Fastest rising
Momentum first — what is accelerating, then what readers are engaging with now. Recomputed on a schedule, never live.
31
Twenty Minutes, Initialled by a Parent, Due Friday
The form went home every Monday for eleven years: five rows, a column for the title, a column for the minutes, a column for a parent's initials. Twenty minutes a night. Due Friday. It was a school …
32
A Recording from 1987 Is Now Telling a Living Singer He Is Wrong
In a room in Dharamsala there is a shelf of cassette copies, digitised twice since, of performances recorded between 1984 and 1991 by a collecting project that was one of the more admirable things …
33
The Previous Reader Wrote No She Wouldn't in the Margin
I buy my copies secondhand, and not for the reason people assume, which is money; the reason is that a used book arrives with an argument already in progress. The copy of Middlemarch on my desk cos…
34
The Case Has Been in Court Since 1985 and the Land Is Being Used
The suit was filed in 1985 over four acres and a house near Karad, between two branches of a family that had until then been one. My grandfather was a defendant. My father inherited the position on…
35
Nobody in the Waiting Room Is Reading the Poster
The poster has been on the wall opposite the check-in desk in our Erie County clinic for three years. It explains, in two languages and a font somebody chose carefully, how to appeal a denied claim…
36
I Tried to Join the Two Databases Myself and Got Two Thirds of the Way
Permitted wetland losses in this state are recorded in one system, by permit number, with an acreage. Compensatory wetlands — the ones created or restored to offset those losses — are recorded in a…
37
We Are Spending Anonymity on Things Nobody Would Be Punished For
Over one week in February I went through the front pages of four English dailies and the political pages of two Hindi ones, and counted every attribution to an unnamed source. There were sixty-one.…
38
He Built the Best Version of Her Argument and She Said That's Not Why
A man in my Thursday group at the county library once spent eleven minutes constructing the strongest possible case for a position he does not hold. It was a good case. It was better organised than…
39
Twenty-Two Vendors, Eighteen Weeks, and Four Percent of the Farm's Income
Our market runs Saturdays from May to September in the parking lot behind the Methodist church, twenty-two vendors in a good week. I have had a table there for nine years. It is the best morning of…
40
The Sensor Works and the Siren Is Two Kilometres From the Houses
The lake sits at about forty-seven hundred metres behind a moraine dam, and the monitoring installation on it is good. Water level, seismic, a camera, telemetry over satellite because there is no o…