Best of 2025: The Stories You Missed

Our devastation of nature is so extreme that reversing even a small part of it requires painstaking, quixotic efforts, Nick Paumgarten writes.

On our first memories

Massimo Vignelli wore a chalk-stripe suit. He stood on the stage of Cooper Union’s Great Hall, one hand holding a microphone with a long, snaking cord,

It’s been an idea for over three decades. How did the clock that will run for 10,000 years become a reality?

I sometimes wonder whether my love of compost is a response to the dispiriting cleanness of modern life – the spray’...

November 3, 2025 – “I pined for something that did not exist: the car at the end of the mind, a car as dazzling as Wallace Stevens’s gold-feathered bird.”

Tracing a mummy’s strange odyssey, from ancient Egypt to Edmonton, and the secrets still entombed

Lauren Markham and Jenny Odell discuss people, books, and places as inspiration; grief and the creative process; and the conscious attention required by climate crisis.

Coming face to face with lionfish in the waters of the Aegean Sea, James Bridle traces the unfolding of geology, evolution, and empire that not only occasions this meeting, but binds us in relationship with this “invasive” species.

My dad was a soldier, a traitor, and a refugee. What would we find when we returned to the country he fled?