But what do we really mean when we call someone eccentric? The word renders a verdict of harmlessness: A person’s style, conduct, or mannerisms may be memorable, but not concerning. And truthfully, we need people who are a bit of a character (to use an equally common euphemism). Their difference reinforces our sense of stability, their peculiarity a necessary splash of color in a landscape of conformity. We love to hear about them, to speculate why they are as they are — the odder, the better. Whether in documentaries like Grey Gardens or the five stories collected here, well-reported tales of quirkiness always invoke a small thrill, vaulting their subjects out of the realm of local gossip and into a wider imagination.

However, it’s no accident that every entry here concerns individuals who are, to varying degrees, rich or famous. The sad truth is that the lives of the everyday working class are seldom celebrated, and least of all those whose habits and personalities fall outside of the bounds of “normal.” To quote a character in Ellen Raskin’s novel The Westing Game, “the poor are crazy, the rich just eccentric.” Wealth affords many privileges in life, among them the indulgence of oddity, and such indulgence is only magnified in the face of celebrity. Behavior that would be considered problematic becomes acceptable, even admired as a natural by-product of genius.

Check out “Pawns, Puppet Heads, and Paranoia,” Chris Wheatley’s quirky new reading list on eccentrics!

This week, our editors recommend stories about:

• A beloved community photographer.
• An ode to Kraft.
• Rethinking psychedelics’ impact on the planet
• A craftsperson at his peak.
• The unusual toolkit of the humpback whale.

Don’t miss this week’s Top 5!

In late November, I am standing near the front of the church at my fiance’s grandfather’s funeral. I am not feeling great, I would say. Earlier that morning, I woke up a little achy and anxious about the achiness. I am wearing the suit I will get married in and standing next to the person I will marry, and, halfway into service, I kneel down as part of the ceremony, feel something go wonky in my head and my mouth and my body, think nope nope nope, and collapse sideways into the arms of my fiance. I wish I could say I remember something about that infinite blackness of not-being-with-it, that space of the unconscious, but it feels, in the moment, only like giving oneself over without permission, and then waking into a sea of faces. The mass goes on; somewhere to my right the priest still speaks. I say sorry. I say sorry again and again. In this way, I am reminded that this is life, that I am alive. I say sorry and people look at me with worry. I say sorry and people look at me with love.

My wrist is held by my fiance’s aunt, a cardiac nurse. She talks to me, gives me sips of water. I think of the people seeing me and wonder how long it takes for an image of someone to undo itself from your mind. I say sorry to myself because I know I will think about this forever. I say sorry again to anyone who will hear. I say yes to a question asked by a cop who is somehow between the pews, and then to an EMT with red cheeks and a Red Sox hat. I want to get up. I want to undo. I want to be in my own head for a little bit and have the people go away. But more people come. Another EMT, then another. I am embarrassed; I am thinking only of myself. I am walked to the back of the church; I am placed on a stretcher, wheeled into an ambulance. The man inside it calls me buddy. I smile. It feels good to be called buddy. It makes me think that I am a kid, that I could be a little bit of a kid forever. I smile and nod. When they put the IV needle in me, and I feel the rush of something cool injected into my body, I pass out again. They are worried when I awake. The man says buddy but with more urgency. He holds me by the shoulder as I am wheeled into the ER. He says something about my heart, something about a pacemaker. I think okay, okay, remember this — the red brick of the building, the one green leaf amidst the others long since gone to gold, the 10 feet of brushed gray concrete between the ambulance and the electric doors, the bench without a person, the cold air against my wet chest, the person I love holding my jacket.

Check out “Something About the Present,” a triumph of an essay by seven-time contributor Devin Kelly.

In 1917, the year the United States entered World War I, Cook assisted paleontologists from the Denver Museum and the American Museum in digs at fossil beds along Snake Creek, some 20 miles south of his family’s ranch. Whether he picked up the tooth while scouting for those excavations, during one of them, or sometime after, he never said. Broken bits of fossil, turned blue-black by iron phosphate, were common in the region, and had little scientific value compared with the bones of entire herds of pony-size rhinoceroses or the corkscrew-shaped dens of prehistoric beavers. But Cook believed he had found something truly special. Based on his knowledge of fossils, he suspected that the tooth belonged to a primate, and not a mere monkey—an ape perhaps. An even more tantalizing prospect was that the tooth belonged to an early human.

