“If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we’re f’d.”

That was an uncharacteristically morbid Tweet from climate scientist Jason Box last summer.

John H. Richardson got Box to share the details of the infamous Tweet as well as a whole lot more about the sad, burdened life of a modern climate scientist.

It’s raw, morbid, and scary; and it’s a must-read.

John H. Richardson, Esquire

He was a globally renowned expert in tropical diseases, and the hero who ran Sierra Leone’s worst Ebola ward. So why, when he finally fell ill, was he denied the extraordinary treatments that could have saved him?

By Joshua Hammer, Matter

“Tending a sugar-beet crop was backbreaking and the valley too far north to draw workers from well-worn Southern migratory routes. Besides, wrote the railroad magnate James J. Hill in 1897, in a letter to the president of the North Dakota Agricultural College, how would America ever find a man willing to work for as low a wage as that earned by a beet laborer in Europe?

The answer was in Mexico.”

By Sierra Crane-Murdoch, VQR

Long before Moby Dick, Herman Melville set off on a Polynesian trip that became a famous literary hoax.

By David Samuels, Laphams Quarterly

“For a seasoned actor like Olson — who’s been working consistently for the past 15 years in comedy roles, turning up on Curb Your Enthusiasm as Becky, Cheryl’s loud and opinionated sister; as Mimi’s vengeful nemesis, Traylor, on The Drew Carey Show; and currently on New Girl as the free-spirited girlfriend of Jess’ dad — it’s surprising that she’s not used to the being the center of attention by now. But she’s decidedly not.”

By Erin La Rosa, Buzzfeed

“Shore had named everything from companies to products to websites to ingredients to colors. He was responsible for some 160 distinct names in all, including SoyJoy (the health bar), Lytro (the camera) and Yum! (the parent company of KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell), as well as lesser-known names like Avaya, Enormo, Fanhattan, Freescale, Homestyler, Kixx, Mylo, Pause, Rig, Scribe, Spontania, Valchemy, Wanderful and Zact. But the new V.R. production process posed a particular challenge.”

By Neal Gabler, NYT Magazine

About a Panama Unit that operated one of the most efficient drug-robbery rings in Texas, taking money from some dealers and traffickers while using their weapons and cars to rob others

By Josh Eells, Rolling Stone

“The residents of Green Bank, West Virginia, can’t use cell phones, wi-fi, or other kinds of modern technology due to a high-tech government telescope. Recently, this ban has made the town a magnet for technophobes, and the locals aren’t thrilled to have them.”

By Michael J. Gaynor, The Washingtonian

“Sharper’s rampage of druggings and rapes could have been prevented, according to a two-month investigation by ProPublica and The New Orleans Advocate based on police records in five states, hundreds of pages of court documents and dozens of interviews across the country.”

By T. Christian Miller and Ryan Gabrielson, ProPublica, and Ramon Antonio Vargas and John Simerman, The New Orleans Advocate

“What’s striking is how little attention has been paid to the impact that technology has had on the actual practice of journalism,” says Michael Massing in this piece in the New York Review of Books.

Massing has set out to figure out the ways in which journalism is better, worse, and different today.

By now, we all know there’s a drought in the western United States.

It would seem that this scarcity is simply a result of a lack rain — but an investigation by ProPublica and Matter shows that government subsidies and business interests have led to a surprisingly silly allocation of water in these states. This is outstanding investigative journalism.

By Abrahm Lustgarten and Naveena Sadasivam, Matter and ProPublica

Anna Erelle (pseudonym) had been reporting on ISIS for a while before she decided to go undercover and try to learn more about what was driving European teenagers toward Islamic extremists. The next thing she knew, she was faking the planning of her marriage to a high-ranking member of ISIS.

A beautiful, fascinating story by pilot Mark Vanhoenacker, sharing a pilot’s view of a journey flying a 747 from Heathrow to Tokyo. In addition to just being a wonderful story, this piece blends multimedia and written word in a seamless, forward-thinking manner.

The Obama administration created a $500 million initiative to provide a 16 course curriculum on fatherhood around the country. North Milwaukee is one of the focuses of the program, where black children are “three times as likely as white children to die in their first year; five times as likely to live with a single parent; nine times as likely to attend failing schools; 15 times as likely to live in poverty; 18 times as likely to go to prison.”

Read The Washington Post’s Eli Saslow’s profile of Paul Gayle of North Milwaukee, who joined this fatherhood program having these goals in mind:“Brush Sapphire’s teeth every night.” “Stay calm.” “Find a stable apartment.” “Get a job — any.”

Disney has bet big on the upcoming Star Wars film. So big, that their $4 billion acquisition of LucasFilm essentially was a wager that this film will be a blockbuster.

Reporter Bruce Handy walks us through the fascinating story of this film coming together and the ambitious plans to re-ignite the Star Wars legacy. Along with the story are outstanding photographs by Annie Leibovitz.

