Here's what we've got for you in our Weekly Top 5:
* Long COVID camaraderie (Men's Health)
* Breeding terrorists on Telegram @ProPublica / Frontline
* 737 Max coverup (Wired)
* Petrusich profiles Dacus (The New Yorker)
* The Irish pub as export (Smithsonian Magazine)
Learn why our editors have recommended these pieces and find out which story our audience loved most.
"The wind gusts reached 100 miles per hour and the smoke was thick and rancid. Sarvis watched electric cars explode and garbage bins tip over, fill with flames, and blow down the streets like missiles." @jbienkahn for @RollingStone
"The kids drifted off, but I lingered in this pre-internet backwater where we used to keep a stool next to the kitchen phone and a list of phone numbers taped to the wall. How did we make plans? How did we know where to go? How did we find each other?" —Heidi Lasher for Orion Magazine
https://orionmagazine.org/article/shifting-baselines-climate-change-dementia-alzheimers/
"Driverless cars are often called autonomous vehicles – but driving isn’t an autonomous activity. It’s a co-operative social activity, in which part of the job of whoever’s behind the wheel is to communicate with others on the road." —@RebeccaSolnit for @lrb
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n03/rebecca-solnit/in-the-shadow-of-silicon-valley
" ... for the stories we tell to recognize life in all beings—seen and unseen, seemingly inert and otherwise—we have to dwell in place long enough to notice when change is afoot." —Elizabeth Rush for @emergencemagazine
"When my mother arrived from California, I sat there on the starched sheets holding my baby, and my mother held me, and I cried uncontrollably, because I finally understood how much she loved me, and I could hardly stand the grace of it." —Leslie Jamison for The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/01/22/the-birth-of-my-daughter-the-death-of-my-marriage
In this week's Top 5 we're highlighting stories about:
- Interracial persecution in 1960s Michigan
- The cruelty bred into the chickens we eat
- How Photo Shuffle helped one man through loss
- Navigating life not knowing you’re neurodivergent
- The deep craft in forging a handmade knife
All this and the piece our audience loved most!
"A cloud of smoke rose to the ceiling, and a searing sound filled the room like a basket of snakes. 'This is the moment of truth,' Sam said, holding the tongs and looking away from the smoke. 'This is when it becomes a knife.'” —Laurence Gonzales for Chicago Magazine
https://www.chicagomag.com/chicago-magazine/january-2024/a-knife-forged-in-fire/
"My father rollerskated on the Cross-Bronx Expressway before it opened to car traffic. Born in 1953, he would have been seven or eight when New York City’s massive thoroughfare reached the peak of its construction, facilitated by the destruction of many tight-knit Bronx neighbourhoods." —Katie Mulkowsky for @aeon_co
https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-new-york-of-robert-moses-shaped-my-fathers-health
"But salmon are notoriously difficult to study. They spawn in fresh water, then spend most of their lives far out in the Pacific, an area dubbed the “black box” because it’s so vast and poorly understood." —Max Graham for @grist
https://grist.org/food/salmon-vanishing-yukon-river-way-of-life-alaska-native/
"The brain does not monitor itself for truth; once encoded, a memory is simply there, no matter how false it is, and a false memory can be as vivid, detailed, and laden with emotion as any other."
"Rats have personalities, too. Nearly every researcher I spoke to who had worked directly with the animals recalled individuals whose distinctive way of being in the world stands out in their memories." —J.B. MacKinnon for @hakaimagazine
"There is no city more beautiful and richer with personal history to me than this one—where my parents grew up, fell in love, and left in their twenties for America. And yet, there is also no city in which I feel more out of my depth." —Shruti Swamy for AFAR
https://www.afar.com/magazine/how-traveling-to-mumbai-helped-me-cope-with-loss
"In Ukrainian folk culture, rushnik is a bridge across the river of life, a return to the world of ancestors. Worn at weddings and funerals, a rushnik accompanies a person from birth to burial and decorates every home. The hidden symbolism of the ornament takes the material object to the spiritual dimension." —Zarina Zabrisky for Orion Magazine
https://orionmagazine.org/article/chernobyl-disaster-homesickness/
"The strange part about going through a house destroyed by a hurricane is how much of it is still there but in the wrong places. The roof is still there, but in pieces in the yard. The windows are still there, but they’re in shards in the sink or scattered on the floor. The stuff is all moved around inside and bloated full of floodwater and made unrecognizable." —Wyatt Williams for The Bitter Southerner
https://bittersoutherner.com/feature/2023/lucinda-williams-and-the-idea-of-louisiana
"There’s real culinary creativity in cooking, in recipes, in the kitchen—in the domestic sphere—that gets discounted when we try to talk about vegan or vegetarian food as something where you’re just replacing the meat or the dairy or the egg." —Alicia Kennedy in conversation with Jason McBride at Hazlitt
https://hazlitt.net/feature/we-have-deep-hatred-taking-food-seriously-interview-alicia-kennedy
"Reflecting on the ascent, the climbers who spoke to Insider continue to wonder whether Mohammad might have been saved if only one risk factor had been removed. Could they have organized a rescue if fewer people had been pushing for the summit?" —Matthew Loh for Insider
https://www.insider.com/death-k2-real-story-climbers-stepped-dying-man-kristin-harila-2023-8
"Levina Moody failed to return to the hotel that night. The family notified the RCMP that same night that she had gone missing, but before a report could even be properly filed, they discovered the worst."
https://thewalrus.ca/finding-closure-fifty-years-after-a-murder/
"At the Seed Vault’s tenth anniversary celebrations five years ago, water had to be pumped out of its entrance foyers after another warmest month on record melted the permafrost that was the whole reason the vault had been built in Longyearbyen." —Sam Kinchin-Smith for London Review of Books
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2023/june/the-singing-glaciers-of-svalbard
"In one video, he gives us a window into his training routine: a carabiner as thick with locks as a Parisian bridge, which he picks idly while watching TV like others reach for handfuls of popcorn, the movements so smoothly automatic at this point that he can do it all by touch and sound alone." —Erica X. Eisen for Hazlitt
