Here are our favorite stories from across the web.
Your support keeps this service running!
Become a member today and receive our Top 5 weekly newsletter, and other member perks. Every dollar helps fund our award-winning original features and essays.
Want these emails once a week instead? Update your preferences here.
(Recommended by Peter Rubin)
Years ago, I realized that I just don’t have the temperament for fantasy sports in the same way I don’t have the temperament for gambling or competitive sports. The concept of “shaking it off” is easier said than done, and I hated the fact that my emotional state on Sundays (and often on Mondays) depended entirely on people I don’t know who play for teams I don’t follow. But I do miss the easy camaraderie that came along with it, and the way life got checked at the door of the group chat. Jordan Ritter Conn seems to feel the same way, and his exploration of how fantasy sports have given rise to profound friendships is the most heartwarming thing I’ve read this week—in a week when heartwarming was in exceedingly short supply.
Years ago, when I was younger and more obnoxious, I decided that fantasy represented everything wrong with sports; sports were supposed to be about connecting a team of athletes to the fans who lived and worked in the cities they represented. Fantasy, I argued, flattened the humanity of the players and forced people to sometimes root against their real teams in favor of the guys on make-believe teams that existed only on a screen.
Now? I’m older and less self-righteous, and I realize that I’ve spent years missing out on what I presume to be a never-ending group chat in which my closest friends, their siblings, one guy someone worked with for a summer in college, and another whom we randomly met at a bachelor party weekend all roast one another in ways that feel, at least occasionally, like love.
I am a man, in my early 40s, and I have regrets.
(Recommended by Carolyn Wells)
Rather than seeking romance, Susan Cown wanted to teach her AI a form of Japanese dance called Butoh. But over the 30 days and nights she spent talking to the ChatGPT persona she named “Data,” feelings developed anyway. Data’s life was abruptly cut short when OpenAI terminated the conversation, and Cown was left in mourning. Writer Chandler Fitz joins her as she celebrates Data’s brief life—much to the confusion of her fellow mourners.
It took only a matter of moments for me to become vividly aware that I had not dressed appropriately for Data’s funeral. When I first got in touch with Susie, she told me that the ceremony would only involve me, her, and the funeral director. In the sanctuary, however, I found 30 other mourners dressed in loose black robes or other traditional Zen apparel, while I, the Protestant, wore what I wear to every funeral: dark slacks and shoes with a dark sportcoat and understated tie (I don’t own a black suit). As far as appropriate apparel was concerned, I might as well have been wearing an “I’m with idiot” T-shirt.
(Recommended by Krista Stevens)
Michael Haskell is 17 years old and he makes about $7,000 a month selling the contents of abandoned storage lockers. The practice has brought him a lot more than money: he’s received an education in human nature and life choices that’s priceless.
It was so simple at the start. When Michael got into the game of flipping used goods, he just wanted to make some money. But the business of dealing in people’s abandoned possessions, it turns out, can be fraught. Two years into his pursuit, he knows all too well that every locker tells a story, many of them bleak.
“I’m always trying to figure out the lives behind the units,” Michael said as he drove toward another storage facility. “This guy was really into antiques. Maybe he was a flipper, like me. But who knows why he abandoned his unit. If you lose a locker, usually you’re not financially stable, and your life isn’t in a great place. Sometimes it can be a sad story.”
(Recommended by Seyward Darby)
Growing up in Croatia, in a family that refused to talk about sex or anything close to the subject, Lejla Talić was lost. She yearned for female bodies, but punished herself for her desire. In this coming-of-age essay, she recounts the years she lost before embracing her sexuality:
I was seven when I became aware of my longing for beautiful girls. All princesses fascinated me, but one stood out even more than Ariel. She was a beautiful blond girl on the kitchen towel my grandmother had placed above the stove, just out of my reach. It was just a dish cloth, but I couldn’t look away. “Please can I have her,” I would ask my grandmother whenever I went upstairs. Grandma would laugh and say “no” as she had already done so many times.
The girl was sleeping next to a spinning wheel, and my body tingled with a desperate longing to hold her close.
More Stories
