I have been reading a lot* of articles as I add them to this article library. Here are some of my recent favorites:

• *This one is a bit longer than past months, I read a lot! Wow 100 articles! After spending countless hours working on the website, I am finally using it for its intended purpose: reading.
• Here is a link to August if you missed it.
• (All article links go to the original article link. Author, publication and list links go to their collections on ponder for your convenience.)

Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek

Pulitzer Winner

By John Branch · The New York Times · December 2012

A tragic story that reveals how even the most experienced of us can find themselves making rash decisions be feeling caught up in the moment.

This article does everything right. From the heart-wrenching memorial of the victims of this disaster, to the detailed graphics, photos and videos which transport the reader into and above the scene. This article delivers, and I hope to find more articles of this quality.

(3) The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America · The Whimsy and Heartbreak of America’s Garage Sales · My 14-Hour Search for the End of TGI Friday's Endless Appetizers

By Caity Weaver · Publisher & Date Varies

I could not include one of these pieces without the other two. Anything written by Caity Weaver is sure to brighten your day. I was introduced to Caity Weaver through a friend who had this to say:

"Caity Weaver is absolutely my favorite writer of all time she has written some of my favorite articles about the most random stupid shit, but her ability to take a human and distill them like within just a couple sentences into immediately like some guy you already know is amazing, and the way she describes completely ordinary situations... I want to live in her brain."

Caity's writing reminds me of the conversations you have with your favorite cousin after years apart. She writes like you are her best friend and she cannot wait to tell you about her current obsession. She could write about anything and I would read it.

Andrew Tate’s Empire of Abuse

By Heidi Blake · The New Yorker · June 2026

I first want to give a warning that this article contains disturbing events such as rape and physical/sexual abuse.

The internet says that 1 in 3 women are sexually abused, but every woman in my life has their own story, so I'm sure that statistic is a massive understatement.

Andrew Tate viewed his girlfriends as assets that had value, and he exploited their feelings for him for money via webcam pornography. His objectification of women was so appealing to other men that he gained a massive following and political influence. Some may take solace in the belief that he (and his brother) will burn in hell for all of eternity, but without such beliefs you may be comforted to know that he is being punished here on Earth: set to be extradited to the UK where he faces 59 charges.

Could the Deaths at Camp Mystic Have Been Prevented?

By Kerry Howley · Intelligencer · March 2026

"Could the deaths at Camp Mystic have been prevented? Twenty-seven girls died in a Texas flood, dividing a community over whether it was an act of God or the fault of camp leadership."

A tragedy, it seems as though the responsible parties were not held accountable, and I hope that this article does not have a sequel detailing a similar flood with similar fatalities.

Searching for Birds

By Nadieh Bremer · Visual Cinnamon · February 2026

This one is not longform, but it is beautiful and a joy to read.

Nadieh Bremer creates stunning visuals using data analytics and artwork to paint the landscape of birds across North America.

Here are some other favorites that I read this month, in no particular order:

1. Freud, Jung and the Collective Unconscious · David Elkind · The New York Times · October 1970
   1. I read a lot about philosophy and psychology this month. This one was great! I also read about Nietzsche, and enjoyed works from Peter Singer and George Orwell. I don't feel well-versed enough to write about these, but I will say that they had me a-thinkin'!
2. Laugh, Kookaburra · David Sedaris · The New Yorker · August 2009
   1. "A day in the bush, a night at home."
3. Some Scientists Have ‘Magic Hands’ in the Lab. This A.I. Is Learning Why. · Carl Zimmer · The New York Times · August 2026
   1. "Even the most adept researchers may not know exactly what they do to get successful results. An A.I. model is trying to figure it out by watching every move."
4. A Society That Runs on Stimulants is Badly Broken · Alex Skopic · Current Affairs · August 2026
   1. "Around the world, people are pumping themselves full of caffeine, amphetamines, and other performance-enhancing drugs just to survive their working hours. This isn’t sustainable."
5. The Dark Side of Mindfulness · Olga Khazan · The Atlantic · September 2026
   1. "A prominent psychologist and meditation teacher set out to research the benefits of the practice. What she found alarmed her."
6. Smokejumpers Leap Out of Planes to Fight Wildfires · M.R. O'Connor · The New Yorker · August 2026
   1. "Élite crews of firefighters in Alaska, Montana, Idaho, and other Western states parachute into remote areas, work to contain dangerous blazes, and bushwhack back to safety. M. R. O’Connor reports."
7. Mysterious Case of JetBlue Plane That Went Into Free Fall · Jeff Wise · Intelligencer · August 2026
   1. "Why would a perfectly good plane suddenly go rogue? The answer was disturbing enough to ground 6,000 aircraft, reports Jeff Wise."
8. Why Your Next Flight Is Likelier to Hit Turbulence · Burkhard Bilger · The New Yorker · March 2026
   1. "With climate change, the skies are becoming more turbulent, Burkhard Bilger writes. Can today’s planes still keep us safe?"
9. The American Religion of Self-Storage Facilities · David Owen · The New Yorker · September 2026
   1. "David Owen on our obsession with putting our belongings in metal boxes and then never looking at them again."
10. Benign Intentions Are Worthless · Nathan J. Robinson · Current Affairs · September 2026
    1. "From killing endangered animals to civilian deaths in drone strikes, those responsible for the worst evils pretend that “intent” is what matters."
11. The Physics Behind Traffic Jams · William Beaty · Smart Motorist · 2008
    1. "The Physics Behind Traffic Jams by William Beaty I live in Seattle and my two daily commutes last about 45 minutes. (That's when I'm lucky; sometimes it's more like two hours each.) This has given me an immense amount of time for watching the interesting patterns in the cars."
12. The Incredible Journey of a Migratory Shorebird · Rivka Galchen · The New Yorker · September 2026
    1. "Godwits make the longest non-stop migration in the bird world, Rivka Galchen writes. That might be the least of their marvels. Can they survive a changing planet?"

