River math, a caffeine hack, Beethoven, Ice Age flowers, and a spy who may have been nobody's.
An archaeologist argues the bell-shaped marks painted in a Spanish cave 16,000 years ago are belladonna or henbane flowers, which would make them the oldest known picture of a psychoactive plant.
A review of Jonathan Freedland's book on the two men who broke out of Auschwitz to warn the world, and on what happened when the warning arrived and was not believed.
Every river network on Earth branches to the same scaling law, and nobody fully knows why. A writer with a river of her own walks through what the equation captures.
Polish police arrested a man for a mail-bomb plot tied to Russian sabotage. The reporting keeps turning up evidence that he was working for someone else, or possibly for everyone.
Celine Nguyen on where taste actually comes from, and why Silicon Valley's version of it, treating taste as a personal signal you can acquire, misses that it is built socially.
The Hadza sleep badly by every clinical measure and report sleeping well. An anthropologist uses that to argue our fragmented nights may be the design, not the failure.
A New York Times obituary writer on the craft of summing up a life in a thousand words, including how he decides what a person's one sentence turns out to be.
Younghusband and his Russian counterpart shared meals in the Pamirs while each believed he was holding back the other's empire. Neither man's great game was as real as he thought.
The thirty-year path from a deaf composer's letter to his brothers to the Ninth Symphony's final movement, and how the tune became the most reused melody in Western music.
Scott Alexander works through why paraxanthine supplements and slow-metabolizer science probably will not let you drink coffee at five and sleep at ten, with unusual care about the evidence.
Factory farming gets worse as countries get richer, following income thresholds almost precisely. The argument is about which interventions could break that pattern rather than which are most satisfying.
Three Finnish painters produced their best work in one summer of 1893, while the country was still Russian. A short piece on light, nationhood, and what a season does to art.