Last week, we shared a collection of stories that you might have missed or otherwise forgotten about, especially if you’ve come to rely on The Postscript for weekly recommendations of some of the best stories on myriad topics. The reason you might have missed those stories if you’ve come to rely on us is simple: We didn’t begin publishing until July.

So those stories linked last week would have taken you through the end of June, right before we started publishing. We served them up in a completely different format from our normal Weekend Reading look, preferring to give you not only the high quality you’ve come to expect but also a large quantity in case you were in need of holiday reading.

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This final edition of Weekend Reading for 2021 will also depart from our normal format, but unlike last week, we’ll be recirculating stories from previous editions.

It’s worth taking a by-the-numbers look at 2021 and Weekend Reading. With the publication of this second year-end round-up, there will be 26 editions of Weekend Reading. Within those first 25, there are, by my very unscientific and inexact count, more than 650 discrete links to articles, essays, podcasts, videos, and more.

There were, unsurprisingly, some repeat topics that we returned to because they were massive stories.

COVID-19

COVID-19 tops the list. The editions that had sections that focused on COVID-19 include:

• July 24th

• August 7th

• November 6th

• November 20th

• December 4th

January 6th

Another of the biggest stories of the year happened on January 6th, 2021, so there has been an entire year of diligent reporting on what arguably is one of the biggest stories in recent history. The editions that had sections that focused on the attacks on the Capitol include:

• July 10th

• July 31st

• November 13th

• December 11th

Climate Change

Climate change, and extreme instances of weather that brought the concept to our attention in a more immediate manner, also featured heavily in the news of 2021. The editions that had sections focused on climate change and, relatedly, extreme weather include:

• July 10th

• August 14th

• September 4th

• November 6th

• December 18th

Facebook

Facebook had a bad year, above and beyond the normal pandemic-induced bad year the rest of us suffered through. It was one bombshell after another being broken by reporters and whistleblowers. The editions that had sections focused on Facebook include:

• July 24th

• September 18th

• October 30th

Abortion

The assault on women’s abortion rights was another frequent topic in Weekend Reading. Editions that had sections focused on abortion include:

• August 28th

• September 4th

Those topics are undeniably newsworthy, but that doesn’t mean that all of the Weekend Reading recommendations were hard news. There were numerous celebrations of the arts, like various recently released films, the next must-read novels, sports, and the cult of celebrity through the art of the profile.

Film

July 17th – Anthony Bourdain

October 2nd – The Sopranos

October 30th – The French Dispatch

November 20th – The Academy Awards

And more individual stories, including ones about Siskel and Ebert, neo-noirs from the ’90s, Melvin Van Peebles, and Wes Anderson, to name a few.

Sports

July 10th – Tennis

July 31st – Simone Biles

September 11th – 9/11 Sports Stories

December 18th – Steph Curry

And more individual stories, including ones about Formula 1 racing, Tom Brady, football between New York City’s firemen and cops, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar calling out Lebron James over COVID-19 vaccines, and Matthew Stafford, to name a few.

Celebrities

July 10th – Britney Spears

September 18th – Celebrity Deaths

October 16th – Celebrity Profiles

December 4th – Stephen Sondheim

And more individual stories, including ones about Jason Isbell, Questlove, Regina King, Jeremy Strong, Keanu Reeves, and Hayao Miyazaki, to name a few.

When I think about any year-end list, I naturally think about what, if any, metric is used to judge whether a piece is “worthy” of being included. Some of the lists, like New York’s most-read, uses the simple metric of “total collective minutes of audience engagement.” Other lists take a more subjective approach. One of my favorite trends is a rash of stories from top-notch publications shouting out other publications’ stories under the banner of “Stories We Wish We’d Published.” (Texas Monthly, High Country News, and STAT are examples of publications that recently shared the work of others.)

I, too, decided to go the subjective route. What story did I remember sharing from months ago? Which did I remember, by title or author or topic or publication, to go back and search for? Here are a few that burned themselves in my mind this year.

What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind — Jennifer Senior, The Atlantic

It’s hard to know just how big a story is outside of my media-obsessed bubble, but if ever a story that the media-obsessed bubble fawned over deserved widespread attention, it’s this one. Everything about this story is pitch-perfect. It’s an anniversary piece for September 11th, 2001; it’s been 20 years, so it’s a big one. There will surely be enough pieces on the occasion to make your head spin. But this one will stand the test of time.

Those were the words I wrote back in August, and I stand by them.

His Name Was Emmett Till — Wright Thompson, The Atlantic

This story was included in the “Some of Our Favorites From the Past Week” section back in July, and so it was shared without comment. But it is an incredible piece of storytelling, of reporting, of revision. The story details the truth about where Emmett Till was murdered, and it’s an incredible piece of time travel via engrossing writing.

Our eyes adjusted to the darkness of the barn where Emmett Till was tortured by a group of grown men. Christmas decorations leaned against one wall. Within reach sat a lawn mower and a Johnson 9.9-horsepower outboard motor. Dirt covered the spot where Till was beaten, and where investigators believe he was killed. Andrews thinks he was strung from the ceiling, to make the beating easier. The truth is, nobody knows exactly what happened in the barn, and any evidence is long gone. Andrews pointed to the central rafter. “That right there is where he was hung at.”

A Secretive Hedge Fund Is Gutting Newsrooms — McKay Coppins, The Atlantic

2021 saw a continuation of the evisceration of local newsrooms across the country as COVID-19 exacerbated many of the difficulties that have challenged newspapers that don’t have the heft of The New York Times or the mega-wealthy investors of The Washington Post and L.A. Times. But one hedge fund in particular is doing untold damage by gobbling up newsrooms and slashing staffs, and, in the process, doing irreparable harm to democracy in the process.

A Haunting New Documentary About Anthony Bourdain — Helen Rosner, The New Yorker

“Academy Award-winner Morgan Neville’s new documentary, Roadrunner, has revived interest in the larger-than-life star that was Anthony Bourdain. In the film, he’s portrayed as both the hero and the villain,” [Helen] Rosner says. She writes: “‘When I’m making a film, I often feel like the instructions are in the box,’ [Neville] told me. ‘How I should tell a story is often expressed by the subject: Mr. Rogers should be simple and deep and loving storytelling; Orson Welles should be chaotic and smart storytelling. And this film — Tony — is all about gray.’”

Those are the words I wrote back in the second-ever edition of Weekend Reading in July. I hadn’t seen the film at that point, but I’d go to see it shortly after, and Neville’s quote about the gray is a perfect encapsulation of the film and its subject.

Jason Sudeikis Is Having One Hell of a Year — Zach Baron, GQ

In a wonderfully meta chat with GQ, Jason Sudeikis discusses the depths of his breakout smash-hit of a character, Ted Lasso, and explores how much the character is like the man, how much the man is like the character, and how similarities between their lives, namely the dissolution of their marriages, unites them. The show is a marvel. It, for the most part, makes the viewer feel so much better after watching it. And, I would submit, so does this article. It feels good to learn this man is like this character we’ve all fallen in love with. It’s a small miracle that so many people close to Sudeikis think highly enough of him to say that he is every bit as good as the character, but it’s even more miraculous that a magazine writer could capture that same feeling on the page.

Who Is the Bad Art Friend? — Robert Kolker, The New York Times Magazine

This in no way is required reading, but at the time it was published, it was the hottest story perhaps all year. It was the discussion online, and there was just something so fun about being a part of that conversation. It’s even more fun if you’re a creative type, as underneath all of the pettiness, there are numerous profound and deeply philosophical questions about the nature of art and what’s owed to the artist and the inspiration.

And that’s it for the year. 2021 is a wrap, and from all of us here at The Postscript, we wish you a happy and healthy 2022.

The Postscript

This week, elsewhere on The Postscript.

Searching for the Perfect Title: Madeleine Blais on 'The Heart Is an Instrument' and 'Uphill Walkers'

A series from award-winning authors and teachers of writing literary journalism on what they learned from the experience of titling their books.

Searching for the Perfect Title: Deborah Campbell on 'This Heated Place' and 'A Disappearance in Damascus'

A series from award-winning authors and teachers of writing literary journalism on what they learned from the experience of titling their books.

Let it be said first and foremost: Year-end lists are imperfect documents. A year is a long time, and in our current journalism landscape, with the sheer amount of content that’s created daily, a year provides a number of riches. Throw in the surreal, time-warping component of the COVID-19 pandemic that’s approaching its third year, and it’s an impossible task to highlight everything in a single list.

There are numerous formats that could have been used to tackle this task, and many of them would have worked well. A simple one for The Postscript hinges on the fact that it went live in July 2021, and that means there were six months of journalism that we never had a chance to share.

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This format will look different from our usual Weekend Reading posts, but it’s in an effort to cover a lot of ground and give you a quick look back at the year that was and a one-stop shop to populate your year-end reading lists.

Do you remember…

January

The timely reporting and contextualizing from one of America’s darkest days. When The New Yorker unleashed one of its best writers with a simple (but massive) mandate: Tell the story of America during a year of a pandemic. When Representative Jamie Raskin wrote so lovingly about his son. When Anthony Fauci leaped at the opportunity to speak freely as President Donald Trump left office.

When we were reminded, upon his death, that Hank Aaron did so much more for baseball than simply hit home runs. What it took for Mitch McConnell to finally speak out against Trump. How Boeing got a sweetheart settlement deal. Alexi Navalny vs. Vladimir Putin. Stonks and GameStop going to the moon. America’s love affair with guns. America’s deep-seated loathing of scam calls. Tim Cook on Big Tech.

February

The 77 days after the presidential election when Trump tried his damnedest to steal it by saying it had been stolen from him first. How a mother of eight ended up storming the Capitol on January 6th. That time Jeff Bezos stepped down as CEO of Amazon. What it’s like to live upwards of 1,000 feet in the sky. A big league baseball player’s second chance at life. What it took to get votes cast and counted in Fulton County.

When COVID-19 came to Minot, North Dakota, the worst-hit county in the worst-hit state in the worst-hit country at the time. A too-little-discussed lunch counter sit-in in Kansas. How it’s more than jobs that are lost when local newspapers shutter. When Texas froze and utility prices skyrocketed. When Rush Limbaugh died and we reckoned with what hell he’d wrought. That time we got to hear what Mars sounds like. How the Duke and Duchess of Sussex surprised everyone when they said no more.

Climate activists who support the use of nuclear energy. How Facebook could have done more to combat misinformation from right-wing figures. When we realized just how deadly our first winter with COVID-19 actually was. What happened inside the forced labor prisons where China sent ethnic and religious minorities.

March

When the American withdrawal from Afghanistan wasn’t yet a reality. How 2021 was the year we were forced to learn what an NFT is. How COVID-19-related school closures disrupted the lives of students. What it felt like on March 11th, 2020, when the U.S. realized COVID-19 had found us. When we thought Cyrus Vance would be the one who filed criminal charges against Trump.

How polyamorists and polygamists are changing family norms. How Peloton became more than just exercise. How money and economic power didn’t necessarily equal success against COVID-19. When hatred and racism found workers in an Atlanta spa. The pandemic saw U.S. air quality improve and then wildfires erased all of those gains. That time America’s supply of nasopharyngeal swabs depended on feuding cousins.

When Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, organized an epic union fight. How a giant container ship got stuck in and finally escaped from the Suez Canal. An unimaginable travesty of so-called criminal justice that saw a young man spend almost two decades in solitary confinement. How the Kochs tried to block election reform. The history of working out. A witness to George Floyd’s murder refuses to be reduced to the trope of “angry Black man.”

April

How one man with 200,000 Twitter followers became a fount of COVID-19 misinformation. Alexey Navalny’s struggle in Russian prison. When we realized that 55 major corporations had zero federal tax liability in 2020. How the pandemic didn’t erase the opioid epidemic. Amazon beat back the Bessemer unionizing effort. How the longest war in American history not only cost more than 2,200 American lives but more than 100,000 Afghan lives.

When a 17-year-old witnessed the murder of George Floyd and had the awareness to hit record. European soccer had aspirations for a super league that didn’t last more than two days. By daring to go against Trump, stalwart conservative Liz Cheney suddenly wasn’t Republican enough for the base anymore.

Mark Zuckerberg vs. Tim Cook. That time lumber got super expensive, and a beetle didn’t help things. When we learned what it’s like to break out of a maximum security prison like in the movies. The Supreme Court considered whether a school could punish a student for things said off campus and on social media.

May

The pandemic created a showdown between landlords and tenants. Facebook’s Oversight Board upheld a decision to temporarily ban Trump from the social media platform. When the worst of COVID-19 was being seen in India’s massive population. While everyone else in the world wanted to disappear in 2021, the Brood X cicadas were just showing up.

The collapse of the Golden Globes and the corrupt Hollywood Foreign Press Association. How online groups for mothers became a massive vector of COVID-19 misinformation. The pandemic exacerbation of burnout. Behind the scenes of the Republican-led Arizona election audit. The mysterious spy thriller plot line known as Havana Syndrome reached the White House. UFOs. The lasting legacy of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. How the pandemic benefited the fast food industry.

June

Credit card rewards aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. How the wealthiest avoid income taxes. What we gain when we commute to work. Rain refused to fall in the West. The birth of Southwest Airlines. What it was like to spend six months inside one of America’s most dangerous industries: a slaughterhouse.

Amazon proved to be a godsend during the worst days of the pandemic, but it strained an already strained workforce within the company. A prophetic profile of Senator Joe Manchin. The Delta variant vs. the unvaccinated. Retail workers leave the industry in droves. The ongoing search for the origins of the virus behind COVID-19. China remakes Hong Kong with new national security law.

The Postscript

This week, elsewhere on The Postscript.

Stay Close: A Guide to Pushing Journalism Forward

Tips from notable reporters and editors that are pushing back against journalism's unwritten rules to advance the profession by making it more inclusive.

Community-Centered: The Evolution of Journalism

The standards we follow when reporting and writing serve a purpose, but they must evolve with the world we're trying to cover.

There’s a lot of great journalism out there. Every week, in a format short enough that it won’t be clipped by your inbox, we aim to share some of the best, with additional context for understanding the biggest news of the day. This is a weekly digest of stories you can savor and reporting you can rely on.

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Rare December Tornado Outbreak Was a ‘Worst-Case Scenario’ — Thomas Frank, E&E News/Scientific American

The storms that ravaged the South didn’t reach my hometown in the western part of the state, just above the Mississippi state line, with the same force they had about two hours north, where my sister lives and works. Across the northern state line into Kentucky saw the worst of the damage.

The tornado outbreak that likely killed more than 100 people over the weekend was an anomaly in every way possible. The deaths were concentrated in a state — Kentucky — that has been relatively unscathed by tornadoes and tornado fatalities. The outbreak hit during a month when tornadoes are least likely to occur. And it struck at night, when tornadoes are unusual — and particularly deadly because people are asleep and unlikely to hear warnings. … The outbreak is certainly the deadliest to have occurred in the United States during a winter month, according to an E&E News analysis of NOAA tornado records dating to 1950. The deadliest recorded December tornado occurred in 1953 in Mississippi and killed 38 people, NOAA records show.

• 🖥️ Here’s How Rare That Massive Tornado in Kentucky Actually Was — Philip Bump, The Washington Post: “In the 70 years from 1950 and 2019, there were nearly 64,000 tornadoes recorded in the United States, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data. Of that total, there was precisely one, a tornado that hit in 1952, that generally shared an unusual set of circumstances with the one that touched down over the weekend: It hit Kentucky in December and was measured at at least an F3 in intensity. It’s an unusual combination and, this time, a deadly one.” I love the maps in this story that show the prevalence of tornadoes by month, and, as the months move throughout the year, you can see the tornadoes working their way north on the map, until the winter months roll around again.

• 📖 They Said the Tornado Would Hit at 9:30. It Hit at 9:30. — Thomas Fuller & Tariro Mzezewa, The New York Times: This story resonated with me from the jump, for one very specific reason: the 1995 movie Twister. When I was a kid, this was a VHS that I nearly wore out from watching and rewinding so many times. For a time, I thought that’s what I wanted to do with my life, to chase storms. If you haven’t thought about the movie in many years, you’d be forgiven if you’d forgotten that it wasn’t just an addiction to the adrenaline of the chase. Helen Hunt’s character was chasing a ghost; as a child, she’d lost her father to a tornado because the warning didn’t come in time. Now, all those years later, the technology has caught up.

The huge strides in tornado prediction rates have been made possible by a cascade of scientific advances. The introduction of Doppler radar in the 1990s and subsequent upgrades allowed forecasters to measure the wind inside of a storm, to distinguish between rain, snow or hail and to see and predict the formation of tornadoes. The proliferation of weather satellites allows scientists even more visibility into the formation of storms — and, crucially, the conditions that might create a tornado. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration operates 16 satellites.

• 🗄️ From 2011: “Heavenly Father!" “I Love You All!" “I Love Everyone!" “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!" “I Love All of You!" — Luke Dittrich, Esquire: There was a line in that Scientific American story that caught my attention: “Although the exact death toll remains unknown, the outbreak is almost certain to be the deadliest since the devastating Joplin, Missouri, tornadoes killed 158 people in May of 2011. It’s likely to be one of the deadliest tornado events in U.S. history.” I remember that storm well. I was in my first year of law school, and that year I’d made a dear friend who was from Joplin. That’s the only reason I had ever heard of the town when the tornado struck. Out of that storm came this remarkable piece of journalism, and if that evocative headline didn’t get your attention, maybe this deck will: “On May 22nd, a three-quarter-mile-wide tornado carved a six-mile-long path through Joplin, Missouri, killing 160. Unable to escape, two dozen strangers sought shelter in a gas station's walk-in cooler while the funnel ripped apart every building, car, and living thing around. This is their story.”

‘The World Is a Lesser Place Today Without Her.’ Acclaimed Author bell hooks Dies at 69. — Linda Blackford, Lexington Herald Leader

bell hooks, a Hopkinsville native who went on to an international career as a hugely influential author, critic, feminist and public intellectual, died on December 15th at her home in Berea. She was 69. … Gloria Jean Watkins was born on September 25th, 1952, in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, to Veodis and Rosa Bell Watkins, the fourth of seven siblings. She attended segregated schools in Christian County, then went on to Stanford University in California, then earned a master’s in English at the University of Wisconsin and a doctorate in literature at the University of California–Santa Cruz.

• 🗄️ From 1999: What bell hooks Had to Say About the State of Feminism in 1999 — Jacqueline Trescott, The Washington Post: This article from 1999 captured bell hooks while she was at an event for one of her books. She was a prolific author, and the book, Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work, was “her reflections on famous writers, her own work and ‘women who write too much.’” I love this quote in particular: “No one said to John Coltrane, Why do you play the saxophone so much?’ … They accepted he had a passion for this,” hooks says. She is wrapped in black and red wool, as dramatic in person as she is on the page. Writing is as easy for her as breathing, and as necessary for life, she says. “There is a lushness to how my mind works. And sometimes I feel guilty because I have this abundance of ideas but I have my life mapped out in writing for the next 20 years.”

• 🎧 bell hooks on How We Raise Men — David Remnick, The New Yorker Radio Hour: In the aftermath of the revelation of the details of Harvey Weinstein’s crimes, and in the midst of the #MeToo movement, bell hooks talked with David Remnick about patriarchy and masculinity.

• 🗄️ From 1995: Cool Cynicism: Pulp Fiction — bell hooks, Artforum: I first read this review of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction in American Film Critics: An Anthology From The Silents Until Now, a collection of critical writings on film. While it was likely low on the ladder of her writing in terms of its importance, it was one of the first that I thought of when I heard about her death. It shows off a particular style as she both lauds and criticizes the film.

Tarantino has the real nihilism of our times down. He represents the ultimate ‘white cool’: a hard-core cynical vision that would have everyone see racism, sexism, homophobia, but behave as though none of that shit really matters, or if it does it means nothing cause none of it’s gonna change, cause the real deal is that domination is here to stay — going nowhere and everybody is in on the act. Mind you, domination is always and only patriarchal — a dick thing.

• 🗄️ From 2019: In Praise of bell hooks — Min Jin Lee, The New York Times: Min Jin Lee tells the story of how she, as a sophomore at Yale University, came to find herself in a class taught by bell hooks. She described hooks as one of those lecturers who can captivate a class, where everyone in the room recognizes that something special is happening. hooks opened Lee’s mind through her writings.

For me, reading ‘Ain’t I a Woman’ was as if someone had opened the door, the windows, and raised the roof in my mind. I am neither white nor black, but through her theories, I was able to understand that my body contained historical multitudes and any analysis without such a measured consideration was limited and deeply flawed.

Steph Curry Redrew Basketball’s Map of Possibilities — Vinson Cunningham, The New Yorker

What strikes me about Steph Curry breaking Ray Allen’s three-point record isn’t that he did it; that much seemed like a foregone conclusion. It was that I actually got to watch it happen in real time, which by no means was a sure thing. But I saw it, and whenever it comes to discussing that record, I’ll never forget that I saw it live.

