Another roundup of great reads to keep you captivated for hours

Urban renewal, city planning, cats, and cadavers.

Volcanoes, power grids, hurricanes and radioactivity.

Corn, olive oil, ghost stories and stolen baby photos.

This new list of great writing for you to check out has all of the above, and much more. And, if you're like me, everything you read will open a door to something else you want to check out or learn more about. It's an endless cycle.

So tell me what you like, and if you have any suggestions, drop me a line on Twitter, @Papergreat.

CURRENT EVENTS

• The New York Times: "How Grid Efficiency Went South" by Matthew L. Wald
• The Atlantic: "The Amish Farmers Reinventing Organic Agriculture: By studying the immune systems of plants, they've developed a technique that eliminates the need for chemicals" by Roc Morin
• SB Nation: "Last Night's [Oakland A's] Loss Explained By Time Travel" by baseballgirl (who is too entertaining of a writer not to use her real name)
• Fast Company: "This is not a startup story: When you start a small business, it's hard to know what success — or failure — looks like" by Emily Gould
• Keystone Crossroads: "An artist battles blight with a coat of gold paint" by Irina Zhorov
• National Geographic: "The Nuclear Tourist: An unforeseen legacy of the Chernobyl meltdown" by George Johnson (Related recent Papergreat post: "Documenting Chernobyl and the early rumbles of Russia-Ukraine war")
  
• Catster: "We Visit the Catboat, a Floating Cat Sanctuary in Amsterdam" by Kristan Lawson

HISTORY

• Wired: "Uncovering Hidden Text on a 500-Year-Old Map That Guided Columbus" by Greg Miller
• The Last Word On Nothing: "Guest Post: Bárðarbunga and the Winters of Winds, of the Sword, of the World" by Alexandra Witze
• New England Historical Society: "The Legend of Faneuil Hall’s Golden Grasshopper Weathervane"
• LancasterOnline.com: "Keeping time: Town clocks have a civic function that exceeds mere time-keeping" by Tom Knapp
• The Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang: "The freak hurricane of 1821 and why it should worry every Mid-Atlantic and Northeast coastal resident" by Jason Samenow

BOOKS & WRITING

• Salon: "The bible of the modern American city: Why 'The Power Broker' is still one of our most important books" by Henry Grabar
• Strange Maps: "Licence to Map: the Other James Bond" by Frank Jacobs
• Citylab: "Building 'Imaginary Cities': An upcoming book shows that the architecture of fantasy isn't so far from reality" by Tanvi Misra
• My Inside Voices: "For the love of a good chapter book" by Susan Jennings
• Odd Things I've Seen: "A Book and a Burial Site: The Grave of John Bellairs" by J.W. Ocker
• Litro Magazine: "Five Ghost Stories that Scared M. R. James" by 999Bagpuss and Emily Cleaver
• The New York Times: "To Lure Young Readers, Nonfiction Writers Sanitize and Simplify" by Alexandra Alter
• It'll All Work Out: "Do Your Characters Reveal Your Race? A White Author’s Push for Self-Examination" by Janet Rundquist

FOOD

• Grub Street: "The Cult of the Macro Plate: How This Healthy Dish Became a New York Staple" by Sierra Tishgart
• Marketplace: "A hard look at corn economics — and world hunger" by Dan Weissmann
• The New York Times: "In Umbria, an Italian Olive Oil Worth the Accolades" by Elaine Sciolino

ENTERTAINMENT

• io9: "More Weird Facts You Probably Didn't Know About The Original Star Trek" by Charlie Jane Anders
• Splitsider: "Inside the Confusing Origins of David Letterman's Top Ten List" by Brian Abrams
• Rolling Stone: "20 Insanely Great Genesis Songs Only Hardcore Fans Know" by Ryan Reed (Note: As a Genesis fan, I appreciated this article. But the headline is a little overblown. I would not call most of these songs "insanely great," though some of them are certainly very good and others are extremely underrated. Also as a side note, newer readers of this blog might not know that its name, Papergreat, has its origins in a Genesis song.)
• The Atlantic: "Roger Ebert's Wikipedia [Citation Needed]: The late film critic was a fan of the online encyclopedia, allegedly adding notes where he saw fit" by Shirley Li

COMPUTERS & TECHNOLOGY

• Unschool Rules: "Why video games are vital to education" by Joan Otto
• Fast Company: "The creepiest new corner of Instagram: Role-playing with Stolen Baby Photos" by Blake Miller
• Wired: "The Epic Effort to Bring a Groundbreaking Online RPG Back to Life" by Bo Moore
• NPR's All Tech Considered: "The Forgotten Female Programmers Who Created Modern Tech" by Laura Sydell

MISCELLANEOUS

• The Atlantic: "The Practical Nobility of Donating Your Body to Science" by Caitlin Doughty
• Collectors Weekly: "These People Love to Collect Radioactive Glass. Are They Nuts?" by Ben Marks
• NPR: "2 Ways To Think About Nothing, One Mo' Time" by Robert Krulwich (a fascinating blog post concerning nothingness, the universe, Robert Rauschenberg, and Willem de Kooning)

***And finally, to blow your minds a little bit...

• Huffington Post Science: "Is Life an Illusion?" by Seth Shostak
  
  An excerpt from Shostak's piece:
  

  "Taking this to its seemingly logical conclusion, a future historian (or curious teenager) wielding programming skills and access to a honking big computer could construct SimEarth on steroids. They could, for example, run a simulation of 15th century European society to see what it was like during the era of the Black Plague: a so-called ancestor simulation. Unlike Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, the people in the simulation wouldn't know that their lives were merely code running in a machine."