Do you enjoy reading Quality Longform Stories? Us neither. We do, however, enjoy reading stories that may be longer and less perishable than average. It’s not always easy to keep up with those, as everything goes flickering by on the internet. Hmm Daily has some spaces up at the top of our page to keep some of them around longer, but eventually they crowd each other out, and new people still might want to read them, if they could find them.
So here is a collection of feature stories we’ve run on Hmm Daily. Read them at your leisure, and come back now and then to see the new ones we’ve added.
Yearning for the Gulag
Ben Dalton writes his own introduction for Jordan Peterson’s introduction for Aleksanr Solzhenytsin’s Gulag Archipelago, about how Western readers use and misuse the lessons of Stalin’s prison camps.
If We Listen to Fish, What Will They Tell Us?
Greg Uyeno explains that what scientists can’t see about fish in the depths of the ocean, they are learning to hear.
Natural Disaster
Dillon Thomas Jones takes his regular Saturday morning walk though Pittsburgh, which now goes past a massacre site.
The Repressive Future Rises in China’s West
JiaJing Liu recalls childhood in a Chinese colonial outpost, and explains how China’s hold on Xinjiang has tightened into a campaign of mass detention and ethnic cleansing.
These Are the Bad Times
Tom Scocca encourages everyone to stop wondering how bad things might get and start reckoning with how bad things already are.
Your Real Biological Clock Is You’re Going to Die
Tom Scocca asks how much control we really have, and what we lose, as we go about trying to plan our lives.
I Wanted to Be Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
Joe MacLeod, who is currently the creative director here at Hmm Daily, was once an Underemployed American. He spent his time scratching for cash and auditioning for the television game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Here is his story.
Man-Writer Against Nature
McMansion Hell‘s Kate Wagner writes about the New Jersey Turnpike and the disastrous indifference of the postmodern male writer’s gaze.
John Urschel Goes Pro
Jordan Ellenberg talked to former NFL player John Urschel, one mathematician to another, about easy it is to miss the chance to do what you most want to do.
What I Know About My Sexual Assault
Lacey Donohue challenges the ways people challenge the stories of how sexual assault happens.
Black Surreal in the Hour of Chaos
Evan Narcisse follows the mind-roasting Boots Reilly film Sorry to Bother You back into a greater pop-cultural tradition of black absurdity.
The Subway Makes a Stop at Ground Zero
Tom Scocca and Mack Scocca-Ho venture to the Cortlandt Street subway station, open for the first time since September 11, 2001.