Curry’s three, by contrast, isn’t an interesting novelty or the final recourse for a lengthening career. It is the culmination of a process that began when the three-pointer was invented. Techniques exist to be perfected; Curry has pushed the three toward its telos. He runs with his torso slightly bent over, with his feet set at a noticeably wide stance — the better to spring into the holistic motion, big toe to the tip of his pointer finger, that makes the net shiver, no matter how far away. Unlike Allen or Miller or his teammate Klay Thompson, another great shooter, he doesn’t have just one form. He placidly fans the shot upward on standard catch-and-shoots but throws his arms out like a tipsy dart player when he’s off balance and covered well.

• 📖 Stephen Curry’s Scientific Quest for the Perfect Shot — Ben Cohen, The Wall Street Journal:

Curry decided before this NBA season that he wasn’t satisfied with simply making shots anymore. He wouldn’t even settle for swishing those shots. “Too easy,” said Brandon Payne, his longtime personal coach. “We're doing swishes within swishes.” The only way to do that was to shrink the basket. This is where the shot-tracking technology described in Pyke’s research became useful to Curry. It allowed him to monitor the exact location of his shots and instantly learn whether they were good enough for him. A shot that strays nearly five inches away from the center of the hoop in either direction can still be a swish. But that margin of error in his left-right positioning was much too high for Curry. So last summer, as he shot threes in the NBA offseason, he gave himself only three inches of wiggle room. He was even more demanding when shooting from closer: Curry’s leeway for his free throws was two inches.

• 📖 His Job Is Counting Stephen Curry’s 3-Pointers. You’d Retire, Too. — Scott Cacciola, The New York Times: This is such a clever use of Steph Curry’s fame and spotlight to highlight a man who toils away behind the scenes and, in many ways, is one of the least likely to get such recognition.

[Fred] Kast, who will turn 82 this month, has recorded every field goal, every free throw, every foul and every timeout in nearly every Warriors home game since 1963-64. He jots the stats into an NBA-issue, spiral-bound notebook that goes to the league office at the conclusion of each season. In a league that has seen its share of technological advances, the official scorer — the person who logs each game’s most vital elements — is a throwback, and every team has one. Somewhere in the NBA archives, there is a small library of Kast’s handiwork.

• 🖥️ The NBA’s Revolution in Pull-Up Threes Isn’t Going Away. But Does the Shot Actually Help? — Louis Zatzman, FiveThirtyEight: Steph Curry is credited with breaking the game of basketball, with changing the entire way the game is played. This is said in reference to his three-point shooting prowess. “Such shots are now routine, emblematic of a revolution of the pull-up three. Steph Curry, James Harden and Damian Lillard each pushed the usage of the shot beyond what had been its logical boundaries in previous eras, and those three remain some of the best pull-up shooters in the NBA. But as often takes place in revolutions, the action has spread beyond the originators; the pull-up three has become the norm throughout the league. Year after year, teams are pushing the envelope in how many pull-up threes are attempted.” FiveThirtyEight takes its statistical look at whether that revolution is a good thing for the NBA.

• 📖 He Thought He Made N.B.A. History. All He Got Was 3 Points. — Tania Ganguli, The New York Times: For those of us of a certain age, the three-pointer has always been a part of basketball. It’s hard for us to conceive of the game without it. But it bears remembering that it was an addition to the game, long after the fact. And one man thought he’d recorded the first three ever. Until he learned he didn’t.

For more than a decade, Kevin Grevey thought he was the first player in N.B.A. history to make a 3-pointer. “It’s pretty amazing that I didn’t make the first one,” Grevey, 68, said recently. “Because I think the first time I touched the ball I caught it in the corner and toed behind the line, shot it and made it.”

More of Our Favorites From the Past Week

How Netflix Made Americans Care About the Most European of Sports — Amanda Mull, The Atlantic

What We Lost When Vaping Got Political — Vanessa Grigoriadis, Vanity Fair

4 Dead Infants, a Convicted Mother, and a Genetic Mystery — Oscar Schwartz, Wired

Jason Isbell Is Tired of Country’s Love Affair With White Nostalgia — Elamin Abdelmahmoud, BuzzFeed News

John Roberts Has Lost Control — Dahlia Lithwick, Slate

The Follow-Up

The news doesn’t stop. If you checked out last week’s edition and found the topics interesting, here’s a collection of stories published since.

The Atlantic’s Reporting on January 6th

• 📖 Beware Prophecies of Civil War — Fintan O’Toole, The Atlantic

Chris Cuomo’s Exit

• 📖 CNN Faces Prime-Time Uncertainty After Firing Chris Cuomo — Benjamin Mullin, The Wall Street Journal

Notable Trials

• 📖 Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes Chose Fraud Instead of Admitting She’d Failed, Prosecutors Said in Closing Arguments at Her Trial — Stephanie K. Baer, BuzzFeed News

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The Postscript

This week, elsewhere on The Postscript.

Searching for the Perfect Title: Pamela Newkirk on ‘Spectacle’ and ‘Within the Veil’

A series from award-winning authors and teachers of writing literary journalism on what they learned from the experience of titling their books.

The Orgy Next Door: Ethical Relationships in Gay Talese’s ‘Thy Neighbor’s Wife’ and ‘The Voyeur’s Motel’

On the balance between loyalty to the reader and to the investigated subject or community, and the need for self-awareness in literary journalism.

There’s a lot of great journalism out there. Every week, in a format short enough that it won’t be clipped by your inbox, we aim to share some of the best, with additional context for understanding the biggest news of the day. This is a weekly digest of stories you can savor and reporting you can rely on.

Share This Edition of Weekend Reading

Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun — Barton Gellman, The Atlantic

I rarely lift entire sections of a single publication for inclusion on a topic, but I’m making an exception for The Atlantic’s upcoming January/February print issue on the fallout from the January 6th attacks on the Capitol. The first must be Barton Gellman’s cover story. Gellman’s thesis is fairly simple: “There is a clear and present danger that American democracy will not withstand the destructive forces that are now converging upon it. Our two-party system has only one party left that is willing to lose an election. The other is willing to win at the cost of breaking things that a democracy cannot live without.” That restatement of the thesis comes near the end of a monster piece. What makes it so notable, so worth your time and consideration, is what came before it: Gellman’s prescient reporting and writing from November of 2020, entitled “The Election That Could Break America,” came months before the terrible acts of January 6th.

• 📖 Are We Doomed? — George Packer, The Atlantic: It’s wild that January 6th isn’t bigger news, right? It’s disconcerting that it’s faded into the background so easily. Granted, there’s a pandemic ravaging the globe still and myriad other travesties and traumas to go around, but this was a huge deal with possibly republic-shattering implications. That’s why I appreciate The Atlantic’s upcoming issue, harnessing the power of a print publication to put out a collection of stories one year since that fateful day. Magazines are great at anniversaries. George Packer, as they say, understood the assignment; he begins his piece thusly: “A year after the insurrection, I’m trying to imagine the death of American democracy. It’s somehow easier to picture the Earth blasted and bleached by global warming, or the human brain overtaken by the tyranny of artificial intelligence, than to foresee the end of our 250-year experiment in self-government.” After dispensing what he thinks are non-issues, Packer concedes this point: “Before January 6th, no one — including intelligence professionals — could have conceived of a president provoking his followers to smash up the Capitol. Even the rioters livestreaming in National Statuary Hall seemed stunned by what they were doing. The siege felt like a wild shot that could have been fatal. For a nanosecond, shocked politicians of both parties sang together from the hymnal of democracy. But the unity didn’t last. The past months have made it clear that the near miss was a warning shot.”

• 📖 A Party, and Nation, in Crisis — Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic: I love a good editor’s note in a magazine, and Jeffrey Goldberg delivers in this one, summarizing the theme of the issue, which has as much to do with January 6th as it does with the decline of the Republican Party. He does not mince words; he does not miss.

There is insufficient space in any one issue of this magazine to trace the Republican Party’s decomposition from Lincoln’s day to ours. It is enough to say that its most recent, and most catastrophic, turn — toward authoritarianism, nativism, and conspiracism — threatens the republic that it was founded to save.

CNN Fires Chris Cuomo Amid Inquiry Into His Efforts to Aid His Brother — Michael M. Grynbaum, John Koblin & Jodi Kantor, The New York Times

Last Saturday saw what many media-watchers would tell you was long overdue: CNN fired anchor Chris Cuomo for his efforts to help his brother survive, politically speaking, sexual harassment accusations. A journalistic slippery slope that raised concerns in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, back when New York was the hardest-hit place in the world, saw the brothers Cuomo trading back-slapping banter on air and it was a ratings bonanza for CNN. Critics said perhaps the governor of New York didn’t deserve such softball interviews, but they continued. When the sexual harrassment allegations broke, Chris again seemed to suggest that slippery slopes were not serious concerns. But last week, CNN said it had discovered that Chris’ collaboration went deeper than initially suspected. Who’da thunk it?

• 📖 The Code of Chris and Andrew Cuomo — Eric Lach, The New Yorker: Eric Lach explores CNN’s half-measure of simply suspending Chris Cuomo before finally cutting all ties with him a few days later.

Chris Cuomo’s business is media. Andrew Cuomo’s business is politics. The line between them is clear, except when it isn’t. “I’m trying to help my brother,” Cuomo told investigators working for the New York attorney general’s office during a six-hour deposition in July, a transcript of which was made public on Monday. “But I’m not part of his team.”

• 📖 Inside CNN’s Decision to Fire Chris Cuomo: ‘He Gave Me His Word’ — Jeremy Barr & Sarah Ellison, The Washington Post: Blatant disregard of journalistic ethics may not have been the only factor at play when it came time to fire Chris Cuomo.

The network’s decision was almost certainly accelerated by the emergence last week of a sexual misconduct claim against the host, made by a lawyer who described her client as a former junior colleague who encountered Cuomo before he joined CNN in 2013. Yet the cable news giant took pains over the weekend to assert that Cuomo had already done enough to merit dismissal earlier this year, when he helped his brother, former New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, combat an unrelated sexual harassment scandal.

• 📖 Time to Pull the Plug on Cable News — Jack Shafer, Politico: Just how powerful are the cable news networks? Jack Shafer wonders if we might not be better off without the whole lot of them.

Why all this attention when cable news barely matters to most Americans? The average audience commanded by [Rachael] Maddow and [Anderson] Cooper and [Sean] Hannity and all the others slithering down your cable cord is so tiny you can almost get away with calling cable news a niche media. According to October numbers from TV Newser, the three major cable networks attract an average audience of only 4.2 million viewers during primetime, which is when viewing peaks. In a nation of 330 million, that’s just a little over 1 percent of the population.

Drawing Ghislaine Maxwell — Choire Sicha, New York

Now, does this Q&A with a courtroom sketch artist at Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial rise to the level of Jimmy Breslin columns in the aftermath of the JFK assissination? No. But few things do. It is an interesting look at a widely covered trial that evokes the spirit of Breslin by looking ever-so-slightly off the center of axis of an issue of the day to find stories that matter. The artist has been drawing defendants in trials for more than 40 years. (For context: The Trial of Ghislaine Maxwell — Sabrina Tavernise, The Daily/The New York Times)

• 📖 Jussie Smollett’s Conviction for Orchestrating and Reporting a Phony Hate Crime Punctuates Actor’s Sudden Downfall — Megan Crepeau & Jason Meisner, The Chicago Tribune: First, it was news because it seemed like the terrible, ugly culmination of so many things America had been building toward under the Trump administration. It was, at first blush, a hate crime. But then the story unraveled, and it became news for a whole new reason: The cops and prosecutors alleged that Jussie Smollett had staged the whole thing. On Thursday, a jury agreed and found him guilty of five of six felony charges. (For context: What the Jussie Smollett Story Reveals — John McWhorter, The Atlantic)

• 🎧 Accusations and Evasions — The Dropout: Elizabeth Holmes on Trial/ABC Radio: The incredibly propulsive original formulation of The Dropout summarized the captivating story of Elizabeth Holmes and the rise and fall of Theranos. Once Holmes went on trial, The Dropout came back to life, and used its built-in audience to update listeners on the machinations of her trial itself (which has been recommended in Weekend Reading on an earlier occasion). Whereas the original series produced only six episodes, the trial coverage has produced more than double that number. (For context: The Theranos Trial: What to Know After Elizabeth Holmes’ Lawyers Rest Their Case & The Trial of Elizabeth Holmes: Who’s Who in the Theranos Case, The Wall Street Journal)

More of Our Favorites From the Past Week

The House Always Wins … Unless — John Gonzalez, The Ringer

Birds Aren’t Real, or Are They? Inside a Gen Z Conspiracy Theory. — Taylor Lorenz, The New York Times

Jimmy Chin Enters Uncharted Territory — Jacob Baynham, GQ

We’re Not Going Back to “Before Roe” — Dahlia Lithwick, Slate

Utah Makes Welfare So Hard to Get, Some Feel They Must Join the LDS Church to Get Aid — Eli Hager, ProPublica

On “Succession,” Jeremy Strong Doesn’t Get the Joke — Michael Schulman, The New Yorker

Low-Profile Heiress Who ‘Played a Strong Role’ in Financing Jan. 6 Rally Is Thrust Into Spotlight — Beth Reinhard, Jacqueline Alemany & Josh Dawsey, The Washington Post

The Follow-Up

The news doesn’t stop. If you checked out last week’s edition and found the topics interesting, here’s a collection of stories published since.

Jack Dorsey’s Run at Twitter

• 📖 Without Dorsey, Can Twitter Finally Flourish? — Lizzie O’Leary, Slate

The Omicron Variant

• 📖 Inside a Sequencing Lab on the Front Lines of America’s Search for Omicron — Mitch Smith, The New York Times

Stephen Sondheim’s Legacy

• 📖 A Sondheim Surge: Interest in His Work Soars After His Death — Michael Paulson, The New York Times

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The Postscript

This week, elsewhere on The Postscript.

Searching for the Perfect Title: Ted Conover on 'Rolling Nowhere,' 'Coyotes,' and 'Newjack'

A series from award-winning authors and teachers of writing literary journalism on what they learned from the experience of titling their books.

Stories That Matter: How Time Released a BIPOC-Led Issue With Journalists Covering Their Own Communities

A conversation with Lucy Feldman, the lead editor of a first-of-its-kind magazine issue, and Sanya Mansoor.

There’s a lot of great journalism out there. Every week, in a format short enough that it won’t be clipped by your inbox, we aim to share some of the best, with additional context for understanding the biggest news of the day. This is a weekly digest of stories you can savor and reporting you can rely on.

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Jack Steps Back — Casey Newton, Platformer

Jack Dorsey’s reign at Twitter ended this week. Casey Newton looks back at a solid year for the company, even though it never met expectations set out by one of its hedge fund investors, to answer the question: Why resign as CEO now? He also considers the notion that maybe Dorsey didn’t really want to be CEO of Twitter, and he looks ahead to the man who’ll fill Dorsey’s shoes.

From his earliest days at the company, Dorsey was an enigma: on one hand, a visionary leader with an uncanny grasp of what the future holds; on the other, a distant and often inscrutable manager whose slowness in making decisions would hobble the company for almost half a decade.

• 📖 Jack Dorsey Was the Soul of Twitter — Steven Levy, Wired:

You could argue endlessly about whether someone else could have done better. But you can never dispute that, for the past six years, Twitter was run by someone who was its very soul. He exulted in its timeliness and verve, and embraced its messiness. He playfully taunted his critics, who kept pestering him for an edit function. There is no way — no way — that Jack Dorsey would rename his company after some dream of a metasphere.

• 🗄️ From 2013: Two-Hit Wonder — D.T. Max, The New Yorker: Steven Levy’s musing in Wired about whether someone else could have run Twitter better is predicated on one huge point: Jack Dorsey was, before his resignation, the CEO of two multi-billion-dollar companies, the second of which was Square. He’ll continue as Square’s CEO, overseeing the device and related technology that made it possible to swipe a credit card on one’s cell phone.

Some of the designers protested, but soon gave way: Square is Dorsey’s company. It is his do-over, after a messy experience with Twitter.

• ✉️ Twitter Has a New CEO; What About a New Business Model? — Ben Thompson, Stratchery: This article thinks more about the business side of Twitter and what’s in store as it moves forward. I like the business-minded approach to a question that I probably couldn’t answer in my personal capacity: Why do I like (and prefer) Twitter as a social media platform?

What makes Twitter such a baffling company to analyze is that the company’s cultural impact so dramatically outweighs its financial results; last quarter Twitter’s $1.3 billion in revenue amounted to 4.4% of Facebook’s $29.0 billion, and yet you can make the case — and I believe it — that Twitter’s overall impact on the world is just as big, if not larger than its drastically larger peer. Facebook hollowed out the gatekeeper position of the media, but that void was filled by Twitter, both in terms of news being made, and just as critically, elite opinion and narrative being shaped.

The Uncertainties of the Omicron Variant — Dhruv Khullar, The New Yorker

The first case of the new coronavirus variant, Omicron, also known as B.1.1.529, was detected in southern Africa this month. Just a few weeks ago, South Africa, where the most Omicron infections have been detected, was recording around 300 coronavirus cases a day — one of its lowest averages of the pandemic. Since then, cases have soared. Nearly 5,000 South Africans now test positive for the virus on average each day, the country’s test-positivity rate has increased nearly fivefold, and the number of COVID hospitalizations in Gauteng province, where the variant was first identified, has almost quadrupled. It’s not yet clear how much of the surge is due to Omicron, but preliminary evidence suggests that it has played a role. Last week, just a day after South African officials reported its emergence, the World Health Organization declared Omicron its fifth ‘variant of concern.’ So far in the pandemic, that’s the fastest the W.H.O. has moved from detection to classification.

A day after this was published, the first case was detected in the U.S.

• 📖 Omicron’s Best- and Worst-Case Scenarios — Rachel Gutman, The Atlantic: Despite being declared a variant of concern, here’s a potential upside from the emergence of Omicron. Emphasis on the word “potential.”

If Omicron continues to show signs of being milder than Delta, that’s good news, of course. But if it also turns out to spread more quickly than Delta, that could be great news. When two variants are circulating, the one that infects more people more quickly will tend to dominate, said Samuel Scarpino, of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute. That variant could win out either because it replicates more quickly in its human hosts and spreads more efficiently between them — that is, it’s more transmissible — or because it more deftly evades the immunity we already have.

• ✉️ The Omicron Information Vacuum — Charlie Warzel, Galaxy Brain/The Atlantic: I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but there’s a new variant of COVID-19. Sarcasm aside, the news has been wall to wall with coverage of the new Omicron variant, but it’s so early in the game that all of the breathless coverage doesn’t really amount to much yet. Not to say it’s useless, for there certainly is some useful information being shared. This is more of a media critique of the Internet Age, where the speed of information (and partial information and misinformation too) is lightning fast and expected to be even faster.

And so here we are: Stuck in a super-weird moment where we know a thing is happening, but we don’t know exactly what that thing is. We’re living in an information vacuum.... It’s a bit like hearing news of a tropical depression out on the ocean that has all the makings of turning into a vicious, land-bound hurricane. The conditions are right for that eventuality, but even advanced modeling can only tell us so much in the early days. Ultimately, we have to wait for nature.

• ✉️ On Omicron, Uncertainty, Vaccine Equity, and the Media — Jon Allsop, The Media Today/Columbia Journalism Review: More media criticism from CJR, and this entry has a great round-up of the types of things news outlets are publishing.

It’s not hard to imagine what media critics will say about the early Omicron coverage in a few weeks if the variant turns out not to be as bad as some experts fear. Equally, however, it’s not hard to imagine what media critics would have said if major outlets had initially ignored or downplayed Omicron and it turns out to be really bad. There is no good way out of this bind without knowing what’s going to happen next — and the story here is that we don’t know what’s going to happen next.

Stephen Sondheim, Titan of the American Musical, Is Dead at 91 — Bruce Weber, The New York Times

The Friday after Thanksgiving was awash in remembrances for Stephen Sondheim, one of, if not the, most famous names from Broadway’s rich history, after news of his death broke. An unparalleled career was recounted skillfully in this New York Times obituary.

• 🎧 'Fresh Air' Remembers Broadway Legend Stephen Sondheim (Part 1) — Terry Gross, Fresh Air/NPR: In the first of Fresh Air’s three-day tribute to Stephen Sondheim, he makes one of my favorite statements about art:

Order out of chaos. Order out of chaos. That’s why I like crossword puzzles. Order out of chaos. I think that’s what art’s about anyway. I think that’s why people make art. … The world has always been chaotic. Life is unpredictable. It is - there is no form. And making forms gives you solidity. I think that’s why people paint paintings and take photographs and write music and tell stories and — that have beginning, middles and ends, even when the middle is at the beginning and the beginning is at the end.

