Cheri Lucas Rowlands

1 day ago | longreads.com | Cheri Lucas Rowlands

In 2025, an unusually high number of whales have washed up dead along the shores of the greater San Francisco Bay Area region—nine gray whales in just the past two weeks. The images are haunting: massive, graceful creatures decomposing on the sand. But Omnia Saed’s short yet poignant Atmos essay, accompanied by stunning photographs by Lena C. Emery, offers a kind of solace. Saed reframes the death of a whale not as an end, but as a beginning—and a boon to the deep sea.

3 days ago | longreads.com | Cheri Lucas Rowlands

For Phoenix New Times, Stephen Lemons unravels an intriguing true-crime mystery. Nineteen years ago, 46-year-old Keith King vanished from the small town of Seligman, Arizona. According to one account, he took off for a hike on May 7, 2006—and was never seen again. “It was as if he’d been beamed up by one of the extraterrestrials he believed in and sometimes believed himself to be.

4 days ago | longreads.com | Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Denver decriminalized psychedelic mushrooms in 2019, making it the first city in the US to ease restrictions on psilocybin. For 5280, Robert Sanchez reports on the latest developments in Colorado’s psilocybin movement, highlighting a team of University of Colorado Denver scientists leading one of the nation’s largest studies into the drug’s therapeutic and palliative potential. As Sanchez delved into the reporting, he found himself growing increasingly curious about the benefits of mushrooms.

1 week ago | longreads.com | Cheri Lucas Rowlands

“Video makes it easy to be completely honest and selective, all at the same time,” writes Kristin Winet in Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature. Winet’s thoughtful essay, part of Panorama’s issue 14 on survival, explores video as an intimate medium to document family memories; the ephemerality of daily life; and the inevitable process of forgetting. The loss, I know, sounds devastating.

1 week ago | longreads.com | Cheri Lucas Rowlands

“For most of my lifetime, Flushing was the humble immigrant enclave that could,” writes urban planner Jefferson Mao in Urban Omnibus, the publication of the Architectural League of New York. In his reflective essay, Mao examines the evolving culture and identity of Flushing, Queens, over the last few decades. A Flushing native, Mao describes the neighborhood as a dynamic, fluid in-between space for Chinese Americans.