Plus: a phone sex operator on the sexual psychology of the right, the couple who saved China's oldest temples, and the biologist who traded God for a wolverine.
Jul 28, 2026
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Jon Mooallem called Lamont Sleets more than a dozen times. Sleets had reportedly invented the high five as a toddler, greeting his father's Vietnam infantry unit at the front door. He never called back. Two comedy writers had made the whole thing up and pulled his name off a college roster. The better claim belongs to Glenn Burke, the Dodgers outfielder who threw his palm skyward at Dodger Stadium in 1977 and was out of baseball by 27. Burke died in 1995 believing the gesture was his. A forward at Louisville tells a third version.
Michael called to argue about the Great Replacement and stayed on the line two hours at $1.99 a minute. Elizabeth R. Blackburn ran a NiteFlirt listing called Talk Politics With The Anarchist Bimbo, and the market found her immediately. Retired Pentagon staff. A conservative attorney in Texas who wanted to be remade as a liberal woman named Sarah. An Australian white nationalist who needed a progressive woman to dominate him, because conservative women had been trained not to. Blackburn took notes after every call. What the notes have in common is the thing nobody says out loud.
The bats were the first thing they noticed, thousands of them packed across the roof like caviar. Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin had ridden mules three days into the Wutai mountains looking for a Tang dynasty temple nobody believed had survived. Lin found the date on a rafter. A.D. 857. Tony Perrottet retraced their route through Shanxi, now among the most polluted places on earth, counting the 436 steps they climbed and finding the hidden stairway behind the Buddha. The couple documented nearly 2,000 buildings. What Mao did to Beijing came later, and Liang watched it happen.
Jeff Copeland's mother taught herself Hebrew and preached in Methodist churches across rural Indiana, and she took her favorite son along. He is now the leading American authority on wolverines. He does not believe in God in the least. Jeff Wheelwright rode a chairlift into the Tetons with him and spent a day and a half asking what filled the space. Copeland described an animal that ignores humans completely, kills snow-bound moose by leaping onto their backs, and travels 40 miles a day for reasons no biologist can explain. Then he mentioned what he would give anything for.
