Unlocking the Secrets of Paranoid Thinking
Cannabis use can cause a signal miscommunication in the brain, which is similar to what might happen in mental illness.
No One's Watching Week
Welcome to No One’s Watching Week, the time of the year when the readers are away, and your tireless editors have run amok. For this week only, Atlas Obscura, the New Republic, Popular Mechanics, Pacific Standard, the Paris Review, and Mental Floss will be swapping content that is too out there for any other week in 2015.
A Taxonomy of Writers’ Foes
They say that naming your fears makes them less scary. Here's a thorough categorization of universal writerly anxieties that everyone feels always and not just me.
My Big Night Out With the Nightingales of Berlin
Spoiler alert: We laid down some serious tracks.
Paddling Out With a Diaper in Tow
A frustrating, but ultimately fulfilling, father-daughter surf adventure in El Salvador.
Come All Ye Failures
Though we wake in fear of mediocrity, let us cease to be crippled by it.
That Time the Philippines Skipped a Day
And it took decades for the rest of the world to notice.
The Quietly Dangerous Suburban Church
How three architects in the 1950s tried to meld religion, modernism, and suburbia.
My Adventures in Soviet Cuisine
Getting hold of food during the Soviet era required patience, ingenuity, and luck.
In Memoriam: The Great Townes Van Zandt
How the songwriter's classic Pancho & Lefty mirrors his own tragic life.
That Time I Took a 'Baby Deadline' Test
I sought an answer in science, when the real answer was a foregone conclusion.
'Cowboys Don't Have Mommies'
An interview with my mother about the meanest thing I've ever said to her.
'There's Peace of Mind Out Here'
In the small coastal town of Mendocino, California, inmates spend hours picking grapes under the sun—and many welcome the break from jail.
The Radical History of 1960s Adult Coloring Books
These subversive coloring books ridiculed pill-popping executives, hipsters, communist-hunters, and conspiracy theorists.
My Summer at the Junk Food Mill
Working at the cookie factory still stands as the worst job in a long line of worst jobs.
America’s Most Electable Fictional Presidents
Tired of these petty, increasingly irrelevant real-life candidates? Here is a deep and methodical analysis of our fictional presidents, and whether America deserves them.
The Internet Is the Grateful Dead
Being a Deadhead used to mean attending the shows. Increasingly, it means you’re participating in a culture of sharing and foraging that began in the 1960s and anticipated almost everything we now take for granted on the Web.