Are we missing something awesome? Submit it for a future issue of Readthisthing: things@readthisthing.com

“The problem with China, though, is that there exists almost zero in the way of native Yachtland infrastructure. There are precious few private airports, no James Bond-style Monte Carlo casinos, no Portofino-esque towns populated only by people who smell of Acqua di Parma, and there is literally only a single yacht club at which a Russian oligarch or an Italian real estate magnate would feel at all comfortable.”

By Devin Friedman, GQ

“But no one could be sure why Gil had committed the crimes he’d committed. Or even what, exactly, those crimes were, though their consequences were severe. He had profoundly damaged the international credibility of the Mossad, whose false information — going back how long, no one was quite sure — had been shared with the major intelligence agencies of the Western world.”

By Ronen Bergman, Atavist

“Stewart Butterfield is everything you don’t think of when you hear the wordsenterprise software: funny, fascinating, philosophical, creative, a little intimidating. Perhaps because he isn’t anything like what you’d expect, he’s been able to make products that are more fun and addictive than anyone could imagine, whether they’re for sharing photos or managing projects.”

By Jeff Bercovici, Inc

“Authors note: It seemed, thirteen years ago when I was following the murderous trail of New York real estate scion Robert Durst — who had possibly killed his wife Kathy in 1982, his friend Susan Berman in 2000 and then his Galveston, Texas neighbor Morris Black a year later, while Durst was in hiding dressed as a woman — that the story could not possibly get more bizarre…but they did”

By Robert Draper, GQ

How a rumor sent a teen to prison for murder in Vegas

“Tossed behind a dumpster and covered in trash was a dead black man. Though he had no ID on him, police would soon learn that he was known on the streets as “St. Louis,” and, eventually, they would identify him as 44-year-old Duran Bailey, who had recently become homeless.”

By Jordan Smith, The Intercept

“In my mid-30s, my sister’s boyfriend sat me down to explain that my preference for a childless life would pass. I thought him presumptuous, particularly since he had only met me once or twice. “At your age,” he explained, ‘people go through phases. You’ll get over it.’”

By Sabine Heinlein | Longreads

“I’m often asked what I do for a living…At least half the time the person flinches with disapproval when I answer “evolution,” and often the conversation simply terminates once the “e-word” has been spoken. Occasionally, someone will retort: “But there is no evidence for evolution.” Or insist: “It’s just a theory, so why teach it?”

By James Krupa, Orion Magazine

He was one of the most hated players in NCAA tournament history. Then he bought a $1 million lottery ticket.

By Alan Siegel, The Washingtonian

On the day he planned to make his sacred journey, or hijra, to the Islamic State, 19-year-old Mohammed Hamzah Khan woke up before dawn at his house in the Chicago suburb of Bolingbrook, Illinois, and walked to the nearby mosque to pray.”

By Janet Reitman, Rolling Stone

“Tidal is news this afternoon, by tomorrow no one is talking about it, never mind next week. Then the hard work begins. Are all these artists going to walk the streets in sandwich boards, garnering sign-ups like a political canvasser gets signatures? Of course not.”

Bonus: More Tidal

By Bob Lefsetz

“Inside the store’s display window stood a four-foot-tall replica of the Golden Gate Bridge where shoppers could snap selfies when trying on the costumier lines of clothing in front of a rotating cast of inflatable monsters that includes a Godzilla, a Bigfoot, and a hanging monkey. A huge mural of Santa Claus impaling Dracula on a giant candy cane advertised6¢ Santa Slays Halloween, Betabrand’s first videogame.”

By Bryan Moylan, Matter

“These days, you might find me talking in front of a crowd of unfamiliar faces. I still kick ass at Mario games. Even now, I feel like an imposter sometimes. Here’s the thing though: it gets easier. You start trusting yourself. You’re an imposter less and less, and you’re yourself more and more. You may not believe me, but I’ll try and convince you all the same.

You belong here. And you are going to be great.”

By Julie Zhou

“Healthy Moms was begun to help the region’s babies thrive. Now part of its mission is much more basic: to keep them alive. This is why it has signed on, along with other local nonprofits, to partner with Cradle Cincinnati — the massive campaign to improve the infant mortality rate in Cincinnati and Hamilton County.”

By Linda Vaccariello, Cincinnati Magazine

“Few noticed that Keranen and her team had gathered likely the best data we have on a new phenomenon in Oklahoma: man-made earthquakes. At the time, earthquakes were a relatively rare event for Oklahomans. Now they’re reported on daily, like the weather, and generally by the weatherman.”

By Rivka Galchen, The New Yorker

“If you knew where a million dollars’ worth of blow was buried, would you go dig it up? Rodney Hyden would. We pick up the story at this critical juncture.”

By Daniel Riley, GQ

“For over 200 years it has been generally believed that the first key-based locks originated in Egypt around 2000 BCE. However, recently there has been strong evidence emerging to place its invention elsewhere, and suggest a more accurate, if somewhat broad window in which the first lock entered the world.”

