Hunger Is Psychological — And Dieting Only Makes It Worse
We all feel hungry before dinner and full after a banquet, but those moments are the tip of the iceberg. Hunger is a process that’s always present, always running in the background, only occasionally rising into consciousness. It’s more like a mood.

On The Hunt For The World’s Rarest Pasta
Delicate and impossible to replicate, su filindeu (or the “threads of God”) is a pasta made of hundreds of tiny strands by a single woman in a hillside town in Sardinia. She’ll make it for you too—if you’re willing to walk 20 miles overnight.

The Long-Lost Story Of The Longest Book Ever Written
For or a long time, Joe Gould thought he was going blind. This was before he lost his teeth, and years before he lost the history of the world he’d been writing in hundreds of dime-store composition notebooks, their black covers mottled like the pelt of a speckled goat, their white pages lined with thin blue veins.

The Rise And Fall Of Subway
With thousands of store closures in the last three years and petitions against Subway from its franchise owners, the fast-food chain with the most locations globally seems to be on the rocks. This video unpacks what’s going on and where Subway’s headed from here.

Lives Adrift In A Warming World
If the Earth’s average temperature increases 2 degrees Celsius by the year 2100, humankind will see catastrophic changes. For millions of people, this extreme warming is already reality, in places like Qatar, Colorado and Angola. And Aaliyah, at the age of 9, has become a climate refugee in Newtok, Alaska.

New York City Paid McKinsey Millions To Stem Jail Violence. Instead, Violence Soared.
In April 2017, partners from McKinsey sent a confidential report to the New York City corrections commissioner. The report recounted that McKinsey had tested its new anti-violence strategy in what the firm called “Restart” housing units at Rikers. Violence had dropped more than 50% in the Restart facilities. The number was bogus.

Can Vertical Farms Reap Their Harvest? It’s Anyone’s Bet.
Food futurists and industry leaders say these high-tech vertical farming operations are the future of agriculture. Indoor-grown produce is available in more than 20 supermarket chains nationwide. But despite massive investment, questions remain about efficiency and costs.

A Long Walk’s End
On May 18 2015, the FBI announced the search for a 53-year-old accountant accused of embezzling $8.7 million from an Ohio-based Pepsi distributor had come to an end. His name: James T. Hammes. Authorities say Hammes took the funds through a series of banking transfers while working as a controller for the distributor. Then he went for a hike.

The Shocking Rape Trial That Galvanised Spain’s Feminists – And The Far Right
The ‘wolf pack’ case inspired widespread anger and protests against sexual assault laws in Spain. The case had been a moment of reckoning, which laid bare a deep culture of misogyny in Spanish society. But the anti-feminist backlash that followed has helped propel the far-right to its biggest gains since Franco.

The Metaphysics Of The Hangover
A hangover is about being poisoned, no doubt. The toxins linger in the body and must be expelled, or waited out. We’re sick with a mini-flu and need to get better. But isn’t a hangover about more than physical toxins, at least some of the time? I’ll wager that a hangover is frequently about shame as well.

Going The Distance (And Beyond) To Catch Marathon Cheaters
Derek Murphy investigates runners whose times seem suspicious, which is what brought him to a 70-year-old doctor named Frank Meza. He’d run an exceptional time of 2 hours, 53 minutes that day, setting a record for the fastest marathon ever run by a man his age.

The Man Who Runs 365 Marathons A Year
One day, Michael Shattuck started to run. He liked it, so he ran longer, sometimes for as many as 65 hours each week. He never wanted to stop. What was he running from?

Inside The Booming Business Of Background Music
The background music industry – also known as music design, music consultancy or something offered as part of a broader package of “experiential design” or “sensory marketing” – is constantly deciding what we hear as we go about our everyday business. The biggest player in the industry, Mood Media, supplies music to 560,000 locations across the world, from Sainsbury’s to KFC.

The Art World’s Mini-Madoff And Me
Inigo Philbrick made his money betting big on a rise in price for a few artists, notably Stingel, who is known for his seemingly endless series of indistinguishable paintings of wallpaper, and Wool, whose most famous text painting fittingly spells out the word FOOL.

The Unraveling Of America
If and when the Chinese are ascendant, with their concentration camps for the Uighurs, the ruthless reach of their military, their 200 million surveillance cameras watching every move and gesture of their people, we will surely long for the best years of the American century.

The Last Time Democracy Almost Died
The last time democracy nearly died all over the world and almost all at once, Americans argued about it, and then they tried to fix it. What can we learn from the upheaval of the 1930s?

Nothing Does It Like 7up: The Rise Of The Lemon-lime Soda
The soft drink we now know as 7UP was invented and made its way onto the soft drink market in 1929. Created by Charles Leiper Grigg, the drink was called Bib-label Lithiated Lemon-lime Soda before Grigg eventually changed the name to 7UP. This was probably because the drink had seven ingredients.

The Rise And Fall Of Marty Tirrell
From central Iowa radio pioneer to alleged scam artist. Money didn’t always belong to Tirrell, according to numerous court judgments against him. He defrauded eight people out of $1.5 million.

The Great Wall Street Housing Grab
Wall Street’s latest real estate grab has ballooned to roughly $60 billion, representing hundreds of thousands of properties. In some communities, it has fundamentally altered housing ecosystems in ways we’re only now beginning to understand, fueling a housing recovery without a homeowner recovery.

Nietzsche On How To Find Yourself And The True Value Of Education
Friedrich Nietzsche considered the journey of self-discovery one of the greatest and most fertile existential difficulties. “Any human being who does not wish to be part of the masses need only stop making things easy for himself. “Be yourself! All that you are now doing, thinking, desiring, all that is not you.”

The Art Of Eviction
In Brooklyn, the median rent has gone up about 10 percent in the six years since Quick Evic was founded, allowing the company to expand aggressively. In 2014 it brought in $20,000 in revenue, which ballooned to more than $300,000 by 2017. How one company helps landlords exploit a loophole in New York’s tenant laws.