On theme parks in America.

The polar icecaps are melting. Is it OK to have a child? Australia is on fire. Is it OK to have a child? My house is flooded, my crops have failed, my community is fleeing. Is it OK to have a child? It is, in a sense, an impossible question.

A master troll on trial in New Jersey.

“Four mornings a week Murray Kempton, the Huckleberry Finn of American journalism, climbs onto his bicycle and pedals out into the world in search of what may be there. For more than thirty years he has been finding things other writers have not even thought to look for, and he has done so with a compelling humanity that is rare not just in his profession but in the human race as well. I have followed him as he made his regular rounds, and I have eaten at his table, and I am not all that certain that he is not the greatest man I have ever met.”

Do not assume, just because there is champagne and whiskey and maybe, sometimes, drugs, that these shuckers aren’t also thinking long and hard, and often poetically, about their métier.

“I was one of the few guys rooting for the comet to hit the Earth. Statistically, more people that deserved to go would go.”

On the American Legislative Exchange Council, a D.C. nonprofit with a library of more than 800 pieces of fill-in-the-blank legislation ready for state legislatures across the country.

Getting arrested was the best thing to ever happen to Jeremy Meeks.

After 20 years of long-distance competition, I ran my fastest. All it took was tech, training, and a new understanding of my life.

While serving in WWII, Jerome Motto received regular correspondence from a woman he barely knew. These letters led to groundbreaking research on how to reach people at risk.

Long considered a punchline, vegan cheese has quietly but steadily infiltrated mainstream supermarket shelves.

The afterlife of a thoughtless, cruel insult.

“For people who pay close attention to the state of American fiction, he has become a kind of superhero.”

On the then-new phenomenon of dead downtowns.

On playing chess and waiting to get arrested.

An archaeology of debt.

A trip to Sweeden’s Disgusting Food Museum.

An argument for ordering in, among other things.

Bruce Cawsey Waite has no home, no office, and wears a dead man’s suit.

All violence is not like all other violence. Every Jewish death is not like every other Jewish death. To believe otherwise is to revive the old typological thinking about Jewish history, according to which every enemy of the Jews is the same enemy, and there is only one war, and it is a war against extinction, and it is a timeless war.

One story of coming to America from the Soviet Union.

America’s poet laureate of the dick joke is taking it all in stride.