I Placed my First Wager When I was 10. I’ve Gambled More than $1 Million Since.

Noah Vineberg learned the art of deception early, from his father’s flashy lifestyle and routine philandering. As a teen, Pro-Line sports betting tickets were his gateway drug to a full-on gambling addiction that almost cost him everything.

I spent anywhere from $50 to $150 a day on Pro-Line tickets, using my daily allowance or money I made running the salad bar at the Keg, which paid $13 an hour and up to $300 in tips on a good night. It left me with more than enough cash to support my burgeoning habit. I don’t think my mom ever suspected anything—at least not until later in life. There wasn’t a day that went by where I didn’t place at least one bet. The legal gambling age was 18, but back then, the tellers never asked for ID. If I was lucky, I won once every few weeks. One time, I put down $100 and accurately picked the outcome of all 10 games, which resulted in an $11,000 payout. I was never smart enough to save the money from my wins, though. I usually dumped it right back into more bets.

I loved the waiting that came with gambling: those final, dramatic moments of uncertainty, when a last-minute field goal or three-point shot could alter the result of the game. The feeling of anticipation— that’s where I got the high. And when I had several bets going on at once, it felt like my brain was on fire, the ultimate stimulation. Nothing else mattered in those moments. Even if I lost, I never let on that I cared. That was part of the appeal, too. People never knew if I had $100 or $10,000 in the bank. I felt like I was bulletproof, like no matter how it turned out, everything would be all right.

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Hopeless Romantic, Seeking Treatment

Everyone’s familiar with having a crush. Some, with infatuation. Parasocial attachment? Sure. But then there’s limerence — a newish word coined to capture a diffuse but well-known type of one-sided fixation. The question, as Alexandra Molotkow sets out in this illuminating piece for Pioneer Works’ Broadcast, is whether it should be thought of as a conventional psychological diagnosis.

To some, limerence is romantic; to others, it’s a scourge. For many, it’s both. A recent Cosmopolitan feature described limerence as a self-regenerating obsession that rarely leads to a healthy relationship. The magazine ran a poll alongside the article, asking readers how they felt about “falling in limerence.” Eighty-seven percent picked the answer: “Give me an all-consuming romantic infatuation or don’t waste my time.”

Though it’s almost five decades old, limerence today feels almost excessively timely. It travels well online. Algorithms feed you more of what you already like, simulating obsession, encouraging you to care about people you don’t really know. Social media can intensify a preexisting preoccupation, shoving the person (the LO, limerent object, in the jargon) into your feed, offering opportunities to lurk. But there is help available online, too: spaces for “limerents” to find each other and form community around a shared plight.

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“What Price Was My Father’s Life Worth?”

America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLD) is a right-wing anti-vaccine group that over the course of the pandemic has peddled disinformation and COVID “treatments” that are anything but—ivermectin, for instance, and hydroxychloroquine. Vera Bergengruen of Time has reported extensively on AFLD since 2021. Now some of the loved ones of people who sought medical advice from the group and others like it want accountability:

Jeremy had started following AFLD online after listening to podcasts that promoted conspiracies about COVID-19. At the time, the group was producing slick videos on social media, falsely claiming that U.S. health agencies were withholding life-saving treatments, and that doctors refusing to prescribe them were like “good Germans who allow the Nazis to kill the Jews.” Jeremy, who worked as an industrial sandblaster, became convinced that hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin were the only effective treatments for the virus.

On Aug. 26, 2021, Jeremy paid $90 for a consultation through AFLD’s online telemedicine portal. He was connected to a doctor named Medina Culver, 33, an osteopathic physician and Instagram influencer based in Henderson, Nev. Culver did not see or examine Jeremy. Over the phone, she prescribed him hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 treatment or prevention, according to a receipt reviewed by TIME. Soon after, Jeremy received a prescription for 200mg of hydroxychloroquine in the mail from Ravkoo, a Florida-based pharmacy chain partnered with AFLD. According to his widow’s lawsuit, he took those hydroxychloroquine pills the night he died.

Jeremy’s family is suing both AFLD and Culver in Nevada district court for in excess of $30,000 in damages. The lawsuit, which was filed in February on behalf of his estate and cites TIME’s 2021 investigation, alleges that his death was linked to the falsehoods spread by AFLD as well as the doctor who prescribed it. “They didn’t even examine him. They gave him something that he used as they prescribed, and it killed him,” Jelena Parker-Hatfield says. “How can they not be held accountable for something? How in America can this be a system that works, that everybody is okay with?”

