Curiosity Weekly

The Beanie Babies craze swept the world in the ‘90s, and people thought the Princess Diana bear might be the key to their retirement. The bubble has long since burst, but a shadow of the Beanie Baby market remains, with price guides, dedicated groups, and a handful of Beanie believers.

Longtime contributor Pravesh Bhardwaj read and shared 276 short stories on the #longreads Twitter hashtag in 2021. Here are his favorites.

Brain stimulation is increasingly being used to treat everything from addiction to chronic pain to Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy.

The work of Paul Virilio urges us to ask: What future disasters inhere in today’s technologies?

Human beings, unlike all the other animals, hate animal bodies, especially their own. Not all human beings, not all the time.

Gentrifiers bulldozed Karachi’s iconic market years ago, but the violence unleashed in that moment never stopped.

‘Enemies of the people’ were the millions of artists, engineers, managers, or professors who were thought to be a threat to the Soviet regime solely for being the educated elite. Along with millions of non-political prisoners, they were forcedly resettled to the Gulag, the system of labour camps across the Soviet Union.