By Schuyler Towne

Everything else in this list is something you can read, but this episode of Last Week Tonight where John Oliver interviews Edward Snowden is really powerful — it’s worth a watch.

John Oliver, Last Week Tonight

“Flash Boys, the author’s best-selling exposé of high-speed trading, made some of Wall Street’s richest people very angry. Dissecting the reaction, he argues that the furor has obscured his book’s real news.”

By Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair

“If you want to imagine how the world will look in just a few years, once our cell phones become the keepers of both our money and identity, skip Silicon Valley and book a ticket to Orlando. Go to Disney World. Then, reserve a meal at a restaurant called Be Our Guest, using the Disney World app to order your food in advance.”

By Cliff Kuang, Wired

“Net neutrality won. The internet is ours! We’ve taken it! Stolen it back from the people who, well, provide it to us at a pretty reasonable rate, truth be told. The entire library of human everything delivered right to your doorstep for a mere $20 to $50 or so a month, depending on how fast it is that you want that everything.”

By Mat Honan, Buzzfeed

“Cody Spafford found both solace and redemption in the kitchen of Seattle’s most celebrated restaurant. What turned a promising chef into a bank robber?”

By Allecia Vermillion, Seattle Met

“The two men are physically incongruous. Key is tall, light brown, dashingly high-cheek-boned, and L.A. fit; Peele is shorter, darker, more rounded, cute like a Teddy bear. Peele, who is thirty-five, wears a nineties slacker uniform of sneakers, hoodie, and hipster specs. Key is fond of sharply cut jackets and shiny shirts — like an ad exec on casual Friday — and looks forty-three the way Will Smith looked forty-three, which is not much.”

By Zadie Smith, The New Yorker

“Twenty-two rows below, Jennifer Kimzey’s eldest son, Sage Steele Kimzey, walks out of the tunnel at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas. He wears purple-and-black chaps, a crisp Wrangler shirt, and his lucky hat and boots, worn through in the toe. His 135-pound frame looks impossibly small from here. She focuses on the words emblazoned on the silver bracelet on her wrist: let your faith be bigger than your fear.”

By Abe Streep, California Sunday

“For the longest time I never spoke about sickle cell and the bad blood that moves inside me. Discussing it meant acknowledging it plainly and somehow jinxing myself into more suffering. Even now as I write I hold my breath, worry, am wary of all my body’s clicks and clacks.”

By Sara Bivigou, Buzzfeed

“Neuroscientists have long tried to measure our maximum mental volume. However, what scrambles any simple reckoning of memory capacity is the astounding cognitive feats achieved by dedicated individuals, and people with atypical brains.”

By Adam Hadhazy, BBC

“The biggest extinction event in planetary history was driven by the rapid acidification of our oceans, a new study concl​udes. So much carbon was released into the atmosphere, and the oceans absorbed so much of it so quickly, that marine life simply died off, from the bottom of the food chain up.”

By Brian Merchant, Motherboard

“A free-floating Earth would miss out on many of the things we enjoy on our actual Earth. There would be no seasons or sunsets. And with no Sun to revolve around, no birthdays. But could a rogue planet support life, let alone a vibrant biosphere like Earth’s?”

By Sean Raymond, Aeon

“The conventional wisdom among public health authorities is that the Ebola virus, which killed at least 10,000 people inLiberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, was a new phenomenon, not seen in West Africa before 2013.

The conventional wisdom is wrong.”

By Bernice Dahn, Vera Mussah And Cameron Nutt, NYT

“In the July/August 2001 issue of the late, great magazine Lingua Franca, James Ryerson published an enthralling article about an anonymous benefactor who was paying professors huge sums of money to review a strange 60-page philosophical manuscript. Ryerson gave Slate permission to republish the story in full.”

By James Ryerson

“Kimi drives for Scuderia Ferrari, a team that was founded in 1929 and is synonymous with the sport. He is 35, a former world champion, and one of the best drivers on the planet. This is the least of his appeal. In a sport as image-conscious and rigidly managed as F1, Kimi is wonderfully, gloriously irreverent.”

By Sam Smith, Wired

“It takes an income of about $106,500 a year to be in the millennial one percent, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. That’s a group of about 720,000 young adults, and they control about double the income of the 14 million millennials in the bottom 20 percent.”

By Rob Wile, Fusion

“Brown’s house is an ordinary ranch in a pleasant, safe neighborhood a few miles from where his son was killed, completely average except for one thing — down in the man cave the walls are decorated with photos of Brown’s dead son, a tapestry of his dead son, a photo of a mural dedicated to his dead son.”

By John S. Richardson, Esquire

Do you like these stories? Subscribe to ReadThisThing and we’ll send you another one each day: readthisthing.com

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 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

“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

“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