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MUK ‘N’ HONEY

Things are off to a rocky start as Honey Bunny—who’s made of melting honey—oversleeps, but Muk Muk the moose rouses her by pulling the Emergency Bunny Wake-Up Lever. Conflict arises as the two disagree over which invention to enter in the convention: the Nut-o-Roombots vs. the Fort-a-Potty. Or maybe the Sweet-N-Sour-Smooth-E-Chomp-R? But Honey doesn’t listen […]

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HOW SIMI GOT HER GROOM BACK

Simi and Rupi Naik are estranged sisters, Indian immigrants to the U.S. who find love and salvation through a dramatic sacrifice. Simi has built an enviable life in rural Kentucky, with a nursing career that suits her (even if she has to work three jobs to sustain it) and the love of Prem Gupta, a […]

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CASUALLY YOURS

Raised by her father in Silverpine, Oregon, after her mother moved halfway across the world, Dani’s separation anxiety ran deep long before Parker ghosted her, so when she runs headfirst into him at a bar in New York City, she promptly runs out rather than reopen a door for the former best friend who’d loved […]

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BENEATH

For six years Sasha has lived in Haven, the underground society built to withstand nuclear war. Since the war, since her family’s deaths, since discovering she doesn’t get sick like everyone else does, Sasha’s life has been full of death and overfull with grief. While working in the Ward, Haven’s limited hospital, she stays with […]

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HITCHHIKING TO HINGNING

In the opening story, “Christmas Holiday, 1945,” a veteran returning home to Chicago after Germany’s surrender prepares to meet the wife he hasn’t seen in two years. Upon arriving in America, he visits his sister, Edith, a nun who’s about to embark on a missionary voyage to China. In “The Visit,” a man named Rob […]

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AMERICAN INFIDELITY

In the post–Civil War era, writes law professor Green, a “freethought” movement swept across the United States. It was never quite coherent, with many strains of dissent advocating such causes as sexual liberation and militant atheism. Green’s account opens in 1887 with a New Jersey activist being hauled to court for blasphemy, “one skirmish in […]

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THE FREEDOM MANIFESTO

When she was growing up, writes Machado, Venezuela regularly held elections with peaceful transfers of power and enjoyed a degree of prosperity greater than many of its Latin American neighbors, thanks to abundant oil. That changed when Hugo Chávez came to power in 1999. He “began by focusing on controlling the judicial system,” replacing longtime […]

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TORCHED

It takes time, Barack Obama warned, for a community to recover from disaster, discarding poor prior practices and experimenting with new ones. Vigliotti’s on-the-ground account suggests that at least some of the Los Angeles fire disaster of 2025 was the result of a rush to rebuild in the same old ways and in the same […]

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THE SLEEPLESS APE

Samson, associate professor of anthropology, University of Toronto, and author of Our Tribal Future (2023), explains that sleep alternates between stages of rapid eye movement (REM) and non-REM (NREM). NREM repairs tissues while the body itself (heart rate, breathing, brain activity, muscle tone) slows down. During REM sleep, dreams occur while the body consolidates memory […]

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THE OTHER BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE

Perfect for readers who enjoy a good workplace drama as well as those who love old movies, Bock’s latest is set in the New York offices of a cable network called the Cinema Channel. In the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center, marketing director Amy Greene and her husband, Jack, also a […]