• 📖 The Measureless, Omnipresent Influence of Stephen Sondheim — Mark Harris, Vulture/New York:

What if Stephen Sondheim had never written a word, or a note of music, after his 30th birthday? What if, grief-stricken at the death of his mentor Oscar Hammerstein II in 1960, the young composer had simply decided that he had done his part for musical theater and was ready to try something new? Had that happened we would still, today, more than six decades later, be memorializing a man who had, via his lyrics for Gypsy and West Side Story, made an indelible contribution to the history of American musical theater — specifically to modernizing it, to darkening it, to helping it burst what were then thought to be the boundaries of its form.

This touching remembrance only gets better from these already masterful opening words.

• 📖 Tony Kushner, Oracle of the Upper West Side — A.O. Scott, The New York Times Style Magazine: Stephen Sondheim’s death occurred in what seemed like a revival of the man’s art (though one can hardly say he’s gone anywhere). He’s portrayed by Bradley Whitford in Lin Manuel-Miranda’s directorial debut, Tick, Tick ... Boom, about the life of Jonathan Larson, the writer of the Broadway smash-hit Rent. The film just recently arrived on Netflix. Whitford nails the look of Sondheim, down to his tiniest mannerisms, but when Sondheim saw that his character was to leave a message on an answering machine, he told Manuel-Miranda that he’d never say that and asked if he could rewrite it. He ended up voicing the message himself. Another big screen adaptation is Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story, for which Sondheim wrote the original lyrics. Spielberg teamed up with Tony Kushner, the celebrated playwright of Angels in America (and husband of Mark Harris of the stunning Sondheim remembrance above). A.O. Scott from the New York Times interviews Kushner ahead of the film, which premiered this week.

More of Our Favorites From the Past Week

Who’s Killing the Grizzlies of Fremont County? — Natalle Schachar, The Washington Post Magazine

The Teenagers Getting Six Figures to Leave Their High Schools for Basketball — Bruce Schoenfeld, The New York Times Magazine

A Posthumous Shock — Will Self, Harper’s

How the FBI Discovered a Real-Life Indiana Jones in, of All Places, Rural Indiana — Josh Sanburn, Vanity Fair

A Year in Gay Bars — Bryan Washington, The New Yorker

The Follow-Up

The news doesn’t stop. If you checked out last week’s edition and found the topics interesting, here’s a collection of stories published since.

Ahmaud Arbery

• 🎧 A Prosecutor’s Winning Strategy in the Ahmaud Arbery Cause — Michael Barbaro, The Daily/The New York Times

Kyle Rittenhouse’s Acquittal

• 📖 Universities Try to Force a Consensus About Kyle Rittenhouse — Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic

Terror in Charlottesville

• 📖 The Mantra of White Supremacy — Ibram X. Kendi, The Atlantic

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The Postscript

This week, elsewhere on The Postscript.

Stories That Matter: How ProPublica’s Cezary Podkul Shed Light on Massive Unemployment Claims Fraud Nationwide

While out-of-work Americans battled outdated unemployment insurance systems to file legitimate claims during the pandemic, scammers aided by automated tech tools were cashing in.

Stories That Matter: How Journalists Teamed Up to Investigate a Mega-Dairy Affecting Communities 1,500 Miles Apart

Agricultural consolidation is shrinking margins and pushing small farmers out of business all while creating new environmental concerns.

There’s a lot of great journalism out there. Every week, in a format short enough that it won’t be clipped by your inbox, we aim to share some of the best, with additional context for understanding the biggest news of the day. This is a weekly digest of stories you can savor and reporting you can rely on.

Share This Edition of Weekend Reading

Guilty Verdict for Ahmaud Arbery’s Killers Is a Welcome Sign of Progress, Jesse Washington, The Undefeated

Equal parts a haunting reminder of the contextual reality of blackness in America and a hopeful eye toward the future after a positive day in the Black Lives Matter movement, Jesse Washington’s essay was a fitting summary of a saga that was bigger than simply Ahmaud Aubrey’s story.

• 🗄️ From 2020: Twelve Minutes and a Life — Mitchell S. Jackson, Runner’s World: No excuse is needed to reshare this Pulitzer Prize-winning (and National Magazine Award-winning) piece on running, as a pastime, for black Americans.

Peoples, I invite you to ask yourself, just what is a runner’s world? Ask yourself who deserves to run? Who has the right? Ask who’s a runner? What’s their so-called race? Their gender? Their class? Ask yourself where do they live, where do they run? Where can’t they live and run? Ask what are the sanctions for asserting their right to live and run — shit — to exist in the world. Ask why? Ask why? Ask why?

• 🗄️ From 2020: Ahmaud Arbery Will Not Be Erased — David Dennis Jr., Atlanta Magazine: David Dennis Jr. begins his story about Ahmaud Arbery with an ugly truth: “Black people disappear in America.” He goes on to highlight the state of Georgia’s ugly past in that respect.

In 1982, James Baldwin flew from Paris to Atlanta to write about the trial of Wayne Williams, the man believed to have been responsible for [the Atlanta Child Murders, where at least 29 black children and young adults went missing]. His reporting eventually became the 1985 book, The Evidence of Things Not Seen’ about America, race, and how a country allowed Black bodies to continue to disappear. “Black death has never before elicited so much attention,” Baldwin wrote, noting that “this is not the first time such a devastation has occurred: It is the first time that Authority has been forced to recognize the devastation as crucial.”

• 📖 The System Only Worked Because It Was Pushed — Adam Serwer, The Atlantic: Much like Jesse Washington’s piece in The Undefeated allowed for room to celebrate the administration of justice while tempering a potential desire to see the guilty verdict as a huge step forward, Adam Serwer points out an uncomfortable truth: The trial very nearly didn’t happen at all.

Of Course Kyle Rittenhouse Was Acquitted — Adam Serwer, The Atlantic

There is a paradox of fragility here, in which a moment of fear — perhaps one imbuing the deceased with supernatural strength — is invoked to justify homicide, and the dead who would be alive but for this moment of terror subsequently become a symbol of the frightened man’s valor. At a certain point the logic of this sort of “self-defense” becomes indistinguishable from a custom that simply allows certain people to get away with murder. This is the legal regime that a powerful minority of gun-rights advocates have built — one in which Americans are encouraged to settle their differences with lethal force, preferably leaving as few witnesses capable of testimony as possible.

• 📖 Kyle Rittenhouse and the Scary Future of the American Right — Zack Beauchamp, Vox: In Adam Serwer’s piece, he writes: “It is one thing to argue that the jury reached a reasonable verdict based on this law, and another entirely to celebrate [Kyle] Rittenhouse’s actions. Much of the conservative media and the Republican Party, however, don’t see the killings as ‘wrongful’ in any sense, instead elevating Rittenhouse as the manifestation of retributive violence against their political enemies.” Zack Beauchamp’s piece for Vox looks into reactions on the right, from citizens to politicians, and uncovers ugliness.

Immediately after Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal on Friday, the fringe right’s online forums lit up with celebration — and among some, a belief that they too can kill without legal consequence. On Telegram, a secure messaging app popular with extremists, the leader of a neo-Nazi group wrote that the verdict gives “good Americans legal precedent and license to kill violent commies without worrying about doing life in prison if we defend ourselves in a riot.”

• 🎧 The Acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse — Michael Barbaro, The Daily/The New York Times: If you were unable (or unwilling) to watch the entirety of the trial, perhaps you could use a refresher on what exactly happened in the courtroom.

• 📖 Kyle Rittenhouse, American Vigilante — Paige Williams, The New Yorker: Paige Williams wrote the definitive account of the aftermath of the events in Kenosha, Wisconsin, that led to Kyle Rittenhouse being on trial. But it’s so much more than just that.

Jury Finds Rally Organizers Liable for the Violence That Broke Out in Charlottesville — James Doubek & Vanessa Romo, NPR

More despicable behavior on trial and more decisions reached by jurors. White supremacists responsible for 2017’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, were found liable for conspiracy to the tune of $25 million.

Lawyers with the plaintiffs have acknowledged that one of the goals of the lawsuit was to diminish the ability of white supremacists to spread their message and influence by draining them financially.

• 📖 A 19th-Century Law Dismantled the KKK. Now It Could Bring Down a New Generation of Extremists. — Lyz Lenz, HuffPost: Although the plaintiffs won a $25 million verdict, the jury was unable to reach a consensus on federal charges that stemmed from alleged violations of the KKK Act of 1871.

After lying dormant for several years, the KKK Act is currently being used to sue conspirators in the January 6th Capitol riot, and in December of 2020, the NAACP filed a lawsuit against Donald Trump and the Republican Party under the act, alleging that they conspired to interfere with the voting rights of Black Americans in Michigan.

• 📖 White Supremacists Used Racist Slurs and Cursed in Bizarre Opening Statements for the Charlottesville Trial — Christopher Miller, BuzzFeed News: Christopher Miller did some great reporting from the trial, posting numerous updates throughout, but perhaps none captured what a sideshow the white supremacist/neo-Nazi defendants wanted the trial to be like his coverage of their opening statements.

“Check. Check. Check,” neo-Nazi shock jock Christopher Cantwell spoke into the courtroom microphone. Wearing a blue shirt without a tie or jacket, he proceeded to name-check Mein Kampf, drop the n-word, plug his far-right radio program, call himself “good-looking” and a “professional artist,” and blast antifascist activists all in a matter of minutes. Surprising nobody in the courtroom, Cantwell, who prepared for this moment with help from two other neo-Nazis in prison and spending evenings watching Tucker Carlson, said “I’m not a lawyer … [but] I'm the best attorney I could afford.” He added, “and I didn’t even stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.”

• 📖 Charlottesville Extremists Lose in Court, but Replacement Theory Lives On — Alan Feuer, The New York Times: Just in case you didn’t get enough outlandish political commentary from some relative around the Thanksgiving dinner table, here’s a doozy for you.

Four years after the event, the same ideas that made “Unite the Right” a lightning rod for hate groups are increasingly being echoed, albeit in modulated tones, by prominent figures in conservative media and politics. Chief among them is the great replacement theory, which holds that Democrats and others on the left are trying to supplant white Americans with immigrants and others for their own political gain.

More of Our Favorites From the Past Week

No Chips, No Problem: Why Old Video Games Are Better Than New Ones — Justin Heckert, 1843 Magazine/The Economist

The Tomb Raiders of the Upper East Side — Ariel Sabar, The Atlantic

Keanu Reeves Knows the Secrets of the Universe — Ryan D’Agostino, Esquire

Hayao Miyazaki Prepares to Cast One Last Spell — Ligaya Mishan, The New York Times Style Magazine

The Dave Portnoy Playbook — Reeves Wiedeman, New York

The Follow-Up

The news doesn’t stop. If you checked out last week’s edition and found the topics interesting, here’s a collection of stories published since.

The Effects of the Pandemic

• 📖 A Crisis of Childhood Grief — Anna North, Vox

Peak Newsletter

• 📖 Substack Is Now a Playground for the Deplatformed — Chris Stokel-Walker, Wired

The Next Academy Awards

• 📖 ‘Procession’ Isn’t a Documentary on Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church — It’s a Portrait of Survivors Reclaiming Their Lives — David Fear, Rolling Stone

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The Postscript

This week, elsewhere on The Postscript.

Searching for the Perfect Title: Michael Norman on 'These Good Men' and 'Tears in the Darkness'

A series from award-winning authors and teachers of writing literary journalism on what they learned from the experience of titling their books.

Searching for the Perfect Title: Amy Wilentz on 'The Rainy Season' and 'Martyrs' Crossing'

A series from award-winning authors and teachers of writing literary journalism on what they learned from the experience of titling their books.

There’s a lot of great journalism out there. Every week, in a format short enough that it won’t be clipped by your inbox, we aim to share some of the best, with additional context for understanding the biggest news of the day. This is a weekly digest of stories you can savor and reporting you can rely on.

Share This Edition of Weekend Reading

Why Health-Care Workers Are Quitting in Droves — Ed Yong, The Atlantic

Ed Yong doesn’t miss. His latest is unsurprisingly great but oh-so bleak when you consider what he’s saying. COVID-19, the disease itself, but also the broader sense of the term that includes public opinion, science skepticism, lackluster governmental responses, and so much more — they’re all taking away our nation’s medical professionals. This story opens with a gripping story of extreme care given by a longtime ICU nurse, and you feel for her. It ends with an ER doctor who recently left the profession, and while it is cumulatively our loss, you can’t help but feel for her too.

• 📖 What Happened at Carmine’s — Bridget Read, The Cut/New York: If Ed Yong’s piece showed on effect of COVID-19 to be a loss of our medical professionals, this story from New York shows the loss of civility. Now, is the COVID-19 pandemic to blame for all of that? Of course not. But this story shows have vaccine mandates — and requirements around those mandates — fueled an ugly narrative that mixed with faulty reporting, innuendo, and other hot-button topics in our national political discourse in 2021.

• 📖 Will Real Estate Ever Be Normal Again? — Francesca Mari, The New York Times Magazine: In a story that could initially feel like it represents the collective loss of sanity on the part of homebuyers, this New York Times Magazine feature gives some interesting explanations for why this possible run on the housing market may not be over any time soon, including my fellow Millennials arriving belatedly to home-buying party after the Great Recession did them no favors.

• 📖 The Home Is the Future of Travel — Derek Thompson, The Atlantic: The CEO of Airbnb considers a reality that was always coming but was accelerated by the pandemic: the revolution made possible by remote work. “And remote work — the ability to do a job not only from home but from anywhere — mashes up our work time and leisure time, erasing the spatial differences between many of our weekdays and weekends.” He and his company are betting that the future of vacations is tied up in those homes people are so desperate to buy right now.

• 📖 What Happened to Eric Clapton? — Geoff Edgers, The Washington Post: Eric Clapton is representative of that which we’ve all had to deal with on some level, and that’s how to assess a person with whom you might disagree. This story tells about a friendship lost, and that’s a reality that many recognize during this highly charged time through which we’re now living. But Clapton is also Clapton, the same famous guitarist who saw his name equated with God in London graffiti decades ago. HIs lofty perch and popularity make him a vector for some troubling thoughts when it comes to COVID-19. What does that do to the artist and fans’ relationships to him? The same questions could be asked of other famous people, like Aaron Rodgers after his willful lies about his vaccination status and his recitation of tired tropes, weak “science” and conspiracy theories. Some will care; others won’t. But his story encapsulates a lot from the past two years.

A Good Newsletter Exit Strategy Is Hard to Find — Delia Cai, Vanity Fair

I’m going to get a bit meta for a minute, thinking about the concept of the very magic that will put these words in front of you: the humble newsletter. Before she was Vanity Fair’s Delia Cai, she was the Cai of Deez Links, a popular media-focused newsletter on Substack. After taking her talents to VF and (for the most part) retiring from the newsletter game, she assessed the state of the great newsletter boom of 2021, prompted, in part, by the aftermath of the Atlantic’s rollout of a new suite of newsletters. While most who start a newsletter are dreaming of growth and longevity, some who’ve already seen both are looking for a way out.

Inevitably, a writer freed from the constraints of pesky editors and SEO dictates must become a writer and a one-person P.R./circulation/audience-development strategist all at once. (Turns out, media companies had those things for a reason?)

• 📖 The Internet’s Unkillable App — Dave Pell, The Atlantic: Dave Pell, the reigning “managing editor of the Internet,” wrote approximately 1.3 bazillion words in his email newsletter, “Next Draft,” before The Atlantic asked him to write an essay on a simple question: Why have newsletters persisted? I liked so much of what he wrote, but especially this paragraph:

Newsletters are patient. I send something to you, and you can read it when you want to and respond (or not) when you want to. You get to absorb and consider the contents of a newsletter without the rest of the internet chiming in, telling you what to think while puking out tweets, replies, posts, comments, photos, videos, news, and memes at a pace that pulverizes human attentional capacity. (The second you catch up, you’re already behind.) Newsletters are always right where you left them. Sure, people complain about having too much email. But compared with everything else online, your inbox is the Walden Pond of the internet.

• 📖 We Haven’t Reached ‘Peak Newsletter.’ Not by a Long Shot. —Jack Shafer, Politico: Jack Shafer weighs in:

The lunatics haven’t taken over the asylum, the writers have. Together they’ve produced something of a shift in the journalism business as a growing number of readers have expressed a taste for unhomogenized, point-of-view journalism from “name” writers that hasn’t felt the iron fist of an editor, doesn’t necessarily conform to the AP Stylebook, and hasn’t been compressed into the inverted pyramid form. Alone, newsletters won’t save journalism from extinction, but as an arrow in the quiver they are doing their part to buttress the shattered business model.

How Kristen Stewart Became Her Generation’s Most Interesting Movie Star — Emily Witt, The New Yorker

The end of the year means a whole host of Oscar-baity movies are on the way, and with the movies come big profiles. This one from the New Yorker catalogs the life and career of Kristen Stewart in the magazine’s typically meticulous way, and it uses some of my favorite tropes of these pieces, namely using the upcoming film to reveal truths about the actor (and vice versa) and the inclusion of the random outing the reporter’s been allowed to share with the star (in this case, it’s a trip to the golf course).

• 📖 Paul Thomas Anderson on ‘Licorice Pizza’ and Moviemaking: ‘Anyone Who’s Done This Knows That Confidence Is an Illusion’ — Brent Lang, Variety: Spend even a short amount of time skimming through Film Twitter these days and you’re sure to see a tweet of rapturous praise for Paul Thomas Anderson’s newest film, Licorice Pizza. This longform Q&A is fun for PTA’s everyman quality — “He’s up by 5, in bed by 9 or 9:30...” — and for a peek into an auteur’s viewing habits — “Shang-Chi was good fun. There’s a terrific energy about it, but I also live in a Marvel-obsessed household, so continuing the journey of these Marvel stories is exciting to us. I liked Venom 2. Titane is worth seeing.”

• 📖 Introducing the Real Will Smith — Wesley Lowery, GQ: Another of Paul Thomas Anderson’s most-anticipated films of the year comes out this week. “I watched the trailer for King Richard, and when it comes out, I will be first in line. When Will Smith decides to turn it on, it’s so magical,” PTA told Brent Lang in Variety. Wesley Lowery profiled Smith ahead of the release of the film, in which he will play the father of Venus and Serena Williams.

For decades, Will Smith was driven by the desire to be the biggest movie star on Earth — early in his career, he even came up with a formula based on the top 10 box office successes of all time. He achieved that goal so effortlessly, ruling the July Fourth weekend from 1996 (Independence Day) to 2008 (Hancock), that it’s easy to forget how unlikely it was for a rapper turned actor. But over the last 10 years, as Smith has become increasingly focused on evolving as a human being, a gulf has emerged between Will Smith the movie star and Will Smith the man.

• 📖 Inside Jane Campion’s Cinema of Tenderness and Brutality — Jordan Kisner, The New York Times Magazine: Sometimes a beautifully complex subject meets a beautiful writer. One of my favorite paragraphs in the whole piece:

Campion tends to seek eye contact, and she is quick to ask fourth-date questions. (During our walk, she asked whether I liked being married, really wanting to know. She is divorced and a bit skeptical of the institution.) She laughs raucously and frequently, and she inserts impish comments into every conversation in her clipped New Zealand accent. She has the drape of fine, silver hair you might associate with a mystic, but everything else about her — the square, chunky black glasses and understated, monochromatic outfits — indicates, aesthetically speaking, what she is: the most decorated female filmmaker alive, an auteur in the lineage of Luis Buñuel, François Truffaut, and Pedro Almodóvar.

More of Our Favorites From the Past Week

To Catch a Turtle Thief: Blowing the Lid Off an International Smuggling Operation — Clare Fieseler, The Walrus

Amazon's Dark Secret: It Has Failed to Protect Your Data — Will Evans, Wired

Seven Forgotten Stories From 1995 — Josh Levin, Slate

The Notorious Mrs. Mossler — Skip Hollandsworth, Texas Monthly

Untimely Futures — Brandi T. Summers, Places

The Follow-Up

The news doesn’t stop. If you checked out last week’s edition and found the topics interesting, here’s a collection of stories published since.

Supreme Court News

• 📖 What Rhymes With Breyer? — Jennifer Senior, The Atlantic

January Insurrection

• 📖 The January 6th Investigation Gets Closer to Donald Trump — David Rohde, The New Yorker

The National Rifle Association

• 📖 Sons of Guns — Elena Saavedra Buckley, Epic Magazine

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The Postscript

This week, elsewhere on The Postscript.

Going Solo: How Journalists Recreated the Production Studio in Their Own Homes

COVID-19 saw journalists adapt to new conditions. With only skeleton crews allowed inside most studios, what did broadcast journalists who had to work from home do? We spoke to three to find out.

Stories That Matter: How a Local Writer Built a Resource for Parents of Color Navigating Seattle's Gifted Program

Jasmine M. Pulido and the South Seattle Emerald, a non-profit digital news outlet, navigate educational equity on a human scale.

There’s a lot of great journalism out there. Every week, in a format short enough that it won’t be clipped by your inbox, we aim to share some of the best, with additional context for understanding the biggest news of the day. This is a weekly digest of stories you can savor and reporting you can rely on.

