dating Apps Again?: “You can decide if all this leaves you feeling optimistic about Bumble, about female leaders in tech, about human connection, or not.” www.nytimes.com/2025/05/10/m...

Men, Explain Things to Me!: “When it came to which disgusting game they’d end up choosing to play on me, homophobia or misogyny, I definitely had my preference. Whichever man would go on to open his mouth, I hoped that he would catcall me.” www.thecut.com/article/dati...

How the Rubik’s Cube Taught Me to Be a Better Parent: “Rotating the sections and occasionally aligning the right colors felt like mastering the right steps in a dance — although, in my case, it was more of a drunken stagger than a waltz.” www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/m...

A Children’s History of Millennial Williamsburg: “Way back in the early 2000s, as some of the eldest Millennials began graduating from college and setting foot in the real world, Williamsburg was emerging as the hot neighborhood of the moment.” www.theringer.com/2025/05/08/p...

The $200 Billion Gamble: Bill Gates’ Plan to Wind Down His Foundation: “To hear Gates and his team tell it, this is the time to go all in — given the yawning gaps produced by post-pandemic setbacks and the Trump assault, and given the promise of biomedical tools....” www.nytimes.com/2025/05/08/m...

How Millennials Learned to Sit at Their Desks and Love the Bowl: “Like Away suitcases or Warby Parker glasses, the bowl is exquisitely engineered, focus grouped, aesthetically pleasing, and sold as something that stands out from the rest.” www.theringer.com/2025/05/06/f...

How Much Are We Paying for Newsletters? $50, $100 ... How About $3,000 a Year.: “On his first day publishing it on Substack, he brought in $100,000 in subscriptions. Substack, then as now, took 10 percent.” www.nytimes.com/2025/05/10/b...

Barry and Diane: “A relationship that began with indifference, then exploded into a romance as natural to us as breathing, surprised us and everyone else. It really is the miracle of my life.” nymag.com/intelligence...

There’s No ‘Undo’ Button for Extinct Species: “De-extinction is a distinctly modern fantasy: the extremely appealing idea that we can, with just some pipettes and computers, undo the destruction we continue to cause the natural world.” www.nytimes.com/2025/05/07/m...

The Phony Physics of Star Wars Are a Blast: “So the only way you could see a laser beam is if it hits you right in the eye. That would be bad. Bottom line: Laser beams are invisible in space.” www.wired.com/story/the-ph...

Are We All Drowning in Debt? We Asked 102 Cut Readers.: “Even though debt is everywhere, there’s a persistent stigma around being in the red. It’s easy to accrue even more debt just to prop up the illusion that you’re staying afloat — even thriving.” www.thecut.com/article/how-...

Is It Colonialism When Europeans Retire in Cheaper Countries?: “Retirees chasing a lower cost of living are simply doing transnationally what many do locally — moving where their resources stretch further, like Bostonians heading to Florida for sun and savings.” www.nytimes.com/2025/05/07/m...

What Alice Munro Knew: “Munro’s stories — particularly those from the years after she learned of the abuse — are full of violated children, negligent mothers, and marriages founded on secrets and lies.” www.nytimes.com/2024/12/08/m...

I Think My Son Is Gay. Should I Talk to Him About Coming Out?: “Pressing fast-forward could leave him with the sense that he has lost a measure of agency — that a big moment has been pre-empted. It could also make him feel exposed or rushed.” www.nytimes.com/2025/06/04/m...

Our Idea of Happiness Has Gotten Shallow. Here’s How to Deepen It.: “Once, happiness was understood as a communal project tied to justice and shared flourishing. But over time, it evolved from an expansive ideal into something individual and small.” www.nytimes.com/2025/05/03/m...

Facebook Enables Extremist Views. Should I Quit and Risk Losing My Friends There?: “In the end, Facebook isn’t a neutral public square, but it’s not a cartoon villain either. It’s a business, shaped by incentives, feedback loops, and pressure.” www.nytimes.com/2025/05/16/m...

The Best Advice I’ve Ever Heard for How to Be Happy: “Some involve finding small opportunities for delight; some are about interacting with people; some are little exercises in gratitude.” www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

The Millennial Cringe Canon: “I’ve become the proverbial old man yelling at a cloud underlines what I’ve come to fear: Millennials are no longer the driving force in pop culture. It’s Gen Z’s world now; we’re just living in it.” www.theringer.com/2025/05/06/p...

The Second Birth of JMW Turner: “It wasn’t until the decades of abstract expressionism and Mark Rothko that Turner was hailed not just as a proto-impressionist but a colour field painter avant la lettre.” www.newstatesman.com/culture/art-...

Should I Retire If My Fellow Federal Employees Are Facing Layoffs?: “The presence of someone skilled, experienced, and committed to public service could strengthen the agency, at a time when the federal work force faces unprecedented strain.” www.nytimes.com/2025/05/21/m...

My Miserable Week in the ‘Happiest Country on Earth’: “The ‘happiest country in the world’ label seems to imprint on the American mind as a never-ending carousel of delights, but in Finland’s February chill, the reality is more modest.” www.nytimes.com/2025/05/02/m...

