Good Will Hunting in reverse: the real-life story of Peter Putnam, promising physicist turned janitor.
HT @cdarwin
https://nautil.us/finding-peter-putnam-1218035/
#PeterPutnam #GoodWillHunting #NautilusMagazine #AmandaGefter #TheoreticalNeuroscience #ScienceMastodon #ScienceStories #JohnArchibaldWheeler #GayHistory #NeuralModels #LongReads #PrincetonUniversity #RobertFuller #HistoryOfPhysics #HistoryOfScience
In this week's Top 5:
—Documenting Israel
—Detective Google
—Parade pondering
—Thoughtful foraging
—Bowling forward
"The 'Western world' is not the culmination of a 10,000-year-long march but an anomaly in a 300,000-year-long history of Homo sapiens’ cultural adaptability."
Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias for @SAPIENS_org: https://www.sapiens.org/biology/foragers-seasonality-social-change-flexibility-societies/
#Longreads #History #Society #Humanity #Civilization #Foragers
"As a writer, I may not want to see my text refracted in this way. But the power of refraction won’t be mine to control; it will lay with readers and their A.I.s."
Joshua Rothman for The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/whats-happening-to-reading
“Do proprietors want to run a center for serious bowlers? Or do they want a recreation center with rock-climbing walls and minigolf, blacklight bowling, and ‘family fun’?” Dave Denison on the state of #bowling for The Baffler #longreads https://thebaffler.com/salvos/changing-lanes-denison?src=longreads
I wrote something out of years of frustration, most of it towards my parents - everything culminating to the current situation.
#Blog #IAmWriting #LongReads
(it's pretty long, and I tried to not add too many details to begin with)
It's For Your Future
"Five of those IP addresses were in Colorado, and three of them had searched for the Truckee Street house multiple times, including for details of its interior."
Raksha Vasudevan for WIRED: https://www.wired.com/story/find-my-iphone-arson-case
#Longreads #Colorado #Arson #Fire #TrueCrime #Internet #Google #Privacy #Surveillance #Technology #Investigation
"A poker player might need to study eight other people at their table. A mheibes captain takes stock of perhaps 45 distinct opponents—or, really, 90 different fists." Jason Anthony for The Atlantic #longreads #games #iraq https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/07/mheibes-iraq-game/682901/?src=longreads
"'What does a human slowly going insane look like to a corporation?' Mr. Yudkowsky asked in an interview. 'It looks like an additional monthly user.'"
Kashmir Hill for The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/technology/chatgpt-ai-chatbots-conspiracies.html
#Longreads #ArtificialIntelligence #ChatGPT #Technology #ChatBot #MentalHealth
"Karoni left her father’s funeral still asking where he was. It was a question she’d dedicate her life to answering."
Josh Alvarez for Texas Monthly: https://www.texasmonthly.com/interactive/final-flight-captain-forrester/
#Longreads #War #VietnamWar #Marines #History #Military #MIA #Texas #Missing
"His circle grew smaller and, to people more accustomed to a traditional Defense Department, stranger."
Kerry Howley for New York magazine: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/defense-secretary-pete-hegseth-pentagon-leaks-signalgate-trump.html
#Longreads #MAGA #NewYork #Pentagon #Politics #Trump #Signalgate #PeteHegseth
The first trial of its kind: A Russian soldier takes the stand for an execution
New on Longreads: An excerpt from THE ENDURING WILD, Josh Jackson's forthcoming book on California's BLM lands—millions of forgotten "leftover" acres of public wilderness. Out on June 24 from Heyday Books 📚
#Longreads #Books #BLM #California #Travel #RoadTrip #Nature #Outdoors #Wilderness
When Therapy Didn’t Work, I Turned to an Illegal Drug
“Attempting to reconstruct the history of early humanity from the available evidence is, it has been said, akin to trying to divine the plot of War and Peace from just 13 of its pages, picked at random.”
👀 On our radar: A vicious dispute raging over fossils of human ancestors // Scott Sayare, The Guardian
"It was only at the burial that I was told how much I had – and there is no better term for this – smashed it." —Alex Taylor for The Fence Magazine
https://www.the-fence.com/i-write-eulogies-not-tragedies/?src=longreads
In this week's #longreads Top 5:
• A father, a son, a tragedy (The Guardian)
• The cost of capital punishment (The Atlantic)
• Criminal justice, unjustly (CalMatters)
• Gaming without sight (Wired)
• An unvarnished icon (The Yale Review)
Learn why our editors have recommended these pieces and find out which story our audience loved most.
https://longreads.com/2025/06/13/longreads-top-567/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social
"We want time to be gentle, but not to stop."
A pick from the Nautilus archives, from David Shultz: https://nautil.us/the-gravekeepers-paradox-235340/
#Longreads #Death #Cemetery #Cemeteries #Burial #Tombstone #Stone #Decay #Ruins
"It’s not that Max is a slow learner: it’s that he has so much more to learn. Where other kids seek a driving licence, he is tasked with the invention of the internal combustion engine." —Archie Bland for The Guardian
#parents #disability #disabled #fatherhood #writing #nonfiction #longreads
"It turns out almost everybody has an opinion on Wilson’s supposed genius, or on Pet Sounds as evidence of it, or both."
Revisit this #longreads reading list on #BrianWilson, by Cecilia Gigliotti: https://longreads.com/2022/03/03/let-go-of-your-ego-a-reading-list-on-brian-wilson-and-pet-sounds/?utm_source=bluesky&utm_medium=social