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Taylor v. Riojas — Harvard Law Review

Qualified immunity protects government officers from being sued for damages unless they have violated ‘clearly established’ law. Following the high-profile police killings of spring 2020, more eyes have turned to holding officers accountable and the ways in which legal doctrines like qualified immunity prevent that from happening. Qualified immunity has come under fire from academics, judges, practitioners, legislators, and the public alike for unjustly precluding remedies for violations of people’s constitutional rights. Last term, in Taylor v. Riojas, the Supreme Court held that correctional officers were not entitled to qualified immunity because the conditions of confinement alleged by the petitioner were so horrific that any reasonable officer should have known they were unconstitutional. In doing so, the Court — for the first time — overturned a grant of qualified immunity based on the obviousness of the constitutional violation. The decision sends a message to lower courts that they cannot ignore the obviousness standard and potentially shows a Supreme Court more willing to police the excesses of the qualified immunity doctrine, even if it will not rethink the doctrine altogether.

• 🎧 A Case That Could Transform America’s Relationship With Guns — Sabrina Tavernise, The Daily/The New York Times: A recent case before the Supreme Court revisited the scope of the Second Amendment for the first time since a landmark case in 2008 established a personal right to own firearms for self-defense in the home. The new case, from the state of New York, seeks to determine the scope of amendment outside the home.

• 📖 What Do We Owe to Those We’ve Condemned to Die? — Michael Hall, Texas Monthly: The absurdity of the law is on display in this case that was heard by the high court on Tuesday. At issue in the case is the push and pull of religious liberty versus law and order: A death row inmate, guilty of a heinous crime, is resigned to his death, and his request, which led to the case, is to have his pastor in the chamber with him as he dies and for the pastor to be allowed lay hands on him and pray aloud for his soul. This is what merits close consideration, but the fact that the state plans to kill the man? Well, that’s pretty settled at this point. No discussion necessary.

• 📖 How Trump Transformed the Supreme Court — Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker: Isaac Chotiner’s incisive questioning is not wasted on Linda Greenhouse, who covered the Supreme Court for more than 30 years. She recently published a book on the Court, and the wide-ranging discussion with Chotiner covers many interesting topics and questions.

• 📖 The Surprisingly High Stakes in a Supreme Court Case About $28,000 — Ian Millhiser, Vox: The lede to this story on a seemingly dry and technical case does a wonderful job of showing how cases before the U.S. Supreme Court are technically about narrow ticky-tack aspects of the law but, in reality, are about so much more.

United States v. Vaello-Madero is a case about an impoverished American citizen, forced to repay a debt to the federal government that he only learned about fairly recently and that he cannot possibly afford. It is also a case about colonialism and the legacy of the U.S. government’s discriminatory treatment of Puerto Rico. And it is a case about the ways American democracy functions, and whether insulating that democracy from an ideological judiciary is worth allowing callous laws to remain in place.

Judge Rejects Trump’s Bid to Keep Papers Secret in Jan. 6 Inquiry — Charlie Savage, The New York Times

This news sat with me after reading it. Not for the depth of the reporting or the elegance of the prose but for the small victory it represented for the rule of law. It’s a very real possibility that, through foot-dragging by those subpoenaed in the inquiry, the mid-term elections will come and go, the Republicans regain control of Congress, and the entire investigation into one of the ugliest days in American history gets dropped. That possibility is thoroughly depressing, so I just wanted to celebrate things working as they should for a minute.

• 🖥️ Before, During, After the Attack — The Washington Post: What a tour de force of journalism! From the depth of the reporting to the digital presentation to the simple-yet-effective framing device of three discrete time periods to look deeper into a blight on the history of the U.S. Capitol, this is what one hopes to get from one of the nation’s few papers well-funded enough to pull it off.

• 📖 At Least 10 Republicans Who Were at the Jan. 6 Rally Just Got Elected to Office — Christopher Mathias, HuffPost: Sigh. Continuing in the vein of “things that are thoroughly depressing,” here’s an example of a headline that tells you all you need to know. If you’re thinking, “Well, attendance at an attempted coup does not necessarily a dunderhead make,” let me encourage you to read some of the tidbits included about those winners. Dunderheads.

• 📖 Tucker Carlson’s ‘Patriot Purge’ Film on Jan. 6 Is Full of Falsehoods, Conspiracy Theories — Bill McCarthy, Poynter: “In his controversial and conspiratorial documentary series attempting to rewrite the events of January 6, Fox News host Tucker Carlson described the attack on the U.S. Capitol as a false-flag operation contrived to frame, trap and ‘purge’ Trump voters in a ‘new war on terror.’” What a lede. The next graf says that “Carlson defended it as ‘rock-solid factually.’” So, you know, it’s pretty much unimpeachable. Except for at least the eight claims that Bill McCarthy dissects, point by point.

A Secret Tape Made After Columbine Shows the NRA's Evolution on School Shootings — Tim Mak, NPR

These recordings are a great many things, but they are, if nothing else, a powerful testament to the power of audio journalism. There’s often an assumption that crass conversations happen behind the scenes of powerful organizations, but to hear these conversations, in the immediate aftermath of the Columbine shootings, is as jarring as it is offensive.

• 📖 An Apparent Ransomware Hack Puts the NRA in a Bind — Lily Hay Newman, Wired: The leaked tapes continues a trend of bad news for the National Rifle Association, which, just a few weeks ago, was said to be the victim of a ransomware attack. The complicating factor is the group said to have hacked the NRA is sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury, which means the NRA could face serious trouble if it even tries to pay the ransom.

• 📖 How a Former Gun Executive Changed His Mind and Turned on the NRA — Ann Givens, Slate: An encouraging read because it has one of the great wonders of the world: a person, perhaps the person you’d consider least likely to do so, who changes their mind.

More of Our Favorites From the Past Week

What Lies Beneath: The Secrets of France’s Top Serial Killer Expert — Scott Sayare, The Guardian

Lawsuit Threats, Empty Seats, and a ‘COVID Mobile’: Trump’s Disastrous Tulsa Rally Was Even More of a Train Wreck Than Originally Thought — Jonathan Karl, Vanity Fair

Bill Ackman’s Glass House — Kim Velsey, Curbed/New York

How NFTs Create Value — Steve Kaczynski & Scott Duke Kominers, Harvard Business Review

The CIA Is Trying to Recruit Gen Z — and Doesn’t Care If They’re All Over Social Media — Jessica M. Goldstein, Washingtonian

The Follow-Up

The news doesn’t stop. If you checked out last week’s edition and found the topics interesting, here’s a collection of stories published since.

Travels to Outer Space

• 📖 The Uncomfortable Truths of American Spaceflight — Marina Koren, The Atlantic

Vaccine Mandates

• 📖 The Vaccine Mandate Kicks in at 100 Employees. What If You’re at 98? — Emma Goldberg, The New York Times

COP26 Climate Coverage

• 🖥️ The Brilliant Ways Big Business Is Pushing Its Climate Agenda During COP26 — Brian Millar, Fast Company

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The Postscript

This week, elsewhere on The Postscript.

Indigenous Literary Journalism, Saturation Reporting, and the Aesthetics of Experience

On the power of two award-winning features by Mohawk journalist Dan David.

Writing From the (Indigenous) Edge: Journeys Into the Native American Experience

Two classic books apply the tools of literary journalism to render Native American life in personal, culturally nuanced, and deeply observed narratives.

There’s a lot of great journalism out there. Every week, in a format short enough that it won’t be clipped by your inbox, we aim to share some of the best, with additional context for understanding the biggest news of the day. This is a weekly digest of stories you can savor and reporting you can rely on.

Share This Edition of Weekend Reading

Ad Astra — Rachel Riederer, Harper’s

Space is one of the last remaining frontiers for which human civilization has remarkably few governing principles. This piece begins in January of 2020, when a U.S. reconnaissance satellite was seemingly approached by a Russian unmanned spacecraft. What followed was a series of provocations, but, technically, Russia had broken no laws.

In fact, the primary source for international law in space is a drastically outdated document from 1967 called the Outer Space Treaty, designed for an environment far simpler than the current field. In a September of 2019 address at a conference for air, space, and cyber security, General Raymond put it this way: “The Outer Space Treaty says you can’t have nuclear weapons in space. That’s about what it says. The rest is the wild, wild West.”

• 📖 We’re Gonna Need Another Space Telescope — Marina Koren, The Atlantic: America announced this week its priorities for space for the next decade.

The decadal survey, organized by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, recommends that NASA establish a program to produce several more major space-based observatories in the coming decades, and that the next one should look for exoplanets — planets beyond our solar system — resembling this little chunk of rock that we call home. In other words, the report recommends, with a sense of urgency not seen in earlier surveys, that we should focus on the search for other Earths.

• 📖 Astronauts Have a Taco Taste Test Using First Chile Peppers Grown in Space — Ashley Strickland, CNN: A next-level awesome headline, just because every word in it is so cool. Astronauts have successfully grown 10 different crops in space since 2015, and it took two years to settle on the specific pepper for this most recent experiment.

Pepper plants self-pollinate, so they are easy to grow, and they are a pick-and-eat crop that doesn't have to be cooked. They also contain low microbial levels, so they are safe to eat raw.

• 🗄️ From 2007: Home — Chris Jones, Esquire: In February of 2003, the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster happened. In 2007, Chris Jones wrote about the two Americans aboard the International Space Station who had no way to get home after the tragedy. 

“I have some bad news,” Howell says, and because it's Howell who's delivering it, Pettit and Bowersox know exactly how bad before he gets it out: “We’ve lost the vehicle.” Nine words. That's all. Everything else is left unspoken, and in the quiet, the blanks are left for each of them to fill in on his own. In the way the parents of missing children hang on to the faintest hope that their loved ones are just lost, not lost for good, Pettit and Bowersox wonder whether any of Columbia’s evacuation systems triggered, and whether any of their friends are floating down to a cloudless Earth under parachutes.

• 🗄️ From 2009: One Giant Leap to Nowhere, Tom Wolfe, The New York Times: Revel in Tom Wolfe’s prose as he recounts the glory of NASA’s early accomplishments and dismay at how those accomplishments seemed to plateau, as he calls for a manned flight to Mars.

How Tyson Foods Got 60,500 Workers to Get the Coronavirus Vaccine Quickly — Lauren Hirsch & Michael Corkery, The New York Times

Just days after the Biden administration announced its requirements for its COVID-19 vaccine mandate, employers around the country are feeling the pinch. Many workers are now faced with a stark decision: get vaccinated or lose their job. But Tyson, one of the largest meatpacking companies in the world, made the call early that it would require its 120,000 employees to be vaccinated, many of whom were situated in the South and Midwest where local vaccination rates were quite low.

• 📖 NYC Police Unions Warned Vaccine Mandates Would Pull 10,000 Officers Off Streets. So Far, the Number Is 34. — Annabelle Timsit, The Washington Post: The New York City police unions warnings were a classic case of bark being worse than bite. When push came to shove, NYC police officers got vaccinated at very high percentages.

• 📖 Biden’s Vaccine Mandate Isn’t Really a Vaccine Mandate — Matt Ford, The New Republic: This article argues that the framing of President Joe Biden’s mandate is a bit of shrewd legal maneuvering designed to help its cause.

In nearly every statement other than Biden’s, and in many news reports on the matter, the OSHA rule was described as a “vaccine mandate.” But this is not actually correct. The new rule is better understood as a testing mandate with a vaccine exception — and that distinction could be crucial as it works its way through courts of law and public opinion.

• 📖 As Villanueva Blasts Vaccine Mandate, Sheriff’s Department Falls Further Behind LAPD in Shots — Alene Tchekmedyian, Kevin Rector & Richard Winton, The Los Angeles Times: There are many instances in popular culture where the county sheriff’s deputies and city police officers — and their respective leaderships — are seen as being odds with each other, prone to jurisdictional squabbling and a seeming lack of conviction that they’re on the same side, so to speak. I see it in good-natured ribbing between the two in my interactions with law enforcement in Wyoming. But what’s happening in Los Angeles County shows the stark difference of elected positions versus appointed ones, as the sheriff, gearing up for re-election, is staking out a conservative path and refusing vaccine mandates for his deputies, while the police chief, appointed by the city, is seeing a much greater success rate for getting his officers vaccinated.

3,000 Miles From Glasgow, a Town and Its Polar Bears Face the Future — Binyamin Appelbaum, The New York Times

This is not another story about saving Hudson Bay’s polar bears. It’s too late for that. This is a story about what comes next for a small town that bills itself as the Polar Bear Capital of the World. In Churchill, an isolated town perched on the southern edge of the Arctic, climate change is not a looming danger. It imbues daily life. It is broken sewer lines and taller trees, longer summers and bigger snowstorms and moose where caribou used to go. Most of all, it is the fear that Americans won’t come visit anymore. Yet the mood in Churchill is surprisingly sunny. If people aren’t exactly cheering for climate change, many are focused on the opportunities global warming could bring to this cold-weather town. The polar bears are in trouble. The people dream of building a maritime city.

• 📖 The U.S. Is Turning Green. What Will This Climate Plan Cost and Who Will Pay? — Shane Shifflett, The Wall Street Journal: More than 200 countries gathered this week in Glasgow for the United Nations Climate Conference, and the Wall Street Journal previewed the event in the thorough, detailed way that only the Journal really can, exploring the biggest hindrance to climate change policies: the cost.

The bill for climate change is coming due, and it will be big. Businesses, investors and the U.S. government are planning to turn the country carbon neutral in the coming 30 years. They are also trying to limit and pay the cost of the climate change that has already occurred.

• 📖 Sunday Reading: The World of Bill McKibben and Elizabeth Kolbert — The New Yorker: This link is definitely a two-for-one special. The New Yorker has a rich archive from which to draw, and David Remnick introduces two classic stories by two of its most storied reporters on environmental issues. Prompted by the U.N. Climate Conference, Remnick simply picked from a long list of possible stories, but his reasoning is solid.

Every writer and editor knows the peril of publishing work about the climate emergency; many readers, fearing gloom, would prefer to read almost anything else. And yet both McKibben and Kolbert, in their own ways, bring such intellectual and literary force to their work that attention must be paid. So by all means follow the daily coverage of Glasgow — but, to understand the stakes, go deep, take the time: read Bill McKibben and Elizabeth Kolbert.

• 📖 The Cutest Way to Fight Climate Change? Send in the Otters. — Matt Simon, Wired: Off the coast of California, there is a forest of kelp that could do wonders at reducing carbon — it could be even more effective than trees on land. But purple urchins have been decimating the kelp since the 18th century, when it became popular to hunt sea otters for their fur. Otters are the natural predators of the urchins. But a team of scientists has overseen an otter adoption program, which has helped reintroduce otters to the California coast in impressive numbers.

More of Our Favorites From the Past Week

Can Jake Paul Fight His Way Out of Trouble? — Kalefa Sanneh, The New Yorker

Slow Burn: The L.A. Riots — Joel Anderson, Slate

Did COVID Change How We Dream? — Brooke Jarvis, The New York Times Magazine

Here’s Why Rapid COVID Tests Are So Expensive and Hard to Find — Lydia DePillis & Eric Umansky, ProPublica

The Nation’s Last Uranium Mill Plans to Import Estonia’s Radioactive Waste — Jessica Douglas, High Country News

The Follow-Up

The news doesn’t stop. If you checked out last week’s edition and found the topics interesting, here’s a collection of stories published since.

The Facebook Papers

• 📖 Why Facebook Shutting Down Its Old Facial Recognition System Doesn’t Matter — Emily Baker-White, BuzzFeed News

The French Dispatch

• 📖 In Defense of Wes Anderson — Cassie Da Costa, Vanity Fair

The Best of the Believer

• 📖 Star System — Elizabeth Greenspan, The Believer

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The Postscript

This week, elsewhere on The Postscript.

The Tech Threat: Literary Journalism in the Age of Interruption

Digital tools can benefit their users as long as they do not overpower personal relationships and social bonds.

Seeking 'Debwewin': Literary Journalism Through an Indigenous Lens

Interpreting works of literary journalism through an Anishinaabe analytical framework for truth.

There’s a lot of great journalism out there. Every week, in a format short enough that it won’t be clipped by your inbox, we aim to share some of the best, with additional context for understanding the biggest news of the day. This is a weekly digest of stories you can savor and reporting you can rely on.

Share This Edition of Weekend Reading

Mark Zuckerberg on Why Facebook Is Rebranding to Meta — Alex Heath, The Verge

Meta. It feels like it should roll off the tongue easier. But when associated with Mark Zuckerberg, it’s just hard for that to sound natural. Zuckerberg is synonymous with the brand that built his billions, Facebook (if The Social Network is to be believed, thanks to Sean Parker’s advice to “Drop the ‘The.’ Just Facebook. It’s cleaner.”) Not unlike the 2015  name change of Google’s parent company to Alphabet, the product that built his empire will remain; You won’t hear people say, “Just Meta me”; grandparents won’t post pictures of grandkids to Meta. The Verge was the first to report on the possibility of the change, and now Zuckerberg is sharing his reasons, which, according to him, have absolutely nothing to do with the avalanche of bad news that’s come out recently about Facebook.

• 📖 Top Outlets (Sort of) Team Up to Make Facebook’s Awful Month Worse — Jon Allsop, Columbia Journalism Review: When I said avalanche of bad news, I did mean avalanche. On Monday, at least 30 different publications were hitting “Publish” on stories stemming from leaked internal Facebook documents. CJR was one of many outlets publishing an aggregation of some of those stories. Now, Weekend Reading, The Postscript’s aggregator, is aggregating the aggregations, which is oh-so-deliciously meta. (You see what I did there.)

• 📖 In the Ocean’s Worth of New Facebook Revelations Out Today, Here Are Some of the Most Important Drops — Joshua Benton, Nieman Lab: Published on the same day as the CJR piece, Joshua Benton’s collection said the count was even higher.

At this typing, their list is up to 40 consortium pieces, including work from AP, Bloomberg, CNBC, CNN, NBC News, Politico, Reuters, The Atlantic, the FT, The New York Times, The Verge, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Wired. (For those keeping score at home, Politico leads with six stories, followed by Bloomberg with five and AP and CNN with four each.)

• ✉️ The Facebook Papers: The Consortium Is Growing — Brian Stelter, Reliable Sources/CNN: What’s that you say? You want more aggregation of Facebook stories? You got it. Brian Stelter also references a handy-dandy Google doc being compiled of all the stories that are coming out. That’s three-levels of aggregation for you. So meta.

• 📖 Inside the Big Facebook Leak — Ben Smith, The New York Times: I’ve mentioned a few times now the “consortium” of news outlets reporting on the Facebook Papers, and the never-to-be-missed media column by Ben Smith takes readers behind the collaborative effort.

‘The French Dispatch’ Review: Remember Magazines? — A.O. Scott, The New York Times

Enough about shake-ups in new media. It’s time to pay tribute to mainstays of old media. A.O. Scott’s review of the new Wes Anderson film, The French Dispatch, clearly stakes out the film as more than just a journalism movie. It’s a very specific kind of journalism movie: a paean to a literary magazine, structured just like the fictional stand-in of The New Yorker, of which Anderson is a longtime reader and collector. That same kind of fanaticism over print magazines is the backbone of The Postscript, and despite the fact that, from my perch in Wyoming, it will likely be mid-2022 before I ever get to see the film, I’m living vicariously through much of the writing surrounding the film’s recent release.

• 📖 The New Yorker Writers and Editors Who Inspired ‘The French Dispatch’ — Erin Overbey, The New Yorker: It’s only fitting that The New Yorker should capitalize on a love letter to it in the form of a movie from one of the most distinctive American directors working. Erin Overbey, The New Yorker’s archive editor (which, side note, sounds like the greatest job ever), pulled together some collected writings of the real-life New Yorker writers, from the likes of Joseph Mitchell to Lillian Ross to James Baldwin, who were blended together to form new composite characters in Wes Anderson’s new film.

• 📖 The Real Star of Wes Anderson’s Films? The Model Maker Who Meticulously Crafts the Signs and Buildings. — Nate Berg, Fast Company: For Wes Anderson, a director with a distinctive visual style, it’s become apparent that he couldn’t achieve that style without a team of miniature-builders.

• 📖 In the Company of Wes Anderson — Melena Ryzik, The New York Times: Come for the Wes Anderson-like opening illustration, which has an added level of functionality to it, and stay for the behind-the-scenes look at why Anderson’s casts seem to love working with him.

• 📖 Wes Anderson’s Whimsy Goes Too Far — David Sims, The Atlantic: Lest you think that all magazine journalists are too in the bag for Wes Anderson because of his subject matter, David Sims’ review throws some cold water on the praise and reminds us that Anderson’s films aren’t for everyone and don’t always work.

The filmmaker has called this movie a “love letter to journalists,” though I couldn’t help but also think of it as the wish list of a present-day blogger dreaming of the industry’s opulence of yore.

