1. Leonardo Da Vinci died 500 years ago, but here’s why we are still awed by his brilliance.
2. The sins of industrial pollution aren’t easily absolved, as we learn from this story about a small Georgian town with an unusually high prevalence of a rare cancer that is killing its citizens. Read on.
3. Call it what you may, and deny it if you must, but our world is going through climate changes. And it is killing a lot of species. We don’t know the second and third order effects of these extinctions, and we should be worried about that. This is another fantastic essay by New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert, one of my favorite writers. On a related note, you can also read about Los Angeles’ unending fire season.
4. Alaska is the Wild West, and in many parts, it is completely lawless — literally! This turns its most vulnerable into victims. This is a devastatingly sad and detailed report from a collaboration between Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica.
5. Where does a whole day’s worth of food come from? The logistics behind it are amazing, actually!
6. Forget about privacy for a moment, let’s talk about the long-term damage social media is doing to our mental health. Just as fast food can propel us to abyss, so does information overload, as Olivia Laing tells in this story.
7. Did you know Conan is on joke-theft trial? I didn’t know that either, and here is all you need to know.

This first appeared on my May 19, 2019, weekly newsletter. If you like to get this delivered to your inbox, just sign-up here, and I will take care of the rest.