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IT’S A DAY of rest, and you may be in the mood for a quiet corner and a comfy chair.
We’ve hand-picked some of the week’s best reads for you to savour.
Meet the first dire wolves to exist in over 10,000 years https://t.co/PiXmBEGrk6 pic.twitter.com/NJl20cxp80
— TIME (@TIME) April 7, 2025
Not a single dire wolf has been seen on Earth in over 10,000 years, when the species went extinct. But a Dallas-based biotech company has claimed to have used both cloning and gene-editing to birth three dire wolf pups.
Experts have disputed that the pups are actually dire wolves. But what could this development mean for other endangered species?
(TIME, approx 23 mins reading time)
Relying on deft genetic engineering and ancient, preserved DNA, Colossal scientists deciphered the dire wolf genome, rewrote the genetic code of the common gray wolf to match it, and, using domestic dogs as surrogate mothers, brought Romulus, Remus, and their sister, 2-month-old Khaleesi, into the world during three separate births last fall and this winter—effectively for the first time de-extincting a line of beasts whose live gene pool long ago vanished. TIME met the males (Khaleesi was not present due to her young age) at a fenced field in a U.S. wildlife facility on March 24, on the condition that their location remain a secret to protect the animals from prying eyes.
Do you believe in luck? One philosopher who studied it didn’t believe that ‘unluckiness’ was something people had. Then he met his wife – who was comically unlucky. In this enjoyable piece, Eric Boorman explores the nature of luck through their story.
(New York Magazine, approx 35 mins reading time)
There’s something about luck that inspires skepticism or rejoinder. Partially, it’s a question of terms. It’s hard to agree what exactly we’re talking about. The word is slippery, a kind of linguistic Jell-O. The critiques come from left and right, from those who see luck as a mask for privilege and those who see it as an offense to self-made men. Voltaire, with the confidence of the encyclopedist, once declared that one can locate a cause for everything and thus the word made no sense. Others dismiss it as mere statistics, still others as simply a term the godless use for God. It can call to mind an austere medieval manuscript, two-faced Fortuna, one side beaming, the other weeping, ordinary humans clinging to her fickle wheel. But we can’t quite quit it, either. It’s something you might say you don’t believe in but continuously invoke. We’re up all night to get it, are warned not to push it, are sometimes down on it. It haunts our pop songs and expressions, but it isn’t just some rhetorical holdover, like the bony stub of an ancestral tail. This organ is still in active use.
More than 50 years ago, Peter Herrmann’s father recruited him into Russia’s KGB. In this fascinating article, he tells his story publicly for the first time.
(The Guardian, approx 28 mins reading time)
Rudi explained to Peter that what he was about to tell him had to stay secret. He could not discuss it with his friends, and certainly not with Michael, his younger brother. Peter nodded, and Rudi began: “I am not who you think I am. I am not a German, and I’m not called Rudi. I am a Czech man named Dalibor Valoušek, and I work for the Soviet Union, for the KGB.” His mission as a spy was to work to bring about world peace, he said. Two thoughts coursed through Peter’s mind. For years, he had felt unable to relate to the world and the people in it. Part of that, he was sure, was because he had no family beyond his parents and brother. As his father told him about grandparents, uncles and cousins behind the iron curtain, he wondered whether everything would now change.
At the same time, his father’s admission was viscerally shocking. The Russians! The KGB! The thoughts hit him like lightning bolts. Peter had, with the discreet curation of his father, witnessed enough inequality and unfairness in American life to know it wasn’t the paradise that some made it out to be. He had read plenty about Watergate and Vietnam. Even so, he was certain that the Russians were the bad guys. But then, his dad wasn’t a bad guy, and his dad was working for the Russians. So perhaps they were not so bad after all? “Does Mother know?” he asked quietly. “She also is an agent of the KGB,” Rudi told his son.
Meet the Dublin company that’s taking on the big tech giants when it comes to drone deliveries.
