Most life stories go unrecorded. And the ones that do get told, our own included, tend to come out far tidier than they were actually lived. This week, #TheEdit is about revisiting the stories we’ve told, and how much they leave out.

• Over 100 billion people have ever lived. Press a button and this site draws one of them at random, year, place and life, all from real data. A quietly humbling corrective to the history we carry around, which remembers kings and forgets almost everyone else – The Any Human Ever
• When AI comes for your purpose in life. AI has gone from fumbling basic arithmetic to helping crack some of maths’ most famous open problems. Cornell mathematician Steven Strogatz on the excitement, and the grief, of watching a machine take on the work that gives people meaning – The Daily Podcast
• A life in episodes. For a decade, historian Thomas Söderqvist has posted his memoir to Facebook one episode at a time. His readers keep correcting him, and the version of himself he thought he knew keeps coming apart – Aeon Magazine Podcast
• An international career forged by the struggles of apartheid. Navi Pillay grew up under apartheid in a Durban slum with no running water. When her headteacher saw her potential, local parents pooled their money to send her to university, not knowing she would go on to become the UN’s human rights chief – The New York Times
• Where the forest went. In 1788, Hugh Maxwell walked ruler-straight lines through 2.6 million acres of forest to carve it into lots for sale. Novelist James Whorton Jr. follows his trail to see what remains, and finds a fox, a smashed toilet and a better question – Longreads  
• The Nobel laureate who rescued me. In his mid-20s, stuck halfway through a PhD he’d lost faith in and quietly lying about his progress, Mark Oppenheimer memorised an Anne Carson poem he couldn’t make sense of. It taught him “to stop looking so hard” – The Atlantic
• How will AI make moral decisions for you and me? When people handed a simple dice game to an AI, the share who cheated jumped from 5% to 25%. Computer scientist Iyad Rahwan on why we need to study machine morality now, before it’s making choices for us – The Beautiful Truth