Christina Kary spent years tending the abandoned house next door, until the morning in 2024 when heavy equipment rolled through the alley and tore it down while she watched from her yard. Jena Brooker traces how the city had sold the lot to Crown Enterprises, the Moroun family's real estate arm, which now controls more than 160 parcels in Cadillac Heights and runs a concrete plant across the street. Residents have logged 80 dust complaints in four years, but the city has issued only one fine, later dismissed. Sixteen neighbors have taken buyouts and left. Kary hasn't.
About 90 percent of human microbial diversity has never been studied, all of it missing from populations outside wealthy, Western labs. Jeneen Interlandi followed two scientists, Mathilde Poyet and Mathieu Groussin, into Paraguay's Cerro Ita Guazu reservation, where they collected stool, saliva and vaginal samples to fill in the gap. Gut bacteria trade genes constantly, and industrialization seems to make the trading more frantic and the microbiome thinner. A curandera in the village had her own explanation. She didn't need microscopes to see something dying.
Three centuries before Lewis and Clark, a Yazoo tribesman named Moncacht-Ape claimed to have walked from the Mississippi to the Pacific and back. American historians called it a fraud. Mike Bezemek spent a year retracing the route using Moncacht-Ape's own descriptions, and found the mistake wasn't his story. It was a mapmaker's confusion between the Missouri River and the Platte. Following that correction through Nebraska and Wyoming, Bezemek found Otter Nation, Granite Mountains and a French pea porridge exactly where a 300-year-old account said they'd be.
Kelsey Weekman was having a miscarriage, and the only thing she could stand to watch was Steve-O getting his butt cheeks pierced together. Every other screen felt like a threat: Instagram kept surfacing babies, and Real Housewives was full of moms. Weekman writes about spending that week with the perpetually adolescent Jackass boys, then walking into a theater to see Jackass: Best and Last with her husband. The film is about friends hurting each other on purpose. What she needed from it turned out to be something else entirely.