(The Guardian, approx 5 mins reading time)
On Manna’s app the Guardian orders two coffees to be delivered to a borrowed house. A speck on the horizon gradually resolves itself into a quadcopter as it skims over the Dublin suburban skyline. It approaches the garden, hovers momentarily, and then drops the paper bag on a biodegradable string. The drone flies off, leaving two warm, unspilled coffees. The coffees arrived 16 minutes after we put in the order on the app, including time for preparation. That compares with preparation time plus a minimum of 11 minutes for someone delivering the same on an e-bike. Crucially though, the drones do not need to lug around a human, meaning they use less energy, Healy says. Each aircraft does about 80 deliveries a day, he says – well over double what a delivery driver or rider would generally do. On top of that, a drone “pilot” is able to oversee up to 20 aircraft at once, Healy adds.
After Emily Polk’s daughter died, she found solace in the company of bees. In this piece, she writes about what they can teach us about loss.
(Emergence Magazine, approx 21 mins reading time)
Humans and bees have been in close relationship for thousands of years. The Egyptians were the first to practice organized beekeeping beginning in 3100 BC, taking inspiration from their sun god Re, who was believed to have cried tears that turned into honeybees when they touched the ground, making the bee sacred. In tribes across the African continent, bees were thought to bring messages from ancestors, while in many countries in Europe, the presence of a bee after a death was a sign that the bees were helping carry messages to the world of the dead. From this belief came the practice of “telling the bees,” which most likely originated in Celtic mythology more than six hundred years ago. Although traditions varied, “telling the bees” always involved notifying the insects of a death in the family. Beekeepers draped each hive with black cloth, visiting each one individually to relay the news.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s incredibly moving essay about the Holocaust and her friend’s father, who survived it, is a must read.
(The New York Times, approx 45 mins reading time)
I can’t say what my precise breaking point was, vis-à-vis the Holocaust, but here’s a story I think about from that time: I went to see “Schindler’s List” on its opening weekend at a theater in Tel Aviv, near where I was spending my gap year. Afterward, I overheard some tattooed Holocaust survivors casually compare the conditions conveyed in the movies with the conditions they remembered. (“They weren’t skinny enough,” one said.) And there was something about that moment, its excruciating discomfort, following three hours and 15 minutes of horror-enrichment, that I began to wonder: What am I doing here? Don’t I know enough about this? Doesn’t further engagement with the Holocaust threaten to deform me? Aren’t I deformed enough by it already? What sort of inertia of inevitability brought me along to “Schindler’s List”? Was this what counted for escape velocity, crossing oceans to get away from Brooklyn, only to end up right where my mother wanted me to be, which was a student at an Israeli university using my recreation time to watch Holocaust movies? I realized, suddenly, that there was no future in which I would know enough Holocaust to move on from it. What the education was asking of me was to not move on. Not ever.
In 2016, four friends from West Bengal tried to climb Mount Everest. They were abandoned near the summit. Three died. It took more than a year to bring them all home. This incredible multimedia piece tells the story of the recovery mission.
(The New York Times, approx 57 mins reading time)
The four Indian climbers, from a vibrant climbing culture in West Bengal, were like so many others attempting Everest. They saw the mountain as the ultimate conquest, a bucket-list item that would bring personal satisfaction and prestige. They dreamed of it for years and made it the focus of their training. As motivation, they surrounded themselves with photographs of the mountain, from their Facebook pages to the walls of their homes. In other ways, however, they were different. Climbing Everest is an expensive endeavor, something to be both bought and earned. Many climbers are middle-aged Westerners — doctors, lawyers and other professionals — with the kind of wealth that the group from India could not fathom. Some spend $100,000 to ensure the best guides, service and safety. These four climbers measured monthly salaries in the hundreds of dollars. They borrowed money and sold off possessions simply for a chance. They cut costs and corners, because otherwise Everest was completely out of reach.
Note: The Journal generally selects stories that are not paywalled, but some might not be accessible if you have exceeded your free article limit on the site in question.
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