Longreads

Jennifer Bogo journeys to Antarctica to report on what it's like to live and work in the frozen continent:

"Penguins are engineers. Each spring, they meticulously build nests of rock—some comically high—then take turns lying atop them for weeks. I didn't fully appreciate this until I stepped out of a zodiac onto Torgersen Island with the Birders—the only group that never changes its name. The three Birders weave among colonies of Adélie penguins, careful to steer clear of the occasional elephant seal.

"Unlike the other scientists, the Birders work outside Palmer's main lab building in a faded red tent stuffed with Clif Bars and yellow weatherproof notebooks. When they arrive at study sites, on islands near Anvers, they strip off their orange Mustang suits to reveal head-to-toe khaki. After stripping off my own Mustang suit to reveal more neon orange, I learn why: Khaki doesn't scare the birds. "

Davyd Betchkal, sound catcher, in Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska. Setting off in the predawn gloaming of central Alaska, we were the sounds of swishing snow pants, crunching boots…

It was dark when Jesper Olsen fell. Dark and cold. In wintertime in northern Greenland there's not so much as a single ray of sunlight for more than three months. The average temperature is 25°…

Stacy Brown-Philpot, 36 •1997 First job: PricewaterhouseCoopers •1999 Second job: Goldman Sachs •2000 Enters Stanford MBA program; offers finance skills to software startups to learn…

Preamble: A medical examiner is a medical doctor specializing in forensic pathology. They attend medical school like other physicians except their residency is guided by other forensic pathologists.…

James Campbell “ Gee I’m afraid I wont be good for anything after this war!”, Ernest Hemingway wrote to his parents in September 1918. He was recuperating at an Alpine hotel on…

On February 23rd, a North Korean girl just shy of her seventeenth birthday walked across the frozen Tumen River into China, becoming at once a runaway and a refugee. Song-hee (as she asked to be called) is a small, moonfaced girl with a faint constellation of acne trailing across her broad forehead. She came from Musan, an iron-mining city, where she had been in her junior year of high school. Her favorite subject was math. After graduation, she intended to go to a teachers’ college in the nearby city of Hoeryong. “I’m not the best in my class, but I have passion,’’ she told me. Although education in North Korea is nominally free, students buy their own lunches and books and are expected to provide monetary gifts for their teachers, who are so poorly paid that they cannot survive without the extra income...

The story of the Occupy Wall Street Archive starts with Jeremy Bold, so we might as well too. When Hollywood decides to cash in and make its OWS movie, central casting could do worse than work off a…

Sometimes a story or idea goes viral because it's too big to be ignored. But more often it's because a single human being passes it along to an audience that's either massive, highly influential, or…