“Crystal was supposed to keep his mouth shut about what he saw, but he didn’t. He broke the “blue wall of silence” and blew the whistle on his colleagues, and the way many of his fellow officers saw it, he had sided with a small-time criminal over his brothers in blue.”

Albert Samaha, Buzzfeed

“One fateful night in the summer of 1988, I took acid…I resolved to get a real job. But then I had an equally ridiculous epiphany: I should work for David Letterman…Less than a month later, I met Matt Wickline at a party. He was a writer at Letterman. It was fate…my career began.”

Daniel Kellison, Grantland

“How did a single sadistic home invasion — one of many senseless crimes in the violent 1980’s — reshape the politics of criminal justice for a generation? … It began with a 30-second television ad. As he has for 28 years, Horton insisted he is innocent — that he never killed or raped, but was just in the wrong places at the wrong times.”

Beth Schwartzapfel and Bill Keller, The Marshall Project

“In 2013, police solved about 86 percent of homicides in which the victim was white. For black victims, the number was just 45 percent.”

In the United States, black victims and their families have a much harder time seeking justice than white ones. Mother Jones asked why.

The team at Eater put together this outstanding interactive piece. It walks through an entire day at a Russian restaurant in Portland — weaving together the stories of customers and staff using video, text, photography and more.

“Minute by minute, dollar by dollar, vodka shot by vodka shot. Welcome to One Night at Kachka.”

Erin DeJesus, Eater

Caitlyn Jenner’s cover feature in Vanity Fair last week sparked conversations around the world about trans issues, feminism and what it means to be a woman. Jill Filipovic digs thoughtfully into these issues in a must-read piece in Cosmopolitan.

A man in a suit was found dead on a beach in Australia in 1948. Beyond a handful of clues, nobody has been able to determine in the ensuing 67 years who he was or how he arrived there. Now a man named Derek Abbot has been digging up clues, chasing leads, and turning to the internet to develop a strong theory.

“Madison was beautiful, talented, successful — very nearly the epitome of what every young girl is supposed to hope she becomes…Everyone in Madison’s life holds a piece of her story, possesses a clue: a text message, a vacant look, a deleted Instagram post…It was as if they hoped she might be breathed back to life.”

Kate Fagan, ESPN

“The logistics of pulling off a heist of this size were straight out of “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” Braum’s had found that each stolen calf weighed between 300 and 750 pounds, meaning that the combined lot would likely have tipped the scales at over 500,000 pounds. Texas Monthly’s John Nova Lomax estimated that it would have taken more than 30 cattle trailers, each 36 feet long, to haul off the animals, and it insulted logic to imagine that a fleet of massive farm vehicles would have evaded detection.”

By Eric Benson, FiveThirtyEight

“Tucked in her pocket was $100 in carefully folded bills for another expense: the fee the salon owner charges each new employee for her job. The deal was the same as it is for beginning manicurists in almost any salon in the New York area. She would work for no wages, subsisting on meager tips, until her boss decided she was skillful enough to merit a wage.

It would take nearly three months before her boss paid her. Thirty dollars a day.”

Sarah Maslin Nir, The New York Times

“I honestly didn’t expect to be approved. The ethics of doing something like this are clear: You can’t lie about who you are. And Uber knew who I was. Earlier, I’d posted on Twitter trying to dig up some Philly-area UberX drivers; spookily, within a couple of hours, Durkosh emailed asking how she could be involved.

A couple weeks later, I got a text: I was in.”

Emily Guendelsberger, The Philadelphia City Paper

Obama’s landmark healthcare achievement — healthcare.gov — famously flopped in a mess of expensive contracts and archaic technology.

Since then, he’s been quietly building a team of more than 100 technologists — and his pitch was strong enough to lure people accustomed to flip-flops and iPhones in California to Washington, where they wear suits and are issued Blackberries. Read about it in FastCompany.

After the devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010, the American Red Cross jumped into action. Collecting nearly $500 million in donations, they made a plan to develop new communities and create housing for 130,000 people.

ProPublica and NPR teamed up to dig into the plan’s success. Their finding? Half a billion dollars built six houses in Haiti.

Justin Elliott, ProPublica and Laura Sullivan, NPR

Fifty thousand murders were committed in Rio de Janeiro in 2o12. In the slums of Brazil, many don’t even expect to survive. For young women growing up in this environment, soccer can play a key role in survival.

Canada’s TSN put together a fascinating, in-depth story about this featuring incredible photography and video, in-depth interviews and beautiful web design.

The team at Matter worked with a group of teenagers in San Francisco to answer that question.

The result is a beautiful, raw, inspiring story featuring prose, poetry, photography, video — even Snapchat.

“Under a bright, midday sun, a large group of prospective college students waits in the parking lot outside Kepler University, in the Rwandan capital of Kigali. The results of the morning’s admissions tests will soon be taped to a large window next to the school’s entrance.