The Believer Was a Victim of Mismanagement and Neglect — Nicholas Russell, Gawker

Remember magazines? That was the catchy headline of A.O. Scott’s review of The French Dispatch, and I used it as a jumping off point to highlight a common thread between Wes Anderson and The Postscript. Anderson’s fictional send-up of The New Yorker venerates a magazine in little need of veneration; it’s a longstanding standard bearer of journalistic excellence and riding a streak of strong subscriber buy-in. In the tenuous world of magazine publishing, it’s not going anywhere. But that’s not the case for all magazines. Indeed, The Postscript is the P.S. to Pacific Standard, which, despite producing world-class journalism, did not survive in the modern media landscape. This week announced the death of another top-notch magazine, The Believer. And like so many of these tragic stories of magazines that have gone under, it didn’t have to be the case.

• 📖 In Aftermath of Zoom Dick Fiasco, Believer Staffers Say, Bosses Used Public Records Law Against Them — Anna Merlan & Tim Marchman, Motherboard/Vice: This scandal wasn’t the sole reason The Believer was shuttered, but many believe it shows a carelessness from management that doomed the magazine. It boggles the mind that I can place The New Yorker and The Believer in the same sentence as magazines at which prominent personalities couldn’t keep from exposing themselves on a Zoom call, but here we are.

• 📖 The Believer’s Best of the Decade: Part I — The Believer: I felt like I landed on something when I decided to aggregate the aggregators above in all the Facebook news, so when trying to figure out how best to eulogize The Believer, it seemed only fitting to let it speak for itself.

• 📖 If He Hollers Let Him Go — Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, The Believer: Not to put my thumb on the scale too much, but I wanted to recommend one of the pieces from the Best of the Decade list that I read last week purely because it was relevant to the past two editions of Weekend Reading. It’s a piece about searching for Dave Chappelle 10 years after he left his own show, but almost a full decade before the current Chappelle controversy. It’s worth your time, so don’t wait. Who knows how long The Believer’s archives stay in place.

• 📖 Believer’s Best of the Decade: Part II — The Believer: Unlike the recent worry over the new adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune, which surprised some when they saw the screen say “Dune: Part I” without any promise or guarantee from Warner Bros. at the time as to whether there would be a Part II, I wouldn’t do that to you. I gave you Part I, so it’s only right to give you Part II. (For the record, WB also greenlit Dune: Part II this week.)

• 📖 The Empathy Exams — Leslie Jamison, The Believer: It was actually a tweet from Leslie Jamison that alerted me to the news that The Believer was shutting down. I can’t remember now what my first piece of Jamison’s writing was, but The Believer is a place that saw her early promise. She is a writer I’m compelled to read because her words and sentences are just that good. Even when I can’t possibly relate to her often-autobiographical writing, hers is a voice I want to see on the page. This is one of her best.

More of Our Favorites From the Past Week

Baseball, Popular but No Longer Dominant, Seeks to Reclaim Its Cool — David Waldstein, The New York Times

Shea Serrano Talks About His Hip-Hop Book, Upcoming TV Series and Twitter Army of Kindness — Tommy Tomlinson, SouthBound

What Happens When Your Favorite Thing Goes Viral? — Rebecca Jennings, Vox

The Alec Baldwin Shooting Has Some People Calling for Only Computer-Generated Gunshots. It’s Not as Easy as It Sounds. — Steven Zeitchik, The Washington Post

The Follow-Up

The news doesn’t stop. If you checked out last week’s edition and found the topics interesting, here’s a collection of stories published since.

The Life and Death of Colin Powell

• 📖 ‘Don’t Feel Sorry for Me,’ Powell Said as the End Approached — Bob Woodward, The Washington Post

Ransomware Attacks

• 📖 A Rare Win in the Cat-and-Mouse Game of Ransomware — Nicole Periroth, The New York Times

School Board Unrest

• 📖 A Look at the Groups Supporting School Board Protesters Nationwide — Anya Kamenetz, NPR

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The Postscript

This week, elsewhere on The Postscript.

Stories That Matter: How Serena Daniari Is Highlighting Trans Pandemic Triumphs

Daniari’s work at Condé Nast’s Them is centered around her community, and proving that reporting on what you know firsthand is an undeniable strength.

Stories That Matter: Tracing Conflict Minerals in Africa

The energy revolution has a dark side in Africa, which Tesla, Apple, and other harbingers of the plugged-in future must contend with. Nicolas Niarchos shines a light on some dark supply chains.

There’s a lot of great journalism out there. Every week, in a format short enough that it won’t be clipped by your inbox, we aim to share some of the best, with additional context for understanding the biggest news of the day. This is a weekly digest of stories you can savor and reporting you can rely on.

Share This Edition of Weekend Reading

Colin Powell, Who Shaped U.S. National Security, Dies at 84, Eric Schmitt, The New York Times

If you listened to Tuesday’s episode of The Daily from The New York Times, you would have heard this anecdote: Colin Powell knew that his role in promoting the invasion of Iraq — and how thoroughly he’d been misled and subsequently misled the American people — would one day be the first line of his obituary. And sure enough, it was.

• 📖 Colin Powell, the Humble American — Robin Wright, The New Yorker: “He was a White House fellow during the Nixon administration and later broke centuries-old racial barriers in three of America’s most powerful jobs: as national-security adviser, in the Reagan administration; chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations; and Secretary of State, in the George W. Bush administration. Until Barack Obama took office, he was the most powerful African American in U.S. history.” But this piece, like so many of the best obituaries and eulogies, is stronger for its brief glimpses of the man, not the breaker of racial barriers.

• 📖 What Working for Colin Powell Taught Me — Kori Schake, The Atlantic: To begin to truly see a man who is rightly both lionized and vilified, it’s nice to peer behind the curtain at what it was like to share an office with him. Turns out, he was a thoughtful boss. For example: “Even though he rose early and worked ceaselessly, he rarely came in the office before 7 a.m. as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, because he knew that if he did, we’d be in at 6:30; when he slept in his office during the 1991 Gulf War, his closest aides kept it tightly secret so the rest of us wouldn’t follow his lead.”

• 🎧 Colin Powell’s Pivotal Moment That Wasn’t — On the Media/WNYC Studios: A reflection on the tragic moment of Colin Powell’s 2003 address to the United Nations that paved the way for America’s invasion of Iraq. “He had a wonderful life, but there was one moment when he could have had a decisive life and he didn’t go there,” said Fred Kaplan in conversation with On the Media’s Brooke Gladstone.

• 📖 Colin Powell: The Man Who Might Have Been America’s First Black President — David Smith, The Guardian: Colin Powell was a principled man, and it truly is one of the great what-ifs in American political history to wonder what the country, and, more specifically, the Republican Party might look like today if he’d chosen to run for president. In 2008, despite his respect for John McCain, Powell endorsed Barack Obama.

He told the NBC politics show Meet the Press: “I’m also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, ‘Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.’ Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim American kid believing that he or she could be president?'“

When Ransomware Hits Rural America — Andrea Peterson, Slate

A small county in Kansas proved what we all probably intuitively could have guessed all along: A ransomware attack on a rural target could be more damaging than a similar attack to a bigger target. That is the case for all the reasons you would expect, namely that the entities in rural settings often have less security safeguards in place, and fewer resources and personnel dedicated to cybersecurity. There’s also the reality that large sums of money are simply less likely to be on hand in these places than in a big city’s budget. All this leads to a very bad outcome when they are hit with an attack, and from the looks of things, more attacks on rural targets can only be expected.

• 📖 Ransomware Rises as a National Security Threat as Bigger Targets Fall — Bree Fowler, CNET: The United States recently hosted a summit to address the problem of ransomware at which more than 30 countries were in attendance. The U.S. hosted the summit presumably because ransomware has grown into such a pronounced problem in this country and will only continue to be one.

According to a report issued October 15th by the Department of the Treasury, suspected ransomware payments reported by banks and other financial institutions totaled $590 million for the first six months of this year, easily surpassing the $416 million in suspicious payments reported for all of 2020.

• 🖥️ A Hospital Hit by Hackers, a Baby in Distress: The Case of the First Alleged Ransomware Death — Kevin Poulsen, Robert McMillan & Melanie Evans, The Wall Street Journal: The tragic but inevitable conclusion of the host of problems hackers can cause with ransomware.

• 🖥️ The Anatomy of a Ransomware Attack — Gerrit De Vynck, Rachel Lerman, Ellen Nakashima & Chris Alcantara, The Washington Post: If you’ve ever wondered exactly what happens during a ransomware attack, this thorough breakdown is a good introduction to all of the moving parts.

Energizing Conservative Voters, One School Board Election at a Time — Stephanie Saul, The New York Times

The issue of school boards becoming the targets of conservative parents and community members hits close to home for me, as so much of my time as a reporter has been spent covering the local school board. Normally, it’s a painfully dull ordeal. That’s not my personal viewpoint, but rather it’s an assumption borne from anecdotal observations about how little interest anyone in the community has in the goings-on of their school district. Occasionally parents will have a niche concern, but, on the whole, it’s a relatively mild beat to cover. Until it isn’t. Critical race theory, masks, vaccine incentive programs (not even mandates, simply bonus payments) and more have become hot-button issues that draw numerous community members (some not parents or grandparents of students at all) into an increasingly political discourse.

• 🎧 What It’s Like to Be on the Front Lines of the School Board Culture War — Anya Kamenetz, All Things Considered/NPR: A woman simply wants to run for her local school board. It’s a dedicated act, for sure, but one that would be considered dull in normal times. Not so much right now, though. An ad opposing her candidacy cropped up: “‘Here in Gwinnett County our kids face a grave threat. A ticket of radical liberals is running for school board,’ says the voiceover. The ad connects Watkins and two other school board candidates to teen pregnancy, Marxism and the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida — that last because of the candidates’ support for reducing the use of police officers in schools.” Like those memes that identify the three genders, it’s hard not to get worked up about those three classic pillars of liberalism: (presumably support for) teen pregnancy, Marxism, and the 2018 Parkland school shooting.

• 📖 Critical Race Fury: The School Board Wars Are Getting Nasty in Texas— Christopher Hooks, Texas Monthly: If you haven’t sat through one of these school board meetings, perhaps you’re saying to yourself, “How bad can it really be?” Read this dispatch from Texas Monthly and try to keep your blood from boiling. “Why, the parents want to know, does Eanes need a diversity program at all? ‘I was raised as a minority in school,’ one parent says. ‘I’m a Jew, OK? I was the only one in my school most of the time. I’m just fine, by the way.’ A father says that when he was young, he was told to ‘suck it up’ when he was bullied. The kids in Eanes who have complained of being taunted with racial slurs, he says, should toughen up a bit. Expressing the idea that the diversity program is intended to make white people feel ashamed of being white, one woman reminds the school board members, ‘You guys are all white,’ and demands to know, ‘Are you feeling guilty?’” If these examples of rock-solid logic don’t convince you how ugly such meetings can be, read on to the part where the (nominal) adults in the room heckle a teenager for having the gall to suggest a high school needs to promote diversity. It’s inspiring stuff.

• 📖 The Increasingly Wild World of School Board Meetings — Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker: The people serving on these boards are fearful. And rightfully so.

After a school board meeting in Williamson County, Tennessee, a group of protesters surrounded a doctor who had testified in favor of students wearing masks, shouting, “You’re a child abuser,” “We know who you are,” and “You’ll never be allowed in public again.” In San Diego County, California, in September, anti-mask protesters forced their way into a school board meeting and tried to swear themselves in as the new, unelected members. At a chaotic meeting in Buncombe, North Carolina, parents opposed to a mask mandate announced that they, too, had “overthrown” the school board. Members of the far-right Proud Boys showed up twice, faces covered, at school board meetings in Nashua, New Hampshire; in Vancouver, Oregon, Proud Boys gained access to school grounds during anti-mask protests, leading to a lockdown of the schools. At a Loudoun County, Virginia, school board meeting, which was considering the district’s policies for transgender students and racial equity, riled-up conservatives got so out of hand that the board chair halted the proceedings while the police cleared the room.

More of Our Favorites From the Past Week

‘More Immediate, More Visceral’ and a Lot Tougher on Eric Clapton: A Plan for Reviving Rolling Stone — Margaret Sullivan, The Washington Post

Raya and the Promise of Private Social Media — Kyle Chayka, The New Yorker

The Inside Story of Tom Brady’s Departure From New England — Seth Wickersham, Sports Illustrated

The New Lost Cause — David Graham, The Atlantic

The Follow-Up

The news doesn’t stop. If you checked out last week’s edition and found the topics interesting, here’s a collection of stories published since.

Juvenile Justice

• 📖 Florida Juvenile Justice’s Long History of Scandals, Carol Marbin Miller, Miami Herald

Hollywood Goes on Strike

• 📖 Film and TV Workers Have a Tentative Deal. Will IATSE’s Rank and File Accept It? — Alex N. Press, Jacobin

Profiles of the Powerful

• 📖 The Passion of Questlove — Jazmine Hughes, The New York Times Magazine

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The Postscript

This week, elsewhere on The Postscript.

'What Inna Namea Christ Is This': The Origins of Tom Wolfe's Journalistic Voice

Famous not only for his idiosyncratic, exuberant use of punctuation but for what one commentator called his “wake-the-dead” prose style, Tom Wolfe has one of the most distinctive journalistic voices.

The First Person in Journalism Must Be Earned

Journalism, and our written culture generally, has been moving in the direction of more first person over the past 30 or 40 years, but its use should be justified by the value it adds.

There’s a lot of great journalism out there. Every week, in a format short enough that it won’t be clipped by your inbox, we aim to share some of the best, with additional context for understanding the biggest news of the day. This is a weekly digest of stories you can savor and reporting you can rely on.

Share This Edition of Weekend Reading

The Shadow Penal System for Struggling Kids — Rachel Aviv, The New Yorker

I vaguely remember the Teen Challenge location in a neighboring town to where I grew up. I didn’t know much about it, except that it was intended for kids who’d gotten in some sort of trouble. I knew there was some connection to Christianity, but I gave little thought to it because it seemed like one of any number of programs in rural Tennessee. Rachel Aviv’s story revealed just how little I knew about the organization, and I’m equal parts thankful I didn’t know and ashamed by that same lack of knowledge. It’s remarkable the ways we can come up with to be terrible to the most vulnerable among us.

• 🖥️ Black Children Were Jailed for a Crime That Doesn’t Exist. Almost Nothing Happened to the Adults in Charge. — Meribah Knight, Nashville Public Radio & Ken Armstrong, ProPublica: This story first came to my attention by way of a well-written Twitter thread, and no matter the medium, the details of this story will turn your stomach. An episode that happens on countless playgrounds across the country every day led to multiple arrests and jailings of young Black children, not for participating in the non-event but for failing to stop it. This warped sense of juvenile justice is allowed to happen under the reign of a single judge, who thinks she’s on a mission from God to keep kids on the straight and narrow.

• 📖 In Arizona, a Radical Change in Juvenile Detention — Ruxandra Guidi, High Country News: A different state, a different judge dealing with juveniles, an entirely different outcome. An example of how things could go — should go — when trying to help out future generations.

The Film Industry Wants to Keep the Status Quo? Then Shut It Down. — Alex Press, The New York Times

The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), the union that represents “below-the-line” workers in Hollywood, is threatening to strike over deplorable working conditions made only worse by the streaming wars and the COVID-19 pandemic. To get an idea of just how fed up the workers are, consider these staggering statistics: “On October 4th, IATSE’s 36 locals, including some 60,000 people, returned a vote of 99 percent in favor of authorizing a strike should progress at the bargaining table prove impossible, with 90 percent of eligible members casting ballots.”

• 📖 Behind Hollywood Glamour, an Instagram Account Highlights Darker Side for Workers — Anousha Sakoui, The Los Angeles Times: Social media became an outlet for disgruntled IATSE members to share their stories of extreme working conditions. The complaints are numerous, but a common one came from members working such long hours that they were literally afraid for their safety to simply drive home at the end of a shift. Some are even more extreme.

One worker on August 19th described an incident where a department head had died of a heart attack on set a few weeks earlier and crew members were told to keep working. A grief counselor was brought in the next day, but crew weren’t given time to visit the counselor, the worker wrote.

• 🎧 The Strike That Could Paralyze Hollywood — What Next, Slate: An examination of the issues underlying the IATSE strike and possible ramifications if it goes through, all in less than 30 minutes.

• 🗄️ From 1988: Labor Power and Organization in the Early U.S. Motion Picture Industry — Michael C. Nielsen, Film History/JSTOR: Anybody who’s ever been to college or graduate school or worked in a career field where academic research was required knows the value of JSTOR, an online repository of more than 12 million academic journal articles, books, and primary sources in 75 disciplines. It’s just fun to read this type of material every now and then, and what used to be reserved to those only with library or institutional privileges can now be accessed by the masses to the tune of 100 free articles a month. Use one of them and read about the background of unions in Hollywood.

Paul McCartney Doesn’t Really Want to Stop the Show — David Remnick, The New Yorker

David Remnick writes only a few pieces a year, and his passion for music has shown through in recent years with his chosen topics. This one is no different. A massive topic — Paul McCartney — that seems daunting to even contemplate writing about in 2021, but it somehow seems routine for Remnick.

• 🎧 The Beatles: This is not quite another profile, but on the always excellent Song Exploder podcast, host Hrisikesh Hirway recently dissected a song a little bit differently than it’s normally done for the show.

Earlier this year, I got an amazing email — the estate of John Lennon said that they have a treasure trove of audio material from his life, and they were wondering if I would be interested in making an episode around the song “God,” from John Lennon’s first solo album. I’ve never tried making a posthumous episode before, because hearing directly from the artist is at the heart of Song Exploder. But with all the interview archives that they have of him speaking, plus all the isolated tracks from the recordings, and the original demo, it actually seemed possible. So this is a very different and special episode of the show.

• 📖 Kumail Nanjiani’s Feelings — E. Alex Jung, Vulture/New York: A refreshingly honest look at the price of desperately seeking superficiality. Kumail Nanjiani was perfect for a Marvel movie: a comic book hero role for a nerdy comic book fan. But then he got in shape and transformed his body into one befitting such a role, in modern viewers’ minds, at least. It didn’t feel good, despite the accomplishment, and in this interview, he and the writer grapple with why that was the case.

• 📖 Dwayne Johnson Lets Down His Guard — Chris Heath, Vanity Fair: Writing about people is hard. Full stop. Writing about famous people is harder. Writing about Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has to be damn-near impossible. What is there left to say? How many times can a person run through his resume and accomplishments? How many different ways can a person talk about how kind and genuine the man is? Here, Chris Heath, a National Magazine Award-winning writer, tackles the assignment well, but it feels like it falls short of the same essential story written by Caity Weaver in 2017 because of Heath’s choice to begin the article around the lingering question of “Will The Rock run for president?” But he reveals some powerful stories, and we’re reminded of why we read celebrity profiles: in hopes of knowing giants a little more intimately.

• 🗄️ From 2018: How Goop’s Haters Made Gwyneth Paltrow’s Company Worth $250 Million — Taffy Brodesser-Akner, The New York Times Magazine: You’re thinking it, I’m thinking it, we’re all thinking it: This list of recent profiles is just a bunch of men writing about a bunch of other, more-famous men. How boring, no? As a palate-cleanser, here’s one of my absolute favorite profiles, period. From one of the best in business, and I know that must be true because I remember exactly where I was when I read this piece, I remember being unable to put it down, and I remember (because it’s still true to this day) to being a run-of-the-mill, average-at-best fan of Gwyneth Paltrow. But that’s the power of a great profile: It can hook you and, suddenly, you want to be in this person’s world for just a minute, just a second longer.

More of Our Favorites From the Past Week

A Secretive Hedge Fund Is Gutting Newsrooms — McKay Coppins, The Atlantic

Blood, Lies, and a Drug Trials Lab Gone Bad — Brendan I. Koerner, WIRED

How to Be a Music Critic With The New Yorker’s Kelefa Sanneh — The Press Box

What Wyoming Really Thinks of Liz Cheney — David Montgomery, The Washington Post Magazine

I Found Clickhole’s ‘Worst Person You Know’ — Cameron Wilson, Slate

The Follow-Up

The news doesn’t stop. If you checked out last week’s edition and found the topics interesting, here’s a collection of stories published since.

The Promise and Peril of Nuclear Power

• 📖 Why Crypto Mining Needs Nuclear Power — Florent Haidet & Milos Atz, CoinDesk

The Fight for Local News

• 📖 New Owners Seek to Revive Missouri Newspapers Sold by Gannett — Rudi Keller, Missouri Independent

Cancel Culture

• 📖 Dave Chappelle’s Betrayal — Saeed Jones, GQ

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The Postscript

This week, elsewhere on The Postscript.

'Storytelling Makes It Possible to Show the Ambiguities of a Reality': A Conversation With Pascal Verbeken

The Belgian writer on why he doesn't use the term "literary journalism," Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, and the demise of the local press.

