Articles and essays
I can’t forget

What’s Noka worth?

DallasFood
December 9, 2006

A 10-part series that aimed to find out whether Noka, a chocolate brand based in Texas, was worth the price — an astonishing $854 a pound, making it the most expensive chocolate in the world. The investigation is incredibly comprehensive, teaching you so much about artisan chocolate along the way. If you like this article, check out the site’s investigation into Mast Brothers, as well as the Tampa Bay Times’ Farm to Fable series.

What’s the deal with the food at T.J. Maxx?

Bon Appetit
July 25, 2016

One of those little articles that gives you an insight into a random part of everyday life. Why does a discount clothing store in strip malls across America have an aisle filled to the brim with beet-dyed artisan pasta and huge jars of Manuka honey? And is the food any good?

The Search for Sweet

The New Yorker
May 15, 2006

“Adults who are offered drinks of different sugar concentrations tend to reach a ‘bliss point’ at about nine teaspoons per cup – fifty percent sweeter than the average soft drink. Children prefer eleven teaspoons per cup, and they’ll take it even stronger. ‘For babies, the fundamental rule is: the sweeter the better,’ Monell’s director, Gary Beauchamp, told me.‘There is nothing that is too sweet.’”

The story of searching for artificial sweeteners, but also the human desire for sugar.

The Babysitter’s Club

Real Life
July 27, 2016

“Yelp’s identity is anchored by its pull-to-refresh icon, a little hamster in a rocket ship. This hamster has a name. It’s Hammy. While you are refreshing a page of search results, Hammy does a side-to-side dance, and then the rocket blasts off toward the top of the screen. Who is the person who enjoys this? Yelp is for adults with disposable income and a high degree of mobility, two things that usually — should — preclude friendships with stuffed animals.”

An article about the era of “post-dignity design.”

What Happens When We Let Tech Care for Our Aging Parents

Wired
December 19, 2017

“On July 29, 2014, Arlyn carried Pony to Jim’s funeral, placing the tablet facing forward on the pew beside her. She invited any workers behind Pony who wanted to attend to log in.”

There are a few articles about our uncomfortable relationship with technology, and how we can’t help but ascribe a humanity to robots, that have descriptions I can’t shake. The one above, another about someone who felt bad leaving a robot in the dark when they left (and another about how sad people were when that same robot was shut down), another about a child looking out the car window and talking to his nonexistent YouTube audience.

Castaways

The New Yorker
February 12, 2007

“Columbus had sailed to the New World and back in less time than they had now been at sea. Intuitively, they knew that—whatever movies they’d seen, whatever stories they’d heard, whatever they knew firsthand about stranded fishermen — they had already survived longer than anyone else.”

How Companies Learn Your Secrets

The New York Times Magazine
February 16, 2012

How Target can figure out you’re pregnant before you do.

If you like this article, you should also check out this article from the same magazine, which looks at how credit card companies can make predictions about who will miss a payment based on what they buy and where they go.

Japan’s Rent-a-Family Industry

The New Yorker
April 23, 2018

“Nishida said that, although he still calls them by the names of his wife and daughter, and the meetings still take the form of family dinners, the women have, to some extent, stopped acting and ‘turned into their own selves.’ The rental wife sometimes ‘breaks out of the shell of the rental family’ enough to complain about her real husband, and Nishida gives her advice.”

There’s No Scientific Basis for Race — It’s a Made-Up Label

National Geographic
March 12, 2018

“Over the past few decades, genetic research has revealed two deep truths about people. The first is that all humans are closely related—more closely related than all chimps, even though there are many more humans around today. Everyone has the same collection of genes, but with the exception of identical twins, everyone has slightly different versions of some of them. Studies of this genetic diversity have allowed scientists to reconstruct a kind of family tree of human populations. That has revealed the second deep truth: In a very real sense, all people alive today are Africans.”

Travels in Siberia

The New Yorker
July 27, 2009

“One day — a Saturday — we drove through five weddings in the course of the afternoon. I couldn’t tell whether the bridal couples had actually been married on the highway or were just having their receptions there.”

A sprawling two-part series that takes you across Siberia, a place few of us will ever get to in our lifetimes.

Rick Steves Wants to Set You Free

The New York Times Magazine
March 20, 2019

“He wants you to stand and make little moaning sounds on a cobblestone street the first time you taste authentic Italian gelato — flavors so pure they seem like the primordial essence of peach or melon or pistachio or rice distilled into molecules and stirred directly into your own molecules.”

The Chameleon

The New Yorker
August 4, 2008

The basis for the movie “The Impostor,” I think about this story perhaps more than any other. It’s the true story of a French man who convinced a Texas family he was their missing 13-year-old son (well, maybe…).

My Life Cleanse: One Month Inside L.A.’s Cult of Betterness

GQ
November 1, 2018

I’ve long been interested in cults and the extremes of human nature and belief. You tell yourself you could never be taken in by one, but... This article is a surprising look at the types of cult recruiting practices that take places in hotel conference rooms across the country, maybe right up the street from us. For more on cults, check out the Heaven’s Gate podcast.

Writer Evan Ratliff Tried to Vanish. Here’s What Happened.

Wired
November 20, 2009

We’ve all wondered — if we wanted to completely disappear from our lives, how would we do it? A writer for Wired tried to find out, while the magazine offered up a $5,000 reward for anyone who found him.

All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere To Go

Medium
November 9, 2014

“200,000 brave and/or insane people have supposedly signed up for a one-way mission to Mars. But the truth about Mars One, the company behind the effort, is much weirder (and far more worrying) than anyone has previously reported.”

The Body in Room 348

Vanity Fair
April 11, 2013

Sometimes locked room mysteries happen in real life. A man is found dead in his hotel room with only a small laceration in a very particular area. What actually happened would sound ridiculous if it didn’t…actually happen. The investigator in this story also solved another mystery covered by Vanity Fair three years earlier, which is also worth reading.

The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans

OtherHand

Truly a long read, so clear some time on your calendar, but the detail is what grabs you. Why did a group of German tourists — two adults and two children — visiting the U.S. seemingly go missing in Death Valley, the only evidence being their rented minivan found in a remote part of the desert and a beer bottle hidden under a bush a mile away. It would take over a decade to solve the mystery.