All the threads | ROROTOKO

In a nutshell

September 25, 2026

A Is for Amoeba: The Story of Life in a Single Cell

Nicholas P. Money

A biography of the blob everyone can draw: a wavy outline with a spot in the middle, reputed to be biology's simpleton, in fact carrying the largest genome of any organism and solving problems no software has matched. The difficulty is imaginative — we can picture a hawk taking a songbird, but not an amoeba chasing bacteria. The human cast is its own reward: a suspected murderer, a self-infecting German scientist, and the inventor of the orgasmatron.

The wide angle

September 24, 2026

The Language of Bees

James C. Nieh

Great discoveries often begin when what you observe refuses to match what you expected. This is the winding, failure-strewn path — feeders ignored, experiments raided by monkeys, storms and turf wars with aggressive bees — that turned a stray “beep” in a hive into a career studying how ecology shapes information itself.

A close-up

September 23, 2026

The Mess That Made Them: How History's Greatest Artists Failed, Floundered, and Made Something Brilliant Anyway

Ryan T. Pozzi

In 1897 a savage reception drove a twenty-four-year-old composer to stop writing for years—one critic said his symphony belonged to the inhabitants of hell. His slow, doubt-ridden return, and his later reinvention in exile, become a case study in what persistence actually looks like when failure changes the terms of the work.

A close-up

September 22, 2026

Vonnegut's War: The Making of Slaughterhouse-Five

Susan E. Farrell

One autumn night in 1961, a New Hampshire couple saw something hovering over the road—and one of its occupants reminded them of a Nazi officer. That widely publicized abduction story handed a struggling novelist the missing frame for his Dresden book, and turned a war memoir into a meditation on trauma, free will, and time itself.

In a nutshell

September 21, 2026

Forgive Us Our Debts: How Black Churches Use Bankruptcy to Survive

Pamela Foohey

Every year, small congregations — most of them Black churches — file to reorganize in bankruptcy court, and they do so at three times the rate you'd expect. Behind the fight to keep a spiritual home lies a quieter story about who gets offered fair credit and who doesn't. A story of triumph, and of skewed lending.

In a nutshell

September 20, 2026

I'm Glad I'm Not Me: Bob Dylan on Film

Ethan Warren

For more than half a century, one folk singer's face has been quietly rewriting the movies it appears in — as actor, documentary subject, music-video fixture, and even unreleased director. This is an argument for taking that filmography seriously, and a corrective to the tidy myths a recent hit biopic spun around the night an icon “went electric.”

In a nutshell

September 19, 2026

The Love of Analog: Meditations on Value

Darren Hudson Hick

Why do inefficient, fragile, expensive things — vinyl, board games, used paperbacks — keep winning us back in an age of frictionless digital everything? A personal, argument-free investigation that trades abstract philosophy for a bottom-up hunt through one collector's own shelves, and lands on three values hiding inside the objects we choose to keep.

A close-up

September 18, 2026

Religion as Make-Believe: A Theory of Belief, Imagination, and Group Identity

Neil Van Leeuwen

A charismatic "prophet" speaks in tongues, overcome by the Holy Spirit—then opens his eyes to check his watch. That small gesture, drawn from an ethnography of Vineyard churches, opens a window onto how the mind runs two maps at once: one tracking the sacred, the other quietly keeping time.

A close-up

September 17, 2026

Untamed Unicorns

Renée M. Jones

The collapse of a $32 billion crypto empire in a matter of days exposed a company with no CFO, no reliable audits, and not a single investor on its board. This close-up shows how a "founder-friendly" financing model and super-voting shares let the people in charge escape accountability — and why the same governance failures keep recurring across today's most celebrated startups.

In a nutshell

September 16, 2026

The Language of Bees

James C. Nieh

Bees don't just tell one another where to go — they also signal where not to go, mark flowers with scent, and even eavesdrop on rivals. This is a tour of communication as evolution actually built it: waggle dances, stop signals, and warnings shaped by predators, competitors, and spies. An invitation to follow very small animals into a world dense with messages we usually miss.