Stories That Matter: How Hunter Harris Wrangled the Ensemble Cast of Fall's Biggest Show

Or how to write about TV shows without accidentally leaking spoilers.

There’s a lot of great journalism out there. Every week, in a format short enough that it won’t be clipped by your inbox, we aim to share some of the best, with additional context for understanding the biggest news of the day. This is a weekly digest of stories you can savor and reporting you can rely on.

Share This Edition of Weekend Reading

Can Nuclear Fusion Put the Brakes on Climate Change? — Rivka Galchen, The New Yorker

A dense but imminently readable deep dive into not only nuclear power, but the unicorn of the field — nuclear fusion. It’s incredibly difficult to write about such heady, scientific material in a way that feels accessible and interesting, but Rivka Galchen does here, powered by the real-world climate crisis and nuclear fusion’s appeal as a potential silver bullet.

• 🖥️ Why Nuclear Plants Are Shutting Down — Cleo Abram, Vox: A short video on the closure of the nuclear power plant at Indian Point, just 30 miles north of New York City. It feels wild to think about a plant being so close to such a massive population center, but then you learn just how much energy it produced, and you understand it as a perfect encapsulation of the push-pull nature of nuclear energy. When operating, Indian Point provided more electricity than is produced annually by all solar and wind in New York State.

• 📖 Cold War, Hot Mess — Lois Parshley, Virginia Quarterly Review: Were you one of the many people who watched the limited series Chernobyl on HBO? It brought to life the horrors of that terrible accident and criminal mismanagement for a whole new generation. It was that mismanagement aspect that generated the show’s drama: a Cold War government too proud to admit failure and its people suffering the cost. This article on the Department of Energy and America’s own mismanagement of nuclear waste is a slow-motion version of that. It’s particularly tough to read about Hanford, Washington, the site of the world’s first nuclear reactor and the cost that town has paid for being on the cutting edge of science.

• 🗄️ From 2017: Why the Scariest Nuclear Threat May Be Coming From Inside the White House — Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair: Though the Trump administration is no longer in power, Michael Lewis’ look at the governmental mismanagement of the Department of Energy shows that problems like Chernobyl and Hanford don’t happen in a vacuum.

What We Lost When Gannett Came to Town — Elaine Godfrey, The Atlantic

This story about the power of a local newspaper fills me with a particular brand of hope, as I’m working at a local paper in Wyoming. I see many similarities between my current paper and the Iowa paper Elaine Godfrey grew up reading. This story focuses on how acquisitions by bigger media companies work to kill off local papers, and it posits a thesis of what happens when they’re gone: It makes people feel less connected and more alone.

• 📖 The Fight for the Future of America’s Local Newspapers — Anna Nicolaou & James Fontanella-Khan, The Financial Times: This is a widespread issue.

About one in four U.S. newspapers, or almost 2,200 titles, have shuttered in the past 15 years, according to a University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Media report. Many of the remaining 6,700 publications have become what UNC calls “ghost newspapers”: shells of their former selves, stuffed with adverts and wire copy after years of gutting.

• 🎧 The Decline of Local News — Dave Davies & Margaret Sullivan, Fresh Air/NPR: Though she’s now a media columnist at the Washington Post and was previously the public editor at the New York Times, Margaret Sullivan brings a level of credibility to her writing about the peril of the decline of local news since she spent many years at The Buffalo News. Sullivan wrote an entire book on the topic called Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy.

• 📖 These Publications Aren’t Free ... and Readers Don’t Mind — Marc Tracy, The New York Times: A look at newsrooms and publications that are trying to reinvent the wheel, moving away from an advertiser-supported model of journalism to one that relies primarily on its readers.

The Daily Memphian, a nonprofit news site in Memphis, is also part of the wave, with readers contributing the bulk of its revenue. It started in 2018 in response to the shrinking of the local newspaper, The Commercial Appeal. Nearly 17,000 subscribers pay $99 per year (or $12.99 per month) for The Memphian, and they have renewed their subscriptions at a rate of 90 percent, said Eric Barnes, the publication’s chief executive. Ad sales, sponsorships and donations cover the rest of a $5 million annual budget that supports a newsroom of 38.

• 📖 Defector Annual Report, September 2020 – August 2021 — The Defector: The fine folks at The Defector, which has officially been around for a year now and is made up of the same voices of writers and editors that made the original iteration of Deadspin so popular, recently released their first annual report on how they made money and from where. It’s a shining light of an example that things don’t have to be so gloomy for publications; readers will support them if the product is of a high quality.

Dave Chappelle’s Endless Feedback Loop — Craig Jenkins, Vulture/New York

Dave Chappelle is at it again. By “it” I do mean comedy (he’s back with a new Netflix special) but I also mean confronting notions of cancel culture and pushing the bounds of political correctness. This interesting review of his latest special delves deep into what Craig Jenkins says is Chappelle’s desire to have things both ways:

What it seems the comic wants is license to be an equal-opportunity offender, to have it known that there’s no malice in his jabs. He wants the old thing back — the freedom to be crass without having it reflect negatively on his character.

• 📖 The New Puritans — Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic: This was a tricky piece and one that had much of the internet (or at least journalism Twitter) talking when it came out (though perhaps not to the extent of “Bad Art Friend” this week). It wasn’t necessarily anything wrong or offensive Anne Applebaum wrote in the story, but rather the conceit of the story itself that seemed to spark a lot of ire. It focused on those who’d been canceled, those who’d suffered consequences for their actions, and what that experience was actually like.

• 🗄️ From 2020: The Long and Tortured History of Cancel Culture — Ligaya Mishan, The New York Times Style Magazine: Sometimes a title perfectly encapsulates what the article is about, and this is a great example of it.

• 🗄️ From 2019: Michael Jackson Cast a Spell. ‘Leaving Neverland’ Breaks It. — Wesley Morris, The New York Times: So much of the discussion around cancel culture focuses on one of two camps: those being canceled, or those calling for cancellation. But there are also the supporters of the canceled: those unwilling to see negative actions as a reason to cast someone aside. I often think of Wesley Morris and his reaction to the powerful Michael Jackson documentary Leaving Neverland. He reckons honestly with his fandom, articulates how canceling Jackson is a massive decision, and then reasons why it’s imperative that he no longer be a fan.

• 🗄️ From 2019: Reckoning With the Real Michael Jackson, Michael Barbaro, The Daily/The New York Times: A conversation with Wesley Morris that lets a person hear what grappling with cancel culture sounds like. I respect Morris for his willingness to say, in essence: “This was hard for me. I do not like what this will mean for my life going forward.” He admitted to coming to the Michael Jackson allegations with the baggage of fandom and needing to grapple with that. It was an understandable articulation of what, when unexamined, leads to people reflexively digging in heels and refusing to cancel problematic favorites, which fans the flames of cancel culture controversy. “The work is on us. I think part of the reason people want an easy answer or don’t want to know anything is because we don’t want to do the work.”

More of Our Favorites From the Past Week

How AT&T Helped Build Far-Right One America News — John Shiffman, Reuters

Who Is the Bad Art Friend? — Robert Kolker, The New York Times Magazine

In the Pandemic Stories of Everyday Americans, Fear and Grief Feel Fresh Again —  Emily Balcetis, The Washington Post

Why LeBron Is Wrong About ‘Honoring’ Vaccination Hesitancy — Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar/Substack

The Follow-Up

The news doesn’t stop. If you checked out last week’s edition and found the topics interesting, here’s a collection of stories published since.

The Sopranos

• 🖥️ The Ringer’s Definitive ‘Sopranos’ Episode Rankings — Justin Sayles, The Ringer

Christianity and Politics

• 📖 What American Christians Hear at Church — Casey Cep, The New Yorker

Excerpts and Reviews of New Novels

• 📖 Abdulrazak Gurnah Is Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature — Alexandra Alter & Alex Marshall, The New York Times

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The Postscript

This week, elsewhere on The Postscript.

'Journalists at Heart Are Storytellers': A Conversation With Elinor Burkett

The Academy Award-winning reporter on leaving a tenured professorship to get into journalism and why it's important to always be hyper-conscious of who your audience is.

Six Months in Central and South America With the Portuguese Female Travel Writer Raquel Ochoa

A close look at the literary journalist's 2008 book, "The Wind of Others."

There’s a lot of great journalism out there. Every week, in a format short enough that it won’t be clipped by your inbox, we aim to share some of the best, with additional context for understanding the biggest news of the day. This is a weekly digest of stories you can savor and reporting you can rely on.

Share This Edition of Weekend Reading

Why Is Every Young Person in America Watching ‘The Sopranos’ — Willy Staley, The New York Times Magazine

A wonderfully expansive essay that not only looks to answer the question posed in the headline, but also to explore the history of the show, the mind of the man who created the show, and the show’s most recent offspring, The Many Saints of Newark, which premiered this week.

• 🎥 The 12 Defining Scenes of ‘The Sopranos’ — Adam Nayman, The Ringer: I always love whenever Nayman publishes a story with The Ringer or appears on one of its podcasts. For a publication/podcast network that gives off a low-brow, easily accessible charm (albeit from very intelligent personalities), Nayman’s inclusion among its ranks always seems to elevate the discourse to an almost academic level. Here, he brings his keen eye to telling moments of the show, but they’re not necessarily big or momentous moments. That’s what makes them so insightful.

• 📖 How Do You Follow ‘The Sopranos’? — Matt Zoller Seitz, Vulture/New York: A piece similar to the Willy Staley essay for The New York Times Magazine, in that it touches on the legacy of the show and the newly released prequel movie. But this is a profile, going deeper into the mind of David Chase, the show’s creator.

David Chase is Schrödinger’s showrunner, of two minds on almost everything. Outwardly, he expresses deep gratitude for The Sopranos’ medium-altering success, but I’ve always sensed ambivalence about the realization that it created a bottomless appetite for more Sopranos stories, not necessarily more David Chase stories.

• 🗄️ From 2007: The Long Con — Emily Nussbaum, New York: I love this piece from 2007. It’s collected in Emily Nussbaum’s book I Like to Watch, and it’s an insightful look into the culture surrounding The Sopranos at the time, and what it meant for a country to so deeply love such a character as deeply flawed as Tony Soprano.

They Went to Bible College to Deepen Their Faith. Then They Were Assaulted — and Blamed for It. — Becca Andrews, Mother Jones

This is a disturbing look into one of the most influential Christian schools in the country, and how assault was not only tolerated but the victims were held responsible because they’d somehow “tempted” their abusers. This was partly due to the school’s biblical teachings, and it made it even harder for the victims’ voices to be heard.

• 📖 The Baffling Legal Standard Fueling Religious Objections to Vaccine Mandates — Charles McCrary, The New Republic: An interesting look at the vague and nebulous standard by which those opposed to the COVID-19 vaccine mandate will seek exemption. It’s hard to comprehend what a winning argument might look like, but that’s not to say winning arguments will be few and far between.

• 🖥️ White, Evangelical, and … Progressive — Alex Samuels, FiveThirtyEight: The headline to this piece felt like it might as well have been describing a unicorn. While the article paints a picture of the existence of white evangelical liberals, the data included just reiterates the obvious: There are very few of them, and the mainstream doesn’t seem likely to follow them any time soon.

• 📖 How the Christian Right Embraced Voter Suppression — Sarah Posner, Vox: A comprehensive overview of recent history when it comes to the emergence of voter suppression laws and evangelical Christian support for such laws. Theirs is a demographic known for getting out the vote, and they’re working hard to make sure others can’t exercise that right so easily.

The Church of Jonathan Franzen — Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker

A new book from Jonathan Franzen can’t help but catch the attention of the literary world, as evidenced by this lengthy and thorough review and analysis in The New Yorker.

It is true that Crossroads is also concerned, like every Franzen novel, with the makeup and the breakdown of American families. And it is concerned, too, with the issues implied by the title he gave it: those moments in the lives of individuals and in the history of a nation when stark choices with permanent consequences must be made. But, deliberately and otherwise, the book returns again and again to the same question: What does it mean — for a person and, in a different sense, for a novel — to be good?

• 📖 The Republic of Literature — John le Carré, Harper’s: “John le Carré was the best-selling author of more than two dozen novels, and first wrote for Harper’s magazine in 1965. He died in December of 2020, leaving behind a final, completed novel, Silverview, which will be published this month by Viking.” Thus reads the brief author bio at the bottom of this excerpt. Sit back and let the words of a master wash over you.

• 📖 Day One at the Every: An Excerpt From Dave Eggers’ New Novel — Dave Eggers, Wired: Eggers is returning to familiar ground, which he first explored in his 2013 novel The Circle. From the Wired teaser language: “When the world’s largest search engine and social media company, the Circle, merges with the planet’s dominant ­ecommerce site, it creates the richest and most dangerous — and, oddly enough, most beloved — monopoly ever known: the Every. … Delaney is an unlikely new hire, but she charms her way into the ecommerce giant with one goal in mind: to take down the company from within.” With parallels to the real world plainly obvious, it should be noted that his book will only be for sale through independent bookstores.

• 🎧 How Colson Whitehead Writes About Our ‘Big Wild Country’ — Ezra Klein, The Ezra Klein Show/The New York Times: It’s my firmly held belief that we should listen to Colson Whitehead as much as possible, and the publication of his latest novel, Harlem Shuffle, makes for a great conversation with Ezra Klein.

More of Our Favorites From the Past Week

We’re Already Barreling Toward the Next Pandemic — Ed Yong, The Atlantic

The New Yorker Writers and Editors Who Inspired ‘The French Dispatch’ — Erin Overbey, The New Yorker

I Had A Chance to Travel Anywhere? Why Did I Pick Spokane? — Jon Mooallem, The New York Times Magazine

Jim Sheeler, Pulitzer-Winning Journalist Who Honored Fallen Troops, Dies at 53 — Harrison Smith, The Washington Post

When Public Health Becomes the Public Enemy — Jane C. Hu, High Country News

The Follow-Up

The news doesn’t stop. If you checked out last week’s edition and found the topics interesting, here’s a collection of stories published since.

Labor and Workers

• 📖 A Profession Is Not a Personality — Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic

True Crime Stories

• 📖 True Crime, Keith Morrison and Me — Jane Coaston, The New York Times

Life in Texas

• 📖 I Love Whataburger, I Just Wish Its Cups Were Biodegradable — Hannah Smothers, Texas Monthly

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The Postscript

This week, elsewhere on The Postscript.

Miles Franklin and the Women Literary Journalists of Gonzo Ethnography

Immersing in low-wage labor brings to mind George Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London," yet there is a history of literary journalists that predate him and his work.

'You Can Write About Reality and Do Literature': A Conversation With Susana Moreira Marques

The Gulbenkian fellowship recipient and Guardian contributor on literary journalism in Portugal and the differences between reporting for newspapers and reporting for book-length projects.

There’s a lot of great journalism out there. Every week, in a format short enough that it won’t be clipped by your inbox, we aim to share some of the best, with additional context for understanding the biggest news of the day. This is a weekly digest of stories you can savor and reporting you can rely on.

Share This Edition of Weekend Reading

Americans Have No Idea What the Supply Chain Really Is — Amanda Mull, The Atlantic

A beautifully simple concept that so often goes overlooked by sanitized language, especially during the pandemic: The supply chain is just people. That’s what we’re talking about. Human beings. Workers.

• 🖥️ Revolt of the Delivery Workers — Josh Dzieza, Curbed/New York: More on the human toll of our current economy. This is a harrowing paragraph: “Delivery workers now move faster than just about anything else in the city. They keep pace with cars and weave between them when traffic slows, ever vigilant for opening taxi doors and merging trucks. They know they go too fast, any worker will say, but it’s a calculated risk. Slowing down means being punished by the apps.” Don’t miss the photo in the story with the caption that reads, “Anthony Chavez delivers an ice cream during Hurricane Ida.

• 📖 When Quitting Your Job Feels Like the Only Option — Laura Entis, Vox: Just staggering statistic after staggering statistic in this piece. It’s hard not to feel gross after reading it. Gross about the system as a whole, gross that we, as a society, haven’t insisted that we do better, gross for every time during the pandemic I went to a store staffed by essential workers or ordered something online to avoid those essential workers but forced to action another set of essential workers.

• 📖 Why Are So Many Knowledge Workers Quitting? — Cal Newport, The New Yorker: A friend of mine sent this article to me when it was first published in August. “This made me think of you,” he said. We’d practiced law together before I quit to return to graduate school. It made sense that he would think of me; I fit the mold of what Newport is describing as a knowledge worker. But now I think about the journalists, among whom I’m fortunate to count myself, and wonder about them, about us. We have all of the triggers that caused so many to quit, except for one thing (for most of us): We’re not paid well. That was the defining characteristic underpinning his group, and I can’t help but worry that if journalists seek that slower pace, the reclamation of their free time, it will take them many places but almost all assuredly away from the profession of journalism.

• ✉️ The ‘Capitalism Is Broken’ Economy — Anne Helen Petersen, Culture Study/Substack: My favorite graf from this whole essay maybe; it’s so simply stated yet so effective:

Stick with me here, but what if people weren’t lazy — and instead, for the first time in a long time, were able to say no to exploitative working conditions and poverty-level wages? And what if business owners are scandalized, dismayed, frustrated, or bewildered by this scenario because their pre-pandemic business models were predicated on a steady stream of non-unionized labor with no other options? It’s not the labor force that’s breaking. It’s the economic model.

Gabby Petito, Online Detectives, and the Queasy Places Our True-Crime Obsessions Have Taken Us — Delia Cai, Vanity Fair

I like this essay because it grapples with some of the myriad thoughts I have on this particular current national fixation. I’m geographically closer to the story than many people reading about it because Gabby Petito died in my state, yet it would be harder to find someone farther away from the topic. I’m trying to assess what that says about me because my knee-jerk reaction is that it sounds cold and callous. Of course I don’t mean it that way; this young woman’s death is tragic. Full stop. But everything else about it, including but not limited to, the social media world’s fascination with the case, is hard to stomach. Not just from the age-old mainstream media fascination with the disappearance of a pretty white girl, or the half of the media eager to lambaste the other for not treating every missing person case the same way, though there were plenty of both in this case. It was more the true-crime-podcastification of this girl’s story in real-time and sheer number of people engaging with the content on social media and wondering how many made content simply to get noticed that grossed me out.

• 🗄️ From 2020: When James Baldwin Wrote About the Atlanta Child Murders — Casey Cep, The New Yorker: Lest you think I’m naive and assume true crime just suddenly became popular, read this piece to be assured that I know it’s always sold papers. In this instance, I simply respect the effort taken for the resultant piece to seem legitimate and worthy of the moment.

• 📖 The Dark Reality Behind ‘Cozy Mysteries’ — Alyse Burnside, The Atlantic: A case for the anti-true crime podcast: the cozy mystery novel.

And yet making my way through a variety of cozy mysteries, I can understand why they appeal to so many readers, why someone might choose to avoid the macabre, again and again and again. Readers can immerse themselves in a world of crime without worrying that they will be overcome with unpleasant images or real grief; they choose to glimpse violence precisely so that they can look away. This sort of world — insulated, replete with homemade baked goods and chaste love affairs, stripped of loss — alleviates the need to interrogate what is so seductive to humans about violence.

• 📖 The New ‘Crime Wave’ Panic and the Long Shadow of John Walsh — Paul M. Renfro, The New Republic

As the host of Fox’s America’s Most Wanted from 1988 through 2011, Walsh would fuel the nation’s crime panic and reinforce his position as the country’s foremost proponent of harsh anti-crime measures. With its grim, gritty tone and dramatic reenactments of violent acts, the show sought to induce fear in the American public, alerting viewers to rare, sensational events and thus distorting their conceptions of crime and danger.

Photos Capture Desperation as Haitian Migrants Hope for Asylum at Texas Border — Tucker C. Toole, National Geographic

More than 14,000 migrants — many of whom had been living in Mexican cities — made the trek to the Texas border after rumors spread that migrants would be able to gain entrance into the United States through Del Rio, the Miami Herald reported. Thousands are now camped out under the international bridge.

• 📖 Who Shot Walker Daugherty? — Wes Ferguson, Texas Monthly: A true crime story that involves two men getting shot and blaming it on a band of roving Mexican immigrants. But that explanation might have been a rush to judgment, or, worse yet, made up entirely.

• 📖 The State of Texas vs. Jesus Christ — Elizabeth Bruenig, The Atlantic: A death row inmate in Texas can’t have his pastor lay hands on him and recite prayers aloud, according to rules and regulations in the unit. The inmate challenged, and now, it pits God-fearing Texas against a man who wants to die while being prayed over by a man of God.

• 📖 New Texas Law Bans Abortion-Inducing Drugs After 7 Weeks Pregnancy — Melody Schreiber, The Guardian: More bad news for pro-choice forces in the Lone Star State, as another incredibly restrictive abortion law is signed into law.

• 🎥 Demi Adejuyigbe’s Final ‘September’ Video Is a Triumph — Dan Solomon, Texas Monthly: There’s a lot of negative news coming out of Texas these days, so let us just sit back and enjoy the delightful stylings of Demi Adejuyigbe’s latest video.