If Cook was right it would be a heady find, as scientists had yet to identify either variety of fossil in America. Meanwhile, paleontologists around the world were eager for evidence of so-called missing links—transitional fossils that could help prove that humans evolved from apes. Men who claimed to have found missing links often became famous.

Cook was correct about one thing: The tooth was important. But it would become part of history in a way he never imagined.

The latest @atavist story, “The Curious Case of Nebraska Man,” concerns a fossil tooth, a splashy debate, and a strange chapter in America’s long history of science denialism. This 1920s battle over science and faith is eerily resonant a century later—read an excerpt here. 

This week, our editors recommend stories about:

• The decimation of a national park.
• The survival of Texas Monthly.
• An enslaved couple’s daring escape.
• Scheduling a death.
• The future of jelly.

All in this week’s Top 5!

I’m trying to cope with my January existential crisis, and the way I cope is to read. Lately, my favorite author is French writer Annie Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel prize in literature. I’d always had a book or two of hers lying around, always meant to read her in earnest, but it took me until this fall to get into her work — and now I’m obsessed. As she explores her memory and its reliability, Ernaux relaxes my melancholy into something closer to curiosity. As Sheila Heti writes in the New York Times: “Most memoirs operate as if the past were right there and can be looked at, like a painting on the wall. But Ms. Ernaux understands that one’s 18-year-old self is a stranger to one’s 70-year-old self.”

In Happening, Ernaux is haunted by an illegal abortion during her youth. She sets out to transcribe “an event that was nothing but time flowing inside and outside of me.” She writes, “I shall try to conjure up each of the sentences engraved in my memory which were either so unbearable or so comforting to me at the time that the mere thought of them today engulfs me in a wave of horror or sweetness.” Ernaux’s works foreground the difficulty of writing about the self, showing memory as just another way to cope with the void: the blank page, the unknown future, the open calendar squares that haunt me. Reading her work exposes the futility of my efforts to force things to mean something just to stave off the blankness of a new year. But there’s a glimpse of hope for me: Ernaux reminds me that sometimes things find their meaning only in hindsight, not in the present. You can relax and return to something later, able to see anew what it was all about.

Check out Bekah Waalkes’ Annie Ernaux inspired reading list!

This week, our editors recommend stories about:

• YouTube pranksters.
• Redemption for two cheaters.
• The world of the nautilus.
• The edge of sleep.
• A big stack of menus.

Check out this week’s Top 5!

Craving a break from nonfiction? Pravesh Bhardwaj read and shared 238 short stories on the #longreads Twitter hashtag in 2022. Here are his favorites.

Keep reading

Two stories tall, 100 times the width of my heart and yours, the giant heart looks alien. It consumes half the room. Its bulbous red self is gripped claw-like by raised blue veins and red arteries. A red aorta emerges from its top. A blue vena cava hugs its right side like the trunk of a ghastly Seussian-blue tree. These vessels ascending from and extending into different parts of the Heart Wing suggest that the entire museum is somehow subsumed by the circulatory system of a giant. The museum says this heart befits someone 220 feet tall.

You can enter the giant heart. You can let proportion shrink you to the size of a blood molecule and traverse the four chambers, through tricuspid, pulmonary, mitral, and aortic valves. That is, you can do so if you aren’t in a wheelchair or don’t need handrails to manage steep steps. And you might do so if you aren’t yet menopausal like one of my museum guests and aren’t sent into raging hot flashes — because the giant heart is warm as blood and stuffy as a concert port-a-potty. Bipedal and of (albeit waning) reproductive years, I round the back of the 28-foot-wide organ, walk along a muddy-pink wall that’s lumpy and gently marbleized and meant, I’m assuming, to evoke the unsettling aliveness of human flesh. I duck beneath a big blue artery. The drumming gets louder.

I have not yet said this: The entire Heart Wing throbs with a nonstop lub-dub, lub-dub. Deep as a bass drum, pulsing about once per second, it’s the constant auditory reminder that the organ in your chest can’t stop, can’t stop, can’t stop. This means that, if you’re like me, the zone under your ribs — just slightly left of your sternum — starts to ache.

If you’ve ever been to The Franklin Institute’s Giant Heart exhibit, our latest feature is a must read. If you haven’t, Heather Lanier’s “The Heart Wing” will transport you there.

This week, our editors recommend stories about:

• LA’s devastating housing crisis.
• Three falls in the alps.
• The memory of geology.
• Critical care reevaluated.
• A complicated father-son dynamic.

Don’t miss our first Top 5 of the new year!