Remembering Portable Soup (Atlas Obscura)
by Laura Kiniry
Before there were Campbell’s cans or bouillon cubes, sailors and travelers counted on rubbery hyper-concentrated protein bombs, sometimes known as “pocket soup” or “veal glue.”

An Interracial Utopia in Upstate New York (Black Perspectives)
by Victoria W. Wolcott
In the 1920s and 1930s, an itinerant Black minister named Father Divine founded a network of cooperative businesses and farming communities that spread from Harlem to the rural countryside.

For Human Speech, Less is More (Reuters)
by Will Dunham
The ability to form complex vocalizations is one of the key differences that separates humans from our closest kin. New research suggests that we developed the ability to speak the way we do by losing the parts of our larynx that do other things.

What’s a Tree Worth? (The New Inquiry)
by Malcolm Sanger
From milling crooked branches to planting seedlings for carbon credits, quantifying the value of forests has never been simple. Is there an alternative to viewing trees as commodities?

African Art and the Harlem Renaissance (New Yorker)
by Julian Lucas
The writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance sought inspiration in the art of Africa. But they had to contend with the question of how to understand objects that had been plundered and cut off from their origins.

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