For many of those waiting, acceptance to Kepler could mean an end to their poverty. One young man, who cleans dishes at a hotel to support his family, says earning a spot here would be the “first happiness in [his] life.”

Wyatt Orme & Tik Root, Bright

“The mother told police that the kidnappers had starved and abused her. “They caused so much pain for my daughter that she does not live a normal life,” she wrote to the judge”

“America’s migrant-extortion market remains in the shadows of our fierce immigration debate. One reason is that the crime targets those who are least likely to report it. Another is that the victims of ransom kidnappings are sometimes twice disappeared: after being rescued from the stash houses where they are kept, they are often detained long enough to testify against their captors and then are swiftly deported.”

Sarah Stillman, The New Yorker

For released Texas prisoners, the first step toward the future is into an old Greyhound station in Huntsville. NPR’s Look At This team created this fascinating photo essay about the hundreds of inmates who arrive there each week.

Seinfeld, revered as one of the greatest sitcoms ever, made it’s debut on Hulu recently. While it has been so popular in the United States, the show has never picked up much of an audience elsewhere.

Jennifer Armstrong has a great take in The Verge on the challenges of translating humor — particularly humor that prides itself on being about nothing.

Do you recognize the design of the plate and cup in the below photo? As ubiquitous and recognizable as it is, it came to the attention of some reddit users recently that nobody really knew where it came from.

Thomas Gounley of the Springfield (Missouri) News-Leader picked up where the internet sleuths left off, and has a really interesting story.

What’s the right way to compensate someone for decades of lost freedom?

By Ariel Levy, The New Yorker

“Hannibal Buress is about halfway through his second set of the night in Denver when he turns to his DJ, who is sitting a couple of feet behind him, fiddling with his turntables. “Hey Tony,” he says with a subtle wince, “play some music.” And then he walks offstage.”

By Hua Hsu, Fader

David Hume Kennerly rode on Air Force One as a photographer for the first time at age 23. In the 50 years since, he’s covered nearly every candidate who’s gotten anywhere close to the White House.

He put together this photo essay in Politico that tells the story of dozens of campaigns, and the story of a man who was there through all of it:

“Of the more than 50 firemen who had walked away from Company Eight before Sears took over, only seven rejoined. Most former members wanted nothing to do with an interloper, much less one rumored to have radical reforms in mind. Their arrogant certainty that Sears would fall flat on his face was matched only by his own arrogant certainty that he was going to prove them wrong.”

By Mathew Pearl, Atavist

Writers and artists have long been fascinated by the idea of an English eerie — ‘the skull beneath the skin of the countryside’. But for a new generation this has nothing to do with hokey supernaturalism — it’s a cultural and political response to contemporary crises and fears

By Robert Mcfarlane, The Guardian

They had nothing in common. One was a humble farm boy from Minnesota. The other was the most electrifying distance runner of his time.

By John Brant, Runners World

“Howe Street on the east side of Manchester, New Hampshire, is part of a tight-knit community of working-class families where neighbors commonly show up unannounced for a favor. So nothing seemed unusual to LoriAnn Silver when her new next-door neighbor walked onto her porch in the summer of 2004 and pressed the buzzer.”

By Michele McPhee, Boston Magazine

What little we know of North Korea and its people comes in through a mix of stories from those who’ve been there and government propaganda.

The New York Times created this fascinating interactive story that aims to show the mundane stories of the 25 million citizens of North Korea:

“Trucks and cars speed down Ninth Street as dusty construction workers, sharply dressed professionals, nannies with strollers, and roughhousing teens hustle across Fifth Avenue, all on their way to somewhere else. Perhaps this neither-here-nor-there-ness explains why two skinned goat heads that appeared without explanation above the intersection last November remained there for days.”

By Adrian Chen, NYMag

How a lousy football video game birthed a bastard and led to the greatest hockey game of all-time.

By Blake J. Harris, Read Only Memory

“I could tell you about all these things, these pieces of the Sri Lankan south — palms swaying in the rain, prawn curry and sweet lime water by candlelight, vanilla ice cream drizzled with treacle from the trees — but instead I want to tell you about visiting the north, a different kind of country, five years after the end of a civil war.”

By Leslie Jamison, Afar

“In a place like Braddock, Pennsylvania, nothing much surprises you. It’s a poor place, mostly black, mostly a shadow of the boomtown steel days. Some say they should just tear the whole place up and pave a highway through it. Others suggest a new shopping mall in lieu of the roadway. Still others think it should become a green paradise, a playground for artists and intellectuals to put down roots and educate people on sustainability.”

By Robyn Coggins, Wilson Quarterly

An outstanding piece of investigative work by Norway’s Dagbladet. A truly fascinating story, and top-notch reporting:

“Last winter two bodies were found in Norway and the Netherlands. They were wearing identical wetsuits. The police in three countries were involved in the case, but never managed to identify them. This is the story of who they were.”