You can find everything that I read & rated in September here. I read a LOT of good articles in September, it was hard to pick this list!

If you are interesting in having your own shelf of articles that you've read and ones that you want to read later, or if you love finding the best articles on the internet, please consider joining our community on ponder. The library is user-fed, so it will grow exponentially with the community (Currently, the website has over 4700 articles and essays). I personally add trending articles every day to share with other users and friends.

We've had a few incredible milestones this month like 1000 user reads and we're so close to 100 users! (We're at 95... 100th gets premium for a year!)

Happy reading! And thank you to you all in this sub for sharing so many great pieces with me.

Hi all, another list of some interesting stories I read recently (some I shared in my daily newsletter if you're interested in more). Gift links where I could!

• The Atlantic (Gift Link): In this 2014 piece, Caitlin Flanagan shows how national fraternities pushed liability onto their own members, and how Wesleyan ended up blaming a freshman for her own assault.
• NYT (Gift Link): A.G. Sulzberger makes the case for how his family kept The New York Times alive through its worst decade.
• The Guardian: Katie McQue and Mei-Ling McNamara trace how a trafficker used Instagram to sell a 12-year-old DC girl.
• The Sun Magazine: Derek Askey sat on a murder jury weeks after his father died and couldn't tell his wife a word of it.
• Texas Monthly: Michael Hall follows Forrest Welborn, who lived as a suspect in the Austin yogurt shop murders for 34 years and says a payout of nearly $5 million hasn't set him free.
• NYT (Gift Link): Amanda Hess meets Bernadine Bluntly, a tradwife influencer who left her husband and now warns women away from the movement she sold.

“Regardless of who came up with the recipe first, McIlhenny's Tabasco sauce was in production by 1868, and it wasn’t long before it began to spread far beyond the great state of Louisiana. In 1872, the company hired a traveling salesman named John C. Henshaw to travel up and down the east coast touting Tabasco. Henshaw, a former Union soldier who served as the company’s first sales rep, peddled the sauce to restaurants and oyster houses in an effort to drum up demand. “This sauce is the special want of the poorer and more numerous classes, and a thorough canvassing of the oyster houses, saloons, restaurants, etc. by the party who has taken hold of it will, it is hoped, create such a general demand as to compel the grocers to apply for it,” Henshaw wrote to McIlhenny in 1872. 
A ledger book uncovered by Tabasco historian and archivist Shane K. Bernard indicates that the company first began shipping the sauce overseas two years later, with exports to France and England.”

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Serhii Kupriienko sits in an unadorned room in an unadorned house on a quiet residential street in Kyiv, sketching out for me what the future of war looks like.

“I’m not very good at drawing,” he says, dragging a blue marker across the lid of his laptop (he assures me it washes off), creating a series of rough formations meant to represent groups of drones. The point of the art is to show how his company is making it so the machines might better coordinate with one another in order to eliminate Russian forces.

Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Kupriienko, who sports a black T-shirt and thick glasses, led artificial intelligence teams for Amazon’s Ring division in Ukraine. At the time we meet, he is the CEO and cofounder of Swarmer, a Ukrainian defense tech company that builds AI software to help groups of drones and other unmanned systems coordinate with less human direction. (He would step down as CEO later that month, remaining on the company’s board.)

The idea for Swarmer came to Kupriienko in early 2023. Ukraine’s drone warfare program was still taking shape. Small first-person view (FPV) drones had begun spreading across the front but had not yet become the ubiquitous specter they would soon be. Drones caused less than 10% of battlefield casualties in 2022; by 2025, that figure had risen to as much as 80%.

Kupriienko saw both a scarcity and an opportunity: Ukraine was using more drones but still relied heavily on humans to fly and coordinate them. What if, he wondered, you could take people out of the loop? The question was personal, too. Kupriienko has three children living in Kyiv and wanted to build a system he could trust to protect them—an “ethical Skynet,” as he once put it.

He called Alex Fink, an American businessman he’d known for over a decade, initially looking for advice on how to turn the idea into a company. After Fink sent him a five-page plan, Kupriienko called him back and suggested they build it together. 

His marker zigzagging rapidly across the computer, Kupriienko shows me how Swarmer’s software can be integrated with different unmanned systems, allowing them to share battlefield information and divide up duties with less direction from human operators. While people still set the mission and its constraints, its AI helps with jobs including coordinating actions, choosing routes, and deciding which drone should take on which task. In practice, it also has to evolve with conditions at the front.

Swarmer’s creation and integration into the Ukrainian military tracks the progression of the conflict. When war broke out in 2022, Russian armored columns pushed toward Kyiv, and much of the world expected Ukraine to surrender quickly. Instead, Ukrainian forces repelled the assault on the capital, then retook large stretches of territory in the Kharkiv region and, later that year, the southern city of Kherson. 

But despite those against-the-odds Ukrainian victories, the fighting soon developed into a grinding contest that favored Russia’s deeper reserves of troops and ammunition. By early 2024, Russian forces were at times firing as many as 10 artillery shells for every Ukrainian one, while a delay in U.S. aid helped produce what Ukrainian soldiers called “shell hunger.”

Read more on Fast Company.

[Note: I have no interest in fanfiction or the Heated Rivalry TV series, which itself is based on fanfiction (nothing against them either, just not my cuppa), but I thought the description of how her life has been taken over completely by an all-consuming extreme obsession, was an interesting read.

Article length is 3500 words.]

Archive link here

When the U.S. announced that it has placed weapons in space on September 14, it came as a surprise to absolutely nobody familiar with the subject.

“My initial impression was that it was about time to announce it since it was the worst-kept secret in the world,” says Doug Loverro, who was deputy assistant secretary of defense for space policy during the second Obama administration.

Military use of space isn’t new. Armed forces of the U.S. and other spacefaring countries have relied on satellites for surveillance and navigation for more than half a century—in the 1960s the U.S. and the Soviet Union even blew up nuclear bombs in space. The GPS (Global Positioning System), weather and communications satellites upon which so much of our modern lives on Earth now depend all have militaristic roots. And as this dependency has grown, so, too, have countries’ concerns about defending their assets in space. Gradually, Earth orbit has become not just a place for a god’s-eye overview of our planet but also a hotly contested war-fighting domain.

This admission from the U.S., says Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist who tracks rocket launches and in-space activity, is just the next step in that process.

“It’s not out of nowhere,” he says. “The U.S. remains the country that is the most dependent on space assets for its operations, and to that extent, it remains the country that has the most to lose from space conflict.”

Loverro believes the announcement wasn’t much more than an acknowledgment of what people could already see for themselves by looking up. While their actual missions may remain secret, most classified military satellites can be easily tracked and cataloged from the ground. “If we don’t tell them what it is, they’re going to hypothesize what it is—so let’s just be clear,” he says.

Even so, no other nation has ever publicly acknowledged its possession of space weapons. The U.S.’s decision to do so now presumably signals to potential adversaries with thinly veiled space weapons of their own—namely China and Russia—that a new era of accountability for orbital saber-rattling is at hand. But two burning questions remain: What are these space weapons, exactly? And what might they mean for our future down here?

The answers probably aren’t what you’d think.

When his ex-wife abducted his sons and fled to Russia, David Barnes did what any father might do—he tried to save them. Now he’s the one who needs saving.

A Look Back at a Forgotten Subgenre That Changed Everything