“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 Tenure, She Wrote, a grad student explains her decision no longer to write narratives of inspiration and gumption: “A little smarts and hard work and luck can’t make my chronically ill body ‘productive.’”

As Movember draws to a close, here’s Ross Murray’s unexpectedly hilarious post recounting his recent prostate-cancer diagnosis. (While you’re there, do check out Ross’s post-surgery update.)

“Like most ambitious English majors, I hoped I would find work in either teaching or writing after graduation. Long story short, I ended up graduating magna cum laude, won my department’s award, and learned that no one really wants to talk about E.M. Forster while playing beer pong. Go figure.”

Deep in Panama’s rainforests, wildlife blogger David (aka the Incidental Naturalist), fulfills a childhood dream: to see the strawberry poison-dart frog in its natural habitat.

“Being a food writer is the most punk rock thing a person can do, and Jonathan Gold was the most punk rock of us all.” Javier Cabral pays homage to the legendary Los Angeles food writer, who was both his mentor and his role model.

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.

The creator of The Wire and Treme remembers his years of friendship and collaboration with the late Anthony Bourdain.

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.

“I still look towards the horizon. I remain restless. I continue to feel that there is something underneath me that defines me more than what I have done.” The author at Flowers for a Lab Mouse reflects on big writing projects as milestones, but not necessarily things that are life-defining.