A close-up

September 15, 2026

The Janus Plan: A No-Resolutions Path to Begin Your Year with Intention

Jobert E. Abueva

Opening The Janus Plan at random, Jobert E. Abueva would want a reader to land on Step One: Ponder the Past, and its disarming question—what did this year actually try to teach you? He shares the book's core passage on Janus's two doors, and the "Stitch Notes" and rituals that give a serious practice its lightness and play.

The wide angle

September 15, 2026

The Janus Plan: A No-Resolutions Path to Begin Your Year with Intention

Jobert E. Abueva

Jobert E. Abueva places The Janus Plan at the crossroads of behavior-change psychology, the world's threshold traditions (teshuvah, Japan's Oosoji, Ethiopia's Enkutatash), and his own burnout at the peak of a Fortune 500 career. His insight: burnout was a sequencing problem—charging forward year after year without ever honestly looking back.

In a nutshell

September 15, 2026

The Janus Plan: A No-Resolutions Path to Begin Your Year with Intention

Jobert E. Abueva

Most New Year's resolutions are gone by February—and Jobert E. Abueva argues the problem is the approach, not the goals. The Janus Plan, named for the two-faced Roman god of thresholds, insists you cannot design a meaningful future without first taking an honest look at your past. Built around a six-step framework and the metaphor of weaving, it is a book meant to be read slowly.

A close-up

September 14, 2026

Out of the Ballpark: How to Think About Baseball

David M. Henkin

Was the game really transformed overnight when the data nerds took over, and has money only recently corrupted a once-pristine sport? A closer look at two durable myths, and the long history of numbers, commerce, and complaint that shows how much of "what's ruining the game" has actually been there all along.

A close-up

September 13, 2026

Action in Artwork

Aram Han Sifuentes

Backstrap weaving is one of the earliest forms of weaving on earth, and its traditions — from Maya brocade to Korea's 1,500-year-old mosi cloth — are vanishing fast. After months of learning from the last practitioners, a new project links the two lineages and brings the technique to workshops in Chicago and Utah, because holding on to cultural heritage is activism too.

In a nutshell

September 12, 2026

Soleil Ô

Noah Tsika

A debut feature from 1970 that is a documentary, an essay film, a work of autofiction, live action and animation at once — African, French, both, neither. Out of circulation for decades, it left behind a literature that cannot agree on what year it was made or which country made it. Sorting the record out turns out to matter, because the complications are the point.

The wide angle

September 11, 2026

The Mess That Made Them: How History's Greatest Artists Failed, Floundered, and Made Something Brilliant Anyway

Ryan T. Pozzi

What if the story of great art isn't lonely genius but stubborn, assisted, interrupted persistence? Drawing on his own burnout and return to writing, the author reads famous biographies against the grain—paying attention to the money, luck, help, and course-corrections that usually get tidied out of the myth.

A close-up

September 10, 2026

Sidewalk Nation: The Life and Law of America's Most Overlooked Resource

Michael Pollack

Whose neighborhoods get smooth, walkable pavement—and whose are left to crack and crumble? Drawing on interviews and street-level observation across four states, a look at how sidewalk quality tracks wealth and race, and why the people with the least access to cars and transit depend on it the most.

In a nutshell

September 9, 2026

Agent Nation: How Autonomous AI Is Rewriting the Rules of Society—and What We Can Do About It

Chirag Shah

The public argument about AI has been about what it says. Meanwhile a different class of system has been quietly acting — screening applications, pricing insurance, routing patrol cars, closing claims — at a speed no review process was built to match, and usually without the person affected knowing a decision occurred. The problem isn't capability; it's that when something goes wrong, responsibility scatters and everyone in the chain has a defensible answer except the person harmed.

In a nutshell

September 8, 2026

The Stepford Wives

Paul Moody

A film about women being replaced turns out to have replaced a good many of them behind the camera too — an actress fired after sixty-five scenes were already shot, a costume designer, a casting director, a sound editor, an electronic music pioneer, all written out of the story since. Archival production records show how those swaps happened and who won the fights that caused them. The erasure rhymes uncomfortably with the film's own plot.

