Land and San Marino

The Land And The Landfill

Russell Jacobs | Urban Omnibus | 5th November 2026

Naturalist checks in on NYC's former landfill sites. "The huge hill was bursting across its slopes with swathes of bright purple and yellow, the asters and goldenrods blooming together in magnificent bands. If One World Trade Center hadn’t been poking up above the hillside, this might have been Montana or Wyoming. It felt like a wholly novel landscape, a sort of urban prairie seated over an estuary" (1,600 words)

Puzzle: Play Nomido, the Browser’s daily word game.

Notes On San Marino

Matt Lakeman | 5th November 2026

Dispatch from a three-day stay in the landlocked microstate. Surrounded on all sides by the mountainous regions of northern-central Italy, San Marino feels surprisingly rural for such a compact place. Small Sammarinese towns sit among rolling hills, with about a third of the 33,500 people living in the capital. It claims to be "the longest-running independent republic in history", founded in the year 301 (20,000 words)