Musings at Richly Evocative on the Wandle in London: “Walking next to a river, perhaps especially an urban survivor like the Wandle, is the chance to connect with something beyond ourselves. Where the river goes and how it turns, or loops back on itself, meanders and twists, is often nothing to do with us humans.”

“Without 24/7 media, without the internet, a fiction like Dylan McKay could overtake a fact like Luke Perry.” 90210 star Luke Perry’s untimely death reminds us that Dylan McKay was one of the last icons of adolescence.

“What I do when I look at Twitter is less akin to reading a book than to the encounter I have with a recipe’s instructions or the fine print of a receipt: I’m taking in information, not enlightenment.” Mairead Small Staid explores the work of Sven Birkerts and reading in our digital age.

In an excerpt from her debut memoir, WordPress.com blogger-turned-author Stephanie Land recalls moving from a homeless shelter to transitional housing with her young daughter.

“I found that when students wrote without their names, much that was awkward, dull, strained, and frankly boring fell away. It was like watching people who thought they couldn’t dance dancing beautifully in the dark.” Stacey D’Erasmo describes the freedom of writing, minus the byline.

At Longreads, Anne Thériault wittily chronicles the early trials and tribulations of Renaissance queen Catherine de’ Medici, from her childhood in war-ravaged Florence to the first few years of her fraught marriage with the heir to the French throne.

Sometimes it takes a touch of darkness (from the “glandular sacs of dead musk deer” to particularly putrid flowers) to create something alluring.

Journalist Iain Akerman follows Mona El Hallak, a Lebanese architect and activist, as she tries to reconstruct facets of the city’s past through the archive of a long-defunct photographer’s studio.

Why do we love (and fear, and kill) polar bears with so much intensity? At Longreads, Michael Engelhard, a wilderness guide and anthropologist, looks into the Arctic predator’s grip on our imagination.

At Undark, Amy Maxmen follows the archaeologists and scientists who are racing to document what’s left of the ancient African civilization of Nubia.

If you love soccer, you probably enjoy a good underdog story. Here’s Uruguay’s: a small country with a rich World Cup legacy, which Candace Rose Rardon lovingly retells in her illustrated essay on Longreads.

At Longreads, Paris-based pastry chef Frances Leech reflects on taste, memory, and literature’s most famous confection: the humble madeleine, immortalized in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.