More of Our Favorites From the Past Week

The Secrets of the World’s Greatest Freediver — Daniel Riley, GQ

The Digital Death of Collecting — Kyle Chayka, Kyle Chayka Industries/Substack

My Time With Kurt Cobain — Michael Azerrad, The New Yorker

The Scientist and the A.I.-Assisted, Remote-Control Killing Machine — Farnaz Fassihi & Ronen Bergman, The New York Times

The Follow-Up

The news doesn’t stop. If you checked out last week’s edition and found the topics interesting, here’s a collection of stories published since.

Celebrity Deaths

• 📖 Melvin Van Peebles, Champion of New Black Cinema, Dies at 89 — Douglas Martin The New York Times

Sexual Misconduct

• 📖 The Most Harrowing Testimony From R. Kelly’s Trial — Claire Lampen, New York

The Facebook Files

• 📖 No More Apologies: Inside Facebook’s Push to Defend Its Image — Ryan Mac and Sheera Frenkel, The New York Times

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The Postscript

This week, elsewhere on The Postscript.

Svetlana Alexievich and the Difficulty of Telling the Stories of Those Who Cannot Tell the Stories Themselves

Teaching the Nobel laureate’s techniques as an alternative to some of the ego-driven pitfalls of literary journalism.

Stories that Matter: How The Washington Post Magazine Revealed the Link Between 9/11 and Dementia

Patrick Hruby discovered that a disproportionate number of 9/11 first responders are suffering in mid-life from cognitive disorders usually seen in old age.

There’s a lot of great journalism out there. Every week, in a format short enough that it won’t be clipped by your inbox, we aim to share some of the best, with additional context for understanding the biggest news of the day. This is a weekly digest of stories you can savor and reporting you can rely on.

Share This Edition of Weekend Reading

The Question Michael K. Williams Asked Me Before Every Season of ‘The Wire’ — David Simon, The New York Times

The death of Michael K. Williams was sudden and tragic. In an ongoing year-and-a-half of sudden and tragic deaths, by the hundreds of thousands at the hands of a pandemic, it can seem extravagant to lavish such attention on a singular death. But to hear David Simon, one of the creators of The Wire, the show that first gave a home to Williams’ talent, tell it, Williams was exactly as we wanted to believe he was.

• 📖 Death of a Storyteller — Matt Zoller Seitz, Vulture/New York: An incredibly touching piece that celebrated what Williams gave to his audiences.

His enduring power as an artist came from his belief in himself — not merely as an actor or a performer but as a storyteller. Williams used that word in interviews when describing himself: storyteller. He used it aspirationally, sincerely. In his mind, he wasn’t just hitting marks and saying lines. He was creating, incarnating, inhabiting, spell-casting.

• 📖 Remembering Michael K. Williams, a Defender of Black Fictions — Doreen St. Félix, The New Yorker

The contact that Williams made with the public through Omar is rare and destabilizing. When Omar was killed, in 2008, toward the end of The Wire, Williams lost his moorings and his sense of identity. On the block, fans would call him by his character’s name, which is to say that they were asking after a ghost. To be reminded that the actor was “more than” Omar is to acknowledge in the same breath that Omar was a masterpiece. But Williams was, of course, more than that one role.

• 🎥 Typecast — Michael K. Williams, HBO & The Atlantic: Two-and-a-half minutes of brilliance, made now more tragic by his death. Watch and remind yourself that he’s simply talking to himself, no matter how real the conversation seems.

• 📖 Here’s Why Norm Macdonald Was Comedy Royalty. It’s Not ‘S.N.L.’ — Jason Zinoman, The New York Times: Another recent celebrity death that triggered an outpouring of love and fond memories was comedian Norm Macdonald’s, who died at 61 from cancer. This piece is a nice blended appraisal of the man and his art.

• 📖 Norm Macdonald Was the Real Thing — Nathan Heller, The New Yorker: A surprised writer’s recounting of the comedian’s dedication to the creative process and his generosity with his particular brand of genius.

• 🎧 Conan Talks About Norm MacDonald — Conan O’Brien, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend: If you’ve engaged with any of the Norm Macdonald remembrances, you’ve probably seen at least two clips: his “roast” of Bob Saget and his moth joke told to Conan O’Brien. A funny man on what made another man so funny.

Mr. Weber’s Confession — Nancy Jo Sales, Vanity Fair

A truly bizarre case of yet another he said-she said, except this one has a twist: He said he kissed her inappropriately when he was her teacher, and she says that never happened. The prestigious boarding school believed him.

• 📖 ‘I Blame an Entire System’: Olympic Gymnasts Testify About the FBI’s Larry Nassar Investigation — Rose Minutaglio, Elle: Simone Biles did not mince words when she testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “To be clear, I blame Larry Nassar and I also blame an entire system that enabled and perpetrated his abuse,” Biles said.

• 🗄️ From 2018: Everyone Believed Larry Nassar — Kerry Howley, The Cut/New York: This week, USA Gymnastics’ biggest stars ripped into the FBI for its handling of the abuse case brought against Larry Nassar, the former team doctor who abused hundreds of girls. Read an in-depth account of his case so we do not forget why and how the team was so spectacularly failed by nearly everyone involved.

• 🗄️ From 2018: The Rise of the Victims’-Rights Movement — Jill Lepore, The New Yorker: The history of the victims’-rights movement, which, in 2018, saw a judge allow nearly 150 women to give victim impact statements against Larry Nassar for the harms he caused through crimes he’d never been charged with, saw its turning point in the 1990s with one of the darkest chapters of the Clinton presidency: the Oklahoma City Bombing.

Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents Show — Georgia Wells, Jeff Horwitz & Deepa Seetharaman, The Wall Street Journal

A big-time exposé from the WSJ on how Facebook and Instagram are harming teen users.

“We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said one slide from 2019, summarizing research about teen girls who experience the issues. “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression,” said another slide. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”

• 📖 Facebook Says Its Rules Apply to All. Company Documents Reveal a Secret Elite That’s Exempt. — Jeff Horwitz, The Wall Street Journal: The revelations about what Facebook knew about Instagram’s negative effects on teen girls is just one small part of a larger project by the WSJ called The Facebook Files. The first story to break from the batch of internal documents WSJ reporters obtained answered the age-old question: Why does it seem like certain people can just get away with saying anything on the platform, despite it’s so-called rules?

• 📖 Facebook Tried to Make Its Platform a Healthier Place. It Got Angrier Instead. — Keach Hagey & Jeff Horwitz, The Wall Street Journal: You know what they say about the best laid plans, right? Of course you do, but it appears that Mark Zuckerberg might not. After changes to the site’s algorithm that were to improve connections and interactions backfired, Zuckerberg resisted updates because he feared it would decrease users’ engagement with the site.

• 📖 Facebook Employees Flag Drug Cartels and Human Traffickers. The Company’s Response Is Weak, Documents Show. — Justin Scheck, Newley Purnell & Jeff Horwitz, The Wall Street Journal: In developing countries where Facebook’s users are exploding in number, many are using the site for less than wholesome purposes. The company knows about it; workers are flagging it. But little is being done. (It seems, quite possibly, like there may be a pattern forming here.)

More of Our Favorites From the Past Two Weeks

The Tragedy of America’s Rural Schools — Casey Parks, The New York Times Magazine

Football, Firemen, and Cops — and What It Means to Never Forget 9/11 — Tom Junod, ESPN

How Tucker Carlson Lost It — Alex Shephard, The New Republic

‘Concerned Citizen’ at Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes’ Trial Turns Out to Be Family — Bobby Allyn, NPR

Can MIT’s Tim Berners-Lee Save the Web? — Tom McGrath, Boston Magazine

One Woman’s Mission to Rewrite Nazi History on Wikipedia — Noam Cohen, Wired

Regina King in Her Element — Jesmyn Ward, Vanity Fair

Super League Rage, Ronaldo Mania, and the Fight for the Soul of Manchester United — Wright Thompson, ESPN+

Peter Thiel Hates a Copycat — Sebastian Mallaby, The Atlantic

The Disastrous Voyage of Satoshi, the World’s First Cryptocurrency Cruise Ship — Sophie Elmhirst, The Guardian

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The Postscript

This week, elsewhere on The Postscript.

Trans People Are Experts in Our Own Experience

Journalism should represent trans, nonbinary, and agender people’s humanity, expertise, suffering, and triumphs. As a nonbinary writer, I asked what’s lacking in journalism and how we can improve.

Stories That Matter: How Exit News Exposed Albanian Politicians Manipulating Public Opinion Through Facebook

In the face of declining media freedom in the country, Alice Taylor reveals how the ruling party is systematically weaponizing social media to influence elections and reduce trust in journalism.

There’s a lot of great journalism out there. Every week, in a format short enough that it won’t be clipped by your inbox, we aim to share some of the best, with additional context for understanding the biggest news of the day. This is a weekly digest of stories you can savor and reporting you can rely on.

This week’s Weekend Reading looks a little bit different in format. Instead of covering multiple topics, this week’s edition focuses on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Rarely does an event reverberate as widely and deeply as 9/11, and rarely will a single topic so thoroughly dominate a news cycle. For even more on the anniversary, click back through our archives to revisit Jennifer Senior’s masterful article for The Atlantic entitled “What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind” and more.

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‘Reopening Old Wounds’: When 9/11 Remains Are Identified, 20 Years Later
Corey Kilgannon, The New York Times

There is something noble about the continued effort to identify the remains of the victims of 9/11, the refusal to call the work complete when there are still 22,000 body parts to test, belonging to 1,106 unidentified victims. This is quietly dignified work that seems fitting for what is still the largest missing persons investigation ever undertaken in the nation.

• 🗄️ From 2003: Falling Man — Tom Junod, Esquire: One of the best magazine stories ever written is also a story about trying to identify a victim of 9/11. Junod took to Twitter to express his disappointment at Esquire’s decision to lock the story behind a paywall (which they’ve since removed), but Junod’s friend and ESPN colleague Kevin Van Valkenburg shared the link to a PDF of the story. He also recommended a story by Esquire’s Alex Belth on the writing of “The Falling Man.”

• 📖 What Does It Mean to ‘Never Forget’? — Dan Berry, The New York Times: An anniversary as big as the 20th for an event as consequential as 9/11 asks us to consider how and what we remember. This piece deconstructs the well-meaning but overly cliche saying of “never forget” that cropped up in the wake of the attacks. It’s an interesting read that reckons with the undeniable truth of, “of course we won’t forget, but then again, of course we will.”

• 🗄️ From 2001: Tuesday, and After — The New Yorker: A Talk of the Town piece written by some of our finest writers, at the time and still now, that came out the week after the 9/11 attacks. Twenty years on, we’re talking about remembering, and rightly so, but the week after, it was about observing and processing. It remains remarkable two decades later.

We Rise or Fall Together
Scott Raab, Esquire

The culmination of a great idea well executed, Scott Raab’s reporting on the rebuilding of One World Trade took a decade for Esquire, and he’s now written a book on the subject, Once More to the Sky: The Rebuilding of the World Trade Center. This article is adapted from the new book, and it speaks to the power of a building, a big building that was as much a symbol as anything else, and how it can represent the perseverance of the human spirit.

• If you’ve got article views on Esquire’s website left or need an excuse to subscribe, consider a few of Raab’s incredible reporting efforts:

  • 15 Years After 9/11, the World Trade Center Is Still a Target

  • The Freedom Tower Is an Absolute Miracle

  • The Truth About the World Trade Center

• 🗄️ From 2011: Commemorative Calculus: How an Algorithm Helped Arrange the Names on the 9/11 Memorial — John Matson, Scientific American: The building of One World Trade wasn’t the only impressive engineering feat situated at Ground Zero. When the 9/11 memorial was built, 2,983 names had to be placed, but instead of going about that task as simply as possible, the planners wanted to preserve “meaningful adjacencies,” where names could be grouped according to how they had existed in the world. Some requests were simple, like two men — one unable to continue the descent and one who refused to leave his side, despite them not knowing each other — were grouped together. Others, like those within the ranks of the 700 people killed from Cantor Fitzgerald, were more complicated.

• 🗄️ From 2001: The Way We Live Now: 11-11-01; Lost and Found — Colson Whitehead, The New York Times Magazine: Quite simply one of my favorite things ever written about not just 9/11 but all of New York City. I revisit it when I’ve forgotten the power of words to transport me to another place, and for all of us who know the Big Apple only through visits, this is more than enough to make us wish we could be counted as New Yorkers.

Saving Par
Jon Wertheim, Sports Illustrated

It’s a favorite saying of golfers everywhere that “a bad day on the course beats a good day in the office,” and for those of us who truly and deeply love the game, truer words have not been spoken. This isn’t one of those stories though. Jimmy Dunne missed a day at the office to play golf, and the day just happened to be September 11th, 2001. And the office just happened to be in the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

• 🗄️ From 2001: Sudden Death — Steve Wulf, ESPN The Magazine: This story ran in the October 1st, 2001, edition of ESPN The Magazine, and, like the New Yorker’s Talk of the Town piece above (or, perhaps the greatest 9/11 example, Nancy Gibbs’ story for Time), I still marvel at what a writer could do in a short amount of time. But reading it again now, I’m struck by a sad truth: The price of beautiful words like Steve Wulf’s came at the expense of truth. Of course, he wasn’t lying, and he couldn’t know how wrong he would be when he wrote, “But never again will a playoff or final or bowl seem quite as ‘huge.’ Not as long as we remember what the Towers and Pentagon looked like before and after, not as long as we ponder the millions of lives touched by the 5,500 innocent people who are dead or missing.” But that’s just not how we watch sports 20 years later.

• 🗄️ From 2011: A Whole New Game — Eli Saslow, ESPN The Magazine

  We crave the escape of sports more than ever — a decade later, attendance, ticket prices and TV audiences are at or near record highs — but we watch them differently. After 19 hijackers sneaked into our airports and disguised their way onto our planes, we are less likely to accept almost anything at face value. Instead of trusting our games, we watch and we speculate: How? Why? This is the age of skepticism, of outright cynicism, when we are not surprised to learn that our champions needed steroids to succeed or that college athletes are as corrupt as the system under which they must nevertheless abide. We were not naive before 9/11. But there is less belief now, less magic.

How 9/11 Changed…
The Washington Post Magazine

Short little vignettes, stitched together to show 9/11’s effect on numerous topics like television, art, education, photography, Millennials, country music, fashion, theater, and much more.

• 📖 Is 9/11 a Day, or Is It an Era? — James Poniewozik, The New York Times: In talking about the glut of 9/11 documentary films and docuseries, one critic asks tough, and somewhat uncomfortable, questions.

  Twenty years later, is there anything still to say about September 11th? Of course; it would be unimaginable to simply ignore it. A tougher question is: Is there anything more to say than there was five, 10, 15 years ago?

• 📖 Dread, War and Ambivalence: Literature Since the Towers Fell — Dwight Garner & Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times: Two New York Times book critics try to capture what 9/11 hath wrought on American fiction, even as they acknowledge that 20 years is early still in the run of time for which 9/11 will be a major influence on culture.

  Cormac McCarthy’s postapocalyptic novel The Road, he has said, was directly inspired by 9/11. Novels like Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, in which a fictional flu epidemic has devastated the world, and even [Colson] Whitehead’s zombie novel Zone One, landed with fresh force. (Zombies became, in novels, film and television, something like national mascots.) There was a sharpened sense that the unease would never end.

• 📖‘One Giant Nerve That You Were Afraid to Touch’ — Jesse David Fox, Vulture/New York: After 9/11, a common question was: When can we laugh again? When can we enjoy levity for levity’s sake? Is it too soon for jokes? Will they seem ghoulish? These were common, everyday questions, but they were felt on much more profound levels by comedians, who struggled to know if there was even a place for them in the world in that moment.

Podcasts

• ‘I’m Part of Something That’s Really Evil’ — The Daily, The New York Times

• Before and After — This American Life

• 60 Words — Radiolab

• Ten Years In — This American Life

• What 9/11 Did to My Life — What Next/Slate

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The Postscript

This week, elsewhere on The Postscript.

Obsessed With Numbers in an Industry of Words

In a never-ending quest for growth, publishers have turned to Google Analytics, Chartbeat, and other tools that promise to provide a sense of what readers want. But at what cost?

Stories That Matter: How Health Reporter Helen Branswell Introduced Us to the Threat of COVID-19

With experience from reporting on the 2003 SARS outbreak, STAT's senior writer saw what COVID might become well before the U.S. reported its first cases.

There’s a lot of great journalism out there. Every week, in a format short enough that it won’t be clipped by your inbox, we aim to share some of the best, with additional context for understanding the biggest news of the day. This is a weekly digest of stories you can savor and reporting you can rely on.

Share This Edition of Weekend Reading

The Enduring Legacy of Elijah McClain’s Tragic Death
Robert Sanchez, 5280

Elijah McClain was 23 years old when he was killed by the police in Aurora, Colorado. He’d committed no crime, yet, as a Black man, he was tackled by the police, accused of resisting arrest, and he was injected with ketamine, which caused him to have multiple heart attacks from which he died. Letters poured in from across the nation, urging the governor of Colorado to make examples out of those who were responsible. This is the story of the power of those letters, which one writer read through one by one, even when the State of Colorado could not say the same.

• 🖥️ Corporate America’s $50 Billion Promise — Tracy Jan, Jena McGregor & Meghan Hoyer, The Washington Post: Elijah McClain’s death did not receive much national attention until the brutal murder of George Floyd ignited a discussion on police brutality. In the wake of Floyd’s death, some of the biggest companies in the world sought to show the world their commitment to the Black Lives Matter movement. They promised to help and pledged almost $50 billion to the cause. This in-depth report from the Washington Post shows the status of some of those pledges.

  So far, 37 companies have confirmed disbursing at least $1.7 billion of the $49.5 billion pledged. Seven of the companies that provided data on their racial justice commitments refused to outline how much they had already spent.

• 📖 ‘Defund the Police’ Was a Rallying Cry in 2020. Minneapolis Is About to Vote on What That Means. — Samantha Michaels, Mother Jones: An in-depth look at the campaign to “defund the police” in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and its supporters’ struggle to overcome the lack of nuance in its name.

  By talking more deeply with voters in this way, Minneapolis organizers are betting they can gain allies. Because while only 18 percent of respondents in the Ipsos/USA Today survey claimed to support the defund movement when asked directly about the term, a much higher number (43 percent) said they supported redirecting police funds to social services in the community — which is exactly what the defund movement calls for.

• 🗄️ From 2020: Twelve Minutes and a Life — Mitchell S. Jackson, Runner’s World: It was a big week for charging decisions in some of the too-numerous cases of police brutality. On Wednesday, charges were brought against those responsible for Elijah McClain’s death in Colorado. On Thursday, misconduct charges were brought against the former Georgia prosecutor for allegedly using her position to shield the men who chased and killed Ahmaud Arbery from being charged with crimes immediately after the shootings. The latter decision made for a perfect reason to remind readers that Mitchell S. Jackson won not only a National Magazine Award but also a Pulitzer Prize for his feature on Abrery and running.

• 🖥️ A Profile of Ahmaud Arbery Reveals the Dangers of ‘Running While Black’ — Chip Scanlan, Nieman Storyboard: For those who love to peek behind the curtain of great journalism, here’s an interview with Mitchell S. Jackson as well as an annotated version of his Runner’s World story with his comments and background information provided.

Overlapping Disasters Expose Harsh Climate Reality: The U.S. Is Not Ready
Christopher Flavelle, Anne Barnard, Brad Plumer & Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times

It’s no secret that climate change and extreme weather events have dominated the news. It’s been a topic of discussion in numerous editions of Weekend Reading (like this one, this one, and this one) as well as The Postscript’s most-recent Essential Reading List. But the lede of this New York Times story pretty well sums things up:

In Louisiana and Mississippi, nearly one million people lack electricity and drinking water after a hurricane obliterated power lines. In California, wildfire menaces Lake Tahoe, forcing tens of thousands to flee. In Tennessee, flash floods killed at least 20; hundreds more perished in a heat wave in the Northwest. And in New York City, seven inches of rain fell in just hours Wednesday, drowning people in their basements.

Disasters cascading across the country this summer have exposed a harsh reality: The United States is not ready for the extreme weather that is now becoming frequent as a result of a warming planet.

• 📖 Fleeing Disaster Is Hard. Climate Change Is Making It Harder. — Matt Simon, Wired: Incredibly dry conditions are ravaging the West, while the East is seeing the complete opposite problem: excessive rainfall. It’s not just that there are worsening extreme weather events, like the Times suggested. It’s that there are numerous kinds of extreme weather events affecting different parts of the country simultaneously, and it’s leaving Americans with very few places to go to find relief.

