At Contingent Magazine, Edward Guimont dives deep into the 19th century, and tells the story of the strange European quest to find living dinosaurs in Africa.

Iman Sultan explores the rich storytelling traditions that gave the world Aladdin — but that have been all but erased in the blockbuster Disney versions.

With the final episode in the Star Wars saga just around the corner, writer Lucy Blue, a lifelong super-fan, reflects on the movies’ darker, more morally ambiguous tone, and the way the series has evolved since her ’70s childhood.

“The old have seized the right to feel sure of themselves, content with their life, and at peace with the fact that they just listened to an entire audiobook on shuffle and were no more confused than if they had listened to the chapters in order.”

Celebrate the pop icon’s 60th birthday by diving into the rich archives of all about Madonna, where you’ll find news, interviews, magazine stories, and other materials going back decades. 

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.

“A simple question, posed at eight o’clock on a Saturday night. I got 5,000 comments back.” At the Village Voice, Mikel Jollett writes on music’s power to evoke memory and a sense of loss.

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.

Silas House remembers Tom Petty: “We embraced strangers and threw our heads back and sang. This was a kind of church, too, I thought. A room full of love in a way I’d never experienced before.”

From the archives of J. S. Graboyes’ Duck Pie blog, a look into the origins of an unnecessary-yet-fascinating 20th-century invention.

“The summertime world is languid. It is the snick-snick-snick of sprinklers. It is Perry Ferrell crooning ‘Tag. You are the one.’” Jen writes a thank you note to a pivotal album for her 13-year-old self.

David Deitrick remembers being care-free: “No sputtering four-stroke internal combustion engines — just the thrum of the kite string and slow dance that comes from manipulating the string to gain altitude or change direction.”

The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band just turned fifty — so super-fan Chris Shaw decided to trace the source photo of each person featured on the album’s iconic cover.