A close-up

September 7, 2026

THE AGE OF TOMATO

Georgia Kotretsos

One evening before dinner was served, I placed on each guest's setting a small carton of locally produced tomato paste, accompanied by a pair of scissors. I introduced the project – the notions on seasonality, coming of age, and, of course, tomatoes before we were served and invited everyone to cut a corner and squeeze the tomato paste onto their plates and table—drawing, and playing with their food.

The wide angle

September 6, 2026

Religion as Make-Believe: A Theory of Belief, Imagination, and Group Identity

Neil Van Leeuwen

If belief isn't one thing but two, everything shifts. A look at why our matter-of-fact beliefs update instantly with evidence while our identity-defining ones resist it—and how that same dynamic drives not only religion but political polarization, because, as the argument goes, anything can be sacralized.

The wide angle

September 5, 2026

Vonnegut's War: The Making of Slaughterhouse-Five

Susan E. Farrell

First published in 1969, the novel spoke to a country reckoning with Vietnam—and it speaks just as sharply to 2026, an age of polarization, far-right resurgence, and wars that displace millions. Is a good war possible? Is a just one? A look at why this darkly funny anti-war book still offers a moral vision of kindness and decency amid absurdity.

A close-up

September 4, 2026

To Think Like a Statistician

Bradley Efron

Fifteen hundred stage 1 breast cancer patients, deemed at low risk according to MammaPrint but high risk according to clinical assessment, were divided into two groups: half of them had chemotherapy while the other half followed MammaPrint's advice and went without.

In a nutshell

September 3, 2026

The Mess That Made Them: How History's Greatest Artists Failed, Floundered, and Made Something Brilliant Anyway

Ryan T. Pozzi

We meet great artists backward—through the masterpieces, with the ending already known—so their greatness starts to look inevitable. But nobody lived it that way. A book about the long, uncertain middle of creative lives, and a pointed skepticism toward the comforting idea that failure is secretly good for us.

The wide angle

September 2, 2026

Out of the Ballpark: How to Think About Baseball

David M. Henkin

The specialized lingo makes the sport look like a closed world of arcane obsessives, but it's precisely its sheer visibility that makes it worth thinking about. A historian's account of how following and talking about a game becomes a way into understanding modern life—and why writing about it meant setting aside a lifelong fan's love.

A close-up

September 1, 2026

The Barberini Butchers: Meat, Murder, and Warfare in Early Modern Italy

Bradford A. Bouley

Four butchers executed in front of the Pantheon for turning their neighbors into sausage—a gruesome spectacle that opens onto something much larger. Behind it lies the route live animals took through a half-empty ancient city, and the ecological toll of wringing so much meat from the surrounding land.

A close-up

August 31, 2026

He Has the People: Abraham Lincoln and the Election of 1860

Jonathan Earle

A one-term congressman with a threadbare résumé walks into a convention hall built just for the occasion and walks out the nominee. Step inside the roaring room for the electric moment the tide turned, and the raucous, hoarse-throated celebration that spilled into the streets.

A close-up

August 30, 2026

America's Wrong Turn: US Health Care in the Neoliberal Era

John E. McDonough

In 1970 Milton Friedman told corporate executives their only duty was to shareholders—and set off a shift whose shockwaves still move through American medicine. From an Adam Smith epigraph to the Business Roundtable's flip-flops, a look at how "shareholder value" reshaped what a corporation owes anyone at all.

The wide angle

August 30, 2026

America's Wrong Turn: US Health Care in the Neoliberal Era

John E. McDonough

A question students kept asking—"what happened to U.S. health spending in the early 1980s?"—became a five-and-a-half-year hunt for an answer. The trail runs through Reagan-era deregulation, a political scientist's model of American "regimes," and the realization that the mystery and the medicine both trace back to neoliberalism.

In a nutshell

August 30, 2026

America's Wrong Turn: US Health Care in the Neoliberal Era

John E. McDonough

Trust in American health care has collapsed—from 78% in 1975 to 28% today—and the usual suspects (premiums, medical debt, consolidation, private equity) are treated as separate problems. What if they are all symptoms of one thing: the neoliberal turn that remade the U.S. economy in the 1980s, and swept medicine up in its wake?

The wide angle

August 29, 2026