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What It Takes to See 10,000 Bird Species

In this piece, Jessie Williamson joins Peter Kaestner on an epic adventure to South America — all to try and spot some elusive birds. She is quick to realize the lengths that Kaestner will go to reach his target of 10,000 birds, writing that “for one of his top targets, the Ayacucho antpitta, he needed permission to navigate through an unstable area ravaged by Shining Path guerrillas.” Kaestner seems to take that sort of thing in his stride, in a tale that is bird watcher meets Indiana Jones.

In 1986, Kaestner became the first person in the world to see a representative of every bird family in existence, 159 back then. But the birding event that most changed his life was his 1989 discovery of the Cundinamarca antpitta, a species new to science. Kaestner had traveled outside Bogotá, Colombia, for work and was exploring a forested area up a newly constructed road. Suddenly, he heard a call he didn’t recognize.

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Reclaiming a North Carolina Plantation

What should happen to former slave plantations? It goes without saying that they shouldn’t be event spaces for lavish weddings and fraternity fêtes. They can be grounds for teaching the South’s brutal history, certainly. But a non-profit group in central North Carolina believes the land can do even more, and it’s showing how on a plantation once known as Snow Hill:

The property sat in disarray. Massive trees were strewn about like a giant’s abandoned pickup sticks. The only road in and out became a car-stalling mud bath after rain. A two-story stable and other outbuildings stood dangerously dilapidated or encircled by brambles.

Sellars didn’t mind — she was envisioning what the onetime plantation, founded in the late 1700s and operated well into the twentieth century, could be. A former social worker who had headed Durham County’s extension office, Sellars had spent nearly a decade managing programs that helped home gardeners and farmers grow sustainable produce. Now she imagined a farm, where people could raise their own food and she could establish an incubator for new and future farmers through the nonprofit UCAN, short for Urban Community AgriNomics, which the sisters had recently launched to encourage gardening and fight food insecurity. “I was giddy,” Sellars, who is sixty-nine, recalls. “It was gorgeous.”

Patterson — Sellars’s younger sibling by two years — saw something quite different: a nearly insurmountable cleanup job. “I looked at Delphine and said, ‘Have you bumped your head?’” UCAN had less than $300 in the bank. But they agreed on one point: They wanted land. And they’d have to persuade TLC to help them secure it.

Now the sisters are on the cusp of finally fully getting their wish — not just to lease the spread, as they have the past five years, but for their nonprofit to own and manage it, in a deal that could model for the national conservation movement how to easily redistribute land to Black institutions and individuals. In time, the sisters hope this seemingly radical move, which would be one of the nation’s largest transfers of land-conservancy property to an African American–led nonprofit, will spark other such organizations to let go of acreage they’ve stewarded, to boost land access among Black people in a country that’s benefited from their dispossession.

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Encountering the High Arctic

After James Conaway takes a summer trip to the high Arctic on assignment for National Geographic and becomes unable to return to camp, he faces his insignificance as a single, helpless human in the vast wild terrain as he waits for a helicopter to arrive to take him to safety. “I think often of the person dropped off at the headwaters of the Lewis,” he writes. “He is down there yet, still waiting.”

I tell the pilot that if I am not back in camp in two days I will be over on the Lewis River, headed back to camp, and I gesture. The casualness of this request will come back to haunt me, but for now I am walking across what feels like a newly minted, untrod land.

I sleep with my very own glacier that night. Try it sometime if you want to know just how insignificant you can be. Melting throughout day, the ice releases what sounds like barks, then pistol shots. It groans, a sound like no other, and shoots out thick streams of snowmelt that arc high above, luminous in the half-light of a dim reeling sun, before plunging down, down into the dark lake.

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How Tokyo Became an Anti-Car Paradise

Thirty million people commute by train each day in Tokyo, and among wealthy cities, the Japanese capital has the lowest car use in the world. In this excerpt from his book, Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It, Daniel Knowles explains how and why Tokyo was built to be human-centric and relatively car-free, making it an unexpectedly calm major city that’s functional but also pleasant to walk and live in.

And even if you are willing to pay all of the taxes, you cannot simply go and buy a car in the way that you might in most countries. To be allowed to purchase a car, you have to be able to prove that you have somewhere to park it. This approval is issued by the local police, and is known as a shakoshomeisho, or “garage certificate.” Without one, you cannot buy a car. This helps to explain why the Japanese buy so many tiny cars, like the so-called Kei cars. It means they can have smaller garages. Even if the law didn’t exist though, owning a car in Japan without having a dedicated parking space for it would be a nightmare. Under a nationwide law passed in 1957, overnight street parking of any sort is completely illegal. So if you were to somehow buy a car with no place to store it, you could not simply park it on the street, because it would get towed the next morning, and you would get fined 200,000 yen (around $1,700). In fact, most street parking of any sort is illegal. There are a few exceptions, but more than 95 percent of Japanese streets have no street parking at all, even during the day.

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