A Smoky Salad That Captures Asparagus’ Sultry Side: “Spring food in general is just not reliable in the way winter roots are. It’s beautiful — vibrant greens, tender shoots pushing through soil — but it isn’t built to last.” www.nytimes.com/2025/05/07/m...

You Have Disney Imagineers to Thank for This ‘Liminal Space’ at the Houston Airport: “Disney hoped to eventually sell this technology to other cities and saw the Bush Airport as a way to provide proof of concept for their work.” www.texasmonthly.com/travel/houst...

Can I Use AI to Look Better Online?: “When old friends greet you IRL, you want to see them lighting up with fondness, not suppressing a wince because their mental image has just crashed into reality.” www.nytimes.com/2025/04/30/m...

Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.: “‘Why did that happen? Why in a freezer in East Hartford, Connecticut, does a man tell me something that I think has only been uttered in that freezer to this day?’” www.nytimes.com/2025/05/03/m...

Is It Ethical to Buy Used Books and Music?: “What artists, especially the good ones, are owed is not a cut of every encounter we have with their work but a system that gives them a real opportunity to sell their work, to build a career, to find a public.” www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/m...

Nate Bargatze Doesn’t Mind If You Think He’s an Idiot: “Low-key and G-rated, his comedy traffics in comfortably relatable stories about the foibles of family life, his confusion with modern living and being a bit of a dim bulb.” www.nytimes.com/2025/04/19/m...

No One Will Ever Love Me Like Rotisserie Chicken Does: “The bird comes in its plastic container, often with a little handle so it can be carried handbag-style. It’s hard to resist its rosemary-scented siren call from the heated supermarket rack.” www.nytimes.com/2025/05/06/m...

Isabel Allende Understands How Fear Changes a Society: “‘Fear is a very pervasive thing that changes a society, and changes the way people behave with each other, and changes you inside. Something breaks inside you.’” www.nytimes.com/2025/04/26/m...

I Can’t Stop Thinking About These Dinner Rolls: “Served from a basket and transferred to your plate with metal tongs, the warm rolls aren’t just a freebie or a filler; they’re a signal of the great meal to come.” www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/m...

How Ozu Created His Own Cinematic Language: “Ozu once spoke in an interview about deliberately leaving ‘empty spaces’ in his movies as a means of revealing ‘the hidden undercurrents, the ever-changing uncertainties of life.’” www.nytimes.com/2025/04/22/t...

I Saw a Neighbor on the Sex-Offender Registry. Should I Tell Others?: “Having access to more information often feels empowering. At other times — and this may be one — it burdens us with uncertainties we struggle to resolve.” www.nytimes.com/2025/05/09/m...

Doors Closing: “Whereas the L was once a societal leveler, the means by which Chicagoans of all types went to their job or school or party, frustration with its unreliable service and fears about safety are leading those who can to abandon it.” www.chicagomag.com/chicago-maga...

When Real Life Calls for a Cheesy Rom-Com Gesture: “Rom-coms resonate with us because we do see ourselves in them: They function as mirrors through which we can pinpoint and understand our own amorphous feelings.” www.nytimes.com/2025/04/22/m...

How Neon Lit Up Indie Cinema in the Letterboxd Era: “‘If you’re going to follow someone into the fire of starting a company in this industry, why not make it the most excited person in the room who truly just loves the shit out of movies.’” theringer.com/2025/01/22/m...

The Most Luxurious Use of Eggs, by Way of Japan: “In truth, it has always been luxurious, the fatty yolk like a ripe sun, the protein-rich white. We just took this bounty for granted.” www.nytimes.com/2025/04/23/m...

Smells Like American Spirit: “We’re all trapped in the back-office cubicle pod, our desperation rebranded as hustle, bitter entrepreneurs of abjection competing for the same dwindling pool of broke rubes.” slate.com/life/2024/12...

Tiger Woods and Vanessa Trump Make More Sense Together Than You Think: “When such social spaces are a central component of your life and work, the dating pool can self-select into something exceedingly narrow.” www.nytimes.com/2025/04/23/m...

The Techno-Utopians Who Want to Colonize the Sea: “The history of seasteading is littered with cool-looking renderings that never came to be, for places with names like Oceania and New Utopia.” www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/m...

The Lure of Divorce: “I wondered if my marriage would always feel like a competition and if the only way to call the competition a draw would be to end it.” www.thecut.com/article/marr...

The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself: “Why did a successful, financially sophisticated banker, a man the whole town trusted for decades, gamble his life away for a shot at crypto riches?” www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/m...

Does the Knot Have a ‘Fake Brides’ Problem?: “Documents I obtained from the Federal Trade Commission reflect that, since 2018, more than two hundred formal complaints have been made about allegedly fraudulent activity on the Knot and WeddingWire.” www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

21st-Century Cinema in Review: The Fellowship of the Ring: “[N]o one has managed to so fully and so poetically use the new tools of movie magic to create a world and atmosphere that feel both as dreamlike and as tangible as in LOTR.” www.theringer.com/2025/03/28/m...

He Dialed 911 to Save His Baby. Then His Children Were Taken Away.: “Even if parents who are accused challenge an abusive-head-trauma diagnosis with medical experts of their own, prosecutors tend to view these witnesses cynically.” www.nytimes.com/2024/12/29/m...