• 📖 The Levees Worked in New Orleans — This Time — Jake Bittle, Curbed: Did you know that, after Hurricane Katrina, the Army Corps of Engineers rebuilt the levee system around New Orleans at a cost of $14 billion? The terrible flooding, which accounted for the worst of Katrina’s damage, didn’t happen this time, despite the fact that Ida was an even stronger storm when it made landfall. Conventional wisdom said the levees had worked; the investment was a success. For some, that the levees withstood the worst Ida had to offer does not mean it’s guaranteed to withstand the next big storm.

• 🎧 New Orleans in the Aftermath of Hurricane Ida — Kevin Roose, The Daily/The New York Times: Hearing from those directly affected by the storm, still without electricity, brings to mind the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. Audio, arguably, is the most intimate medium, and it’s impossible to hear the New Orleans residents in this podcast and not feel, if only for a second, like you were there.

• 🎧 Floodlines — Vann R. Newkirk II, The Atlantic: One of the best podcasts of any genre to come out in recent years, this in-depth look at Hurricane Katrina will make you sad and then mad and then thankful that Ida didn’t bring this same level of disaster to the Crescent City.

67 Abortions in 17 Hours: Inside a Texas Clinic’s Race to Beat New 6-Week Abortion Ban
Chabeli Carrazana, The 19th

A short-but-powerful piece from The 19th, which has been covering the fallout from the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to block Texas’ six-week abortion ban. The saddest part of the clinic’s story was that, despite its success in serving those 67 patients on Tuesday, there were another 77 appointments for Wednesday, and because the law had already gone into effect, those women could not be helped.

• 📖 Texas Abortion Case Highlights Concern Over Supreme Court’s ‘Shadow Docket’ — Charlie Savage, The New York Times: The U.S. Supreme Court prompted outrage when it did nothing to allow the most restrictive abortion law in the land, proffered by Texas and in flagrant violation of constitutional law, to go into effect on Wednesday. But it brought even more disrepute down on itself with its mealy mouthed reasoning for not blocking the law on procedural grounds and how the majority reached this decision without the usual trappings of the judicial process.

• 📖 The Deviousness of Texas’ New Abortion Law — Mary Ziegler, The Atlantic: The part of the Texas abortion law that’s easiest to understand is for whom it makes abortions illegal: anyone more than six weeks pregnant (at which point a doctor can typically detect a fetal heartbeat), which is often before many women even know they’re pregnant. What’s a bit more complicated to understand is how Texas got around existing precedents when such laws have failed before. The short version of the state’s solution is this: It doesn’t make the state the enforcement arm of the law. Instead, it allows private citizens to sue anyone who performs or aids and abets an abortion performed after six weeks. As this Atlantic piece explains:

  Someone challenging the constitutionality of a law can sue the state officer charged with enforcing it. But in Texas, there arguably is no such officer, because only private citizens can sue to enforce the law.

• 📖 The Conservative Justices’ Reasoning in the Texas Abortion Case Is Legal Mansplaining — Dahlia Lithwick, Slate: There were numerous articles linked in last week’s Weekend Reading on the topic of abortion, but most were prompted by the case on the Supreme Court’s docket from Mississippi. Dahlia Lithwick is a fantastic read on all issues involving the highest court in the land, but she’s especially good on the topic of abortion. She burns with a white-hot indignity at the way the majority in the Texas abortion law decision just did not seem to care about the real-world ramifications of its decision but instead dithered behind tired procedural posturing.

• 📖 Two Frontline Workers on Day 1 of Texas’ New Abortion Ban — Annie Geng & Esther Wang, The New Republic: An OB-GYN and abortion-services hotline operator share the realities of the new Texas abortion law.

  Today [Wednesday], I also talked to somebody who was at a doctor’s office getting an ultrasound, and I was like, let me know what the ultrasound says, and maybe you can stay in your city and get an abortion. We had been texting earlier in the week, but it was the first time I had spoken to them about their appointment. She’s going to be traveling out of state. Everybody’s leaving. We’ve had primarily people going to New Mexico or Oklahoma. We’ve had requests for people to go as far away as Seattle or the D.C. area. So we’re starting to get people going further away, probably as closer states start to be booked up. I think it means that people are maybe just throwing spaghetti against the wall and seeing what sticks.

More of Our Favorites From the Past Week

The Heart-Wrenching History of the Breakup Album — Gracie Anderson, Smithsonian

Castles in the Sky — Christina Lalanne, The Atavist

The Surprisingly Big Business of Library E-Books — Daniel A. Gross, The New Yorker

Long-Haulers Are Fighting for Their Future — Ed Yong, The Atlantic

The Untold Story of IRAK, Downtown New York’s Most Legendary Graffiti Crew — Noah Johnson, GQ

The Follow-Up

The news doesn’t stop. If you checked out last week’s edition and found the topics interesting, here’s a collection of stories published since.

Health Care in America

• 📖 Teachers, Police, Other Public Workers Left Out of Mental Health Coverage — Reed Abelson, The New York Times

Elizabeth Holmes

• 📖 How Elizabeth Holmes’ Abuse Allegations Could Affect Her Fraud Trial — Eliana Dockterman, Time

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The Postscript

This week, elsewhere on The Postscript.

The Essential Climate Solutions Reading List

Kendra Pierre-Louis, a climate reporter for Gimlet Media who is shifting the conversation from problems to solutions, shares some of the stories she’s found most inspiring.

Stories That Matter: How High Country News Exposed the Dark Origin Stories of Some of Our Greatest Universities

A team of journalists and scholars was able to draw a direct line between the taking of Indigenous land and the founding of some of America’s preeminent institutions of higher learning.

There’s a lot of great journalism out there. Every week, in a format short enough that it won’t be clipped by your inbox, we aim to share some of the best, with additional context for understanding the biggest news of the day. This is a weekly digest of stories you can savor and reporting you can rely on.

Share This Edition of Weekend Reading

The Mississippi Clinic at the Center of the Fight to End Abortion in America
Emily Wax-Thibodeaux & Ariana Eunjung Cha, The Washington Post

Everyone in Mississippi knows of the Pink House, brightly colored and standing out like a sore thumb at Fondren Place and North State Street. Everyone knows what happens there, and why it’s famous (or infamous, depending on your politics): It’s the only location that a woman can get an abortion in the entire state of Mississippi. The U.S. Supreme Court will soon hear a case that threatens to shut that clinic down. It’s been targeted by countless lawsuits before, but this is the first to be heard by the court that Donald Trump helped create with his three confirmed justices.

• 📖 ‘Roe v. Wade’ Is Now in the Hands of the 3 Trump Justices — David S. Cohen & Dahlia Lithwick, Slate: An interesting assessment of a nagging question for Supreme Court watchers: Are Donald Trump’s justices truly a product of his political movement and willing to give him the win he clearly sought when seeking a nominee who’d vote against Roe v. Wade? Or do the justices have a long eye for history and realize the steps they’d be taking by overturning the case would damage not only the Court’s legitimacy but their own?

• 📖 Brett Kavanaugh’s Latest Decision Should Alarm Liberals — Ian Millhiser, Vox: While David S. Cohen and Dahlia Lithwick aren’t quite convinced that Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett will go full Trumpian in their decision of the case, this piece from Vox argues that Kavanaugh has been showing a willingness to uproot precedent and not look back.

• 🗄️ From 2020: The #MeToo Case That Divided the Abortion-Rights Movement — Maggie Bullock, The Atlantic: The possibility that the most important abortion case in three decades could be decided by Brett Kavanaugh can’t help but remind one of his turbulent confirmation and the allegations against him. One of the biggest moments in the #MeToo campaign came from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against him, yet it wasn’t enough to keep him off the Court. In an intersection of topics, one of the pro-choice movement’s biggest stars and former physician at the Pink House, Dr. Willie Parker, was accused of sexual assault. This article tells both sides of the story.

• 🗄️ From 2014: The Abortion Ministry of Dr. Willie Parker — John H. Richardson, Esquire: Before his fall from grace, Dr. Willie Parker was one of the pro-choice movement’s best representatives: an African-American Christian who’d avoided abortions for much of his early career but then had a “come to Jesus” moment where he embraced that providing abortions was his Christian duty.

• 🗄️ From 1994: The Abortionist — Tom Junod, GQ: Included here for no other reason than it’s one of the best magazine stories ever written. Tom Junod profiled John Britton, who’d taken over as an abortion provider in Pensacola, Florida, after his predecessor, David Gunn, was murdered by anti-abortion activists. Not long after Junod profiled Britton, he, too, was murdered by those who disagreed with his profession.

Costa Ricans Live Longer Than Us. What’s The Secret?
Atul Gawande, The New Yorker

Atul Gawande is can’t-miss when his name appears in the table of contents of a New Yorker issue. In this story, he reminds us that health care is only as good as a country’s priorities.

Although Costa Rica’s per-capita income is a sixth that of the United States — and its per-capita health-care costs are a fraction of ours — life expectancy there is approaching 81 years. In the United States, life expectancy peaked at just under 79 years, in 2014, and has declined since.

• 🖥️ Hospitals and Insurers Didn’t Want You to See These Prices. Here’s Why. — Sarah Kliff & Josh Katz, The New York Times: Everyone can sense it. Everyone who’s undergone a medical procedure has thought it: Something doesn’t add up with these prices. This piece shows just how screwed up things can be. Sticking with my beloved Mississippi, here are the prices for a colonoscopy: $1,463 with a Cigna plan; $2,144 with an Aetna plan; $782 with no insurance at all. More details like this abound. Read it and try not to pull out your hair.

• 📖 Why It’s so Hard to Be a Nurse in America, According to 2 Nurses — Katherine Harmon Courage, Vox: From the story’s lede: “Last month, at the start of a fourth COVID-19 wave in the U.S., a nurse in a Seattle-area intensive-care unit announced her resignation on Twitter. ‘No amount of money could convince me to stay on as a bedside ICU nurse right now,’ she wrote. ‘I can’t continue to live with the toll on my body and mind. Even weekly therapy has not been enough to dilute the horrors I carry with me from this past year and a half.’” Read the whole piece to find out what drove her to say this.

• 📖 The Lament of COVID-19 Caregivers in the Nation’s Safety-Net Hospitals: ‘What Could Be Next?’ — Akilah Johnson, The Washington Post: This story is a reminder that, while COVID-19 is an equal opportunity offender, its lasting and damaging effects are not being felt equally.

They Still Live in the Shadow of Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes
Erin Griffith, The New York Times

Imagine being compared to Elizabeth Holmes, who was supposed to be the next Steve Jobs, but actually just ended up being the prototype for Billy McFarland, for no other reason than you happened to be a female entrepreneur, or from Stanford, or developed the latest tech in Silicon Valley, or some combination of all of the above. That’s what numerous women are facing, as the cloud of Holmes’ scandal lingers over companies that have no connection to the disgraced former head of Theranos.

• 📖 Blood, Labs and Fraud: Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes Is About to Go on Trial — Rachel Lerman, The Washington Post: Not sure what Theranos is? Not sure who Elizabeth Holmes is? Not sure why she’s going on trial next week? Not sure why any of it matters? Start here.

• 📖 Elizabeth Holmes’ Trial Could Reveal Her Side of Theranos Story — Christopher Weaver & Sara Randazzo, The Wall Street Journal: Now that you know who Elizabeth Holmes is, aren’t you curious: What’s her side of the story? I mean, even if we get to hear it, we’ll constantly have to wonder if it’s remotely close to the truth. But all criminal trials are more fun when you get to ask the question: Will she testify or not? And if so, what will she say?

• 📖 Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes: History of the WSJ Investigation — The Wall Street Journal: It’s fine. You can admit it: You still don’t know who Elizabeth Holmes is or what Theranos was or any of it, do you? No, no, no; it’s not just you. It’s actually really confusing. All of the chicanery first came to light by some intrepid reporting by the Journal’s John Carreyrou, who went on to write Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. These are the articles that would make up the backbone of the book.

• 🎧 The Dropout: Elizabeth Holmes on Trial — ABC Radio: Are you tired of reading to figure out who this woman was and what her company promised and how she flim-flammed so many people? Then just listen to this excellent podcast, which is about to start airing new episodes when her trial gets underway on August 31st. It’s also about to be made into a movie, set to star Amanda Seyfried as Holmes.

More of Our Favorites From the Past Week

The Coronavirus Could Get Worse — Katherine J. Wu, The Atlantic

Stillwater Runs Deep! — William Miller, Rolling Stone

I’ll Tell You the Secret of Cancer — Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic

Matthew Stafford Isn’t Satisfied — Yet — Seth Wickersham, ESPN

The Follow-Up

The news doesn’t stop. If you checked out last week’s edition and found the topics interesting, here’s a collection of stories published since.

The Opioid Crisis

• 📖 A Program Tried to Cut Opioid Addiction Among Veterans. Did It Cause Suicides? — Benjamin Cowan & Joshua Tibbitts, The Washington Post

The Fall of Afghanistan

• 📖 American Purpose After the Fall of Kabul — Phil Klay, The New Yorker

Tragedy in Haiti

• 📖 Almost 2 Weeks After the Quake, Aid Is Just Getting to Some Remote Towns in Haiti — Becky Sullivan & Carrie Kahn, NPR

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The Postscript

This week, elsewhere on The Postscript.

'Literary Journalism ... It's News That Stays News': A Conversation With Barry Siegel and Amy Wilentz

The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle award winners on teaching literary reportage, how Donald Trump’s presidency was a boon for journalism programs, and the power of storytelling.

Stories That Matter: How The New York Times Magazine Busted the GMO Myth

Jennifer Kahn digs into the reasons underlying our fear of such products, and describes their enormous potential.

There’s a lot of great journalism out there. Every week, in a format short enough that it won’t be clipped by your inbox, we aim to share some of the best, with additional context for understanding the biggest news of the day. This is a weekly digest of stories you can savor and reporting you can rely on.

Share This Edition of Weekend Reading

Richard Sackler Says Family and Purdue Bear No Responsibility for Opioid Crisis
Jan Hoffman, The New York Times

The latest in the saga of the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma, and it could be seen as just another boring question-and-answer inherent to so many legal proceedings. But if you look at the questions being asked and the hard-to-believe responses from Dr. Richard Sackler about his family’s culpability in the nation’s opioid crisis, it’s profoundingly enraging. Not only does the settlement deal allow for resolution of the numerous existing lawsuits, but it would also grant immunity from future civil claims and shield the family individually.

• 🖥️ ‘It’s Huge, It’s Historic, It’s Unheard-of’: Drug Overdose Deaths Spike — Josh Katz & Margot Sanger-Katz, The Upshot/The New York Times: Just how serious is the opioid epidemic? This data-heavy piece looks at the startling reality of a 30 percent rise in deaths by drug overdose in 2020, a staggering 93,000 souls lost.

• 🗄️ From 2017: The Family That Built an Empire of Pain — Patrick Radden Keefe, The New Yorker: Before Keefe authored Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, which came out in April, he tackled the subject of the Sackler family and their contribution to the opioid epidemic in The New Yorker.

• 🗄️ From 2020: America’s Other Epidemic — Beth Macy, The Atlantic: Just an incredible introduction to this story. After introducing Nikki King, who’d seen untold pain by her teenage years due to the opioid epidemic as it raged in Kentucky, the author tells this detail:

  She remembers a teacher asking her classmates what they wanted to be when they grew up. “A drawer,” one boy said. “You mean an artist?” “No, a draw-er” — someone who draws disability checks and doctor-shops for OxyContin prescriptions. The pills could be had for next to nothing through Medicaid and then resold on the black market for $1 a milligram. It was the only future he could imagine for himself.

• 🗄️ From 2016: ‘How’s Amanda?’: A Story of Truth, Lies and an American Addiction — Eli Saslow, The Washington Post: Simple rule of media-consumption: Read anything and everything that Eli Saslow writes and you won’t be disappointed. This classic story is five years old, but it’s just as resonant now as it was when he first wrote it. Another stunning lede that hooks the reader immediately:

  She had already made it through one last night alone under the freeway bridge, through the vomiting and shakes of withdrawal, through cravings so intense she’d scraped a bathroom floor searching for leftover traces of heroin. It had now been 12 days since the last time Amanda Wendler used a drug of any kind, her longest stretch in years.

• 🎥 Opioids, III — Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, HBO: John Oliver does more good than dozens of well-written articles could possibly ever hope to achieve when it comes to reach. His show is rooted in such journalistic underpinnings that it’s just immensely satisfying to watch him layer on jokes for a place of moral certitude.

Biden’s Betrayal of Afghans Will Live in Infamy
George Packer, The Atlantic

A well-written criticism of the moral failings behind the ignominious end to America’s 20 years in Afghanistan as the Taliban resumed power in Kabul with hardly a shot fired.

There’s plenty of blame to go around for the 20-year debacle in Afghanistan — enough to fill a library of books. Perhaps the effort to rebuild the country was doomed from the start. But our abandonment of the Afghans who helped us, counted on us, staked their lives on us, is a final, gratuitous shame that we could have avoided.

• 📖 Collapse and Conquest: The Taliban Strategy That Seized Afghanistan — David Zucchino, The New York Times: A 35,000-foot view of the rapid conquering of Afghanistan by Taliban forces, complete with some incredible photojournalism.

• 📖 The Taliban’s Swift Victory Was Years in the Making — Sune Engel Rasmussen, The Wall Street Journal

• 📖 The Taliban Has Retaken Control of Afghanistan. Here’s What That Looked Like Last Time. — Kevin Sieff, The Washington Post: With the 20th anniversary of September 11th coming up soon, it’s a bitter reality that Afghanistan, a country in which U.S. troops have fought for two decades, will look very much as it did before the Americans arrived. The Taliban was a ruthless ruling force, and it’s spent the past few days trying, to varying degrees, to convince the international community that it won’t be falling back into its old ways. This piece reminds just what those old ways were.

• 📖 The Return of the Taliban — Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker: Not unlike Packer’s Atlantic piece, Jon Lee Anderson writes with a certain grand, historic scope. “In that regard, the United States joins a line of notable predecessors, including Great Britain, in the 19th century, and the Soviet Union, in the 20th. Those historic precedents don’t make the American experience any more palatable. In Afghanistan — and, for that matter, in Iraq, as well — the Americans did not merely not learn from the mistakes of others; they did not learn from their own mistakes, committed a generation earlier, in Vietnam.” But the most resonant parts of the piece are the first-person elements from his time as a foreign war correspondent in Afghanistan 20 years ago.

‘I’m the Only Surgeon’: After Haiti Quake, Thousands Seek Scarce Care
Maria Abi-Habib, The New York Times

Dr. Edward Destine did all he could after a massive earthquake rocked Haiti. It was much more devastating than the earthquake that hit the island in 2010. “‘I would like to operate on 10 people today, but I just don’t have the supplies,’ he said, listing an urgent need for intravenous drips and even the most basic antibiotics.” The death toll was catastrophic, leaving more than 2,000 dead.

• 📖 Explainer: Why Haiti Is Prone to Devastating Earthquakes — Ben Finley, Associated Press: How is it that two of the biggest and most well-known earthquakes of the past decade both hit the small island nation of Haiti?

  The Earth’s crust is made up of tectonic plates that move. And Haiti sits near the intersection of two of them — the North American plate and the Caribbean plate. Multiple fault lines between those plates cut through or near the island of Hispaniola, which Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic. What’s worse, not all of those fault lines behave the same way.

• 🗄️ From 2010: Suffering — George Packer, The New Yorker: George Packer again, writing on another international tragedy, tackled the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake in The New Yorker’s pages.

  Haitian history is a chronicle of suffering so Job-like that it inevitably inspires arguments with God, and about God. Slavery, revolt, oppression, color caste, despoliation, American occupation alternating with American neglect, extreme poverty, political violence, coups, gangs, hurricanes, floods — and now an earthquake that exploits all the weaknesses created by this legacy to kill tens of thousands of people.

• 🗄️ From 2000: The Good Doctor — Tracy Kidder, The New Yorker: Before Tracy Kidder wrote about Paul Farmer in the celebrated book Mountains Beyond Mountains, he wrote about Farmer in the pages of The New Yorker. Farmer, the physician and philanthropist who spent time in Haiti working for the betterment of the country, is still there and was mentioned in Maria Abi-Habib’s New York Times article above.

More of Our Favorites From the Past Week

The Spine Collector — Reeves Wiedeman, Vulture/New York 

The Dresden Job — Joshua Hammer, GQ

Bad News — Joseph Bernstein, Harper’s

Owen Wilson Is Doing Great, Thanks — Ryan D’Agostino, Esquire

The Coronavirus Is Here Forever. This Is How We Live With It. — Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic

The Follow-Up

The news doesn’t stop. If you checked out last week’s edition and found the topics interesting, here’s a collection of stories published since.

The 20th Anniversary of 9/11

• 📖 Life After Terror: The Children of 9/11 — Michael Segalov, The Guardian 

The Complexity of Climate Change

• 🎧 How Climate Models Work — Politics Podcast, FiveThirtyEight

The Atomic Bomb

• 📖 America Needs to Start Telling the Truth About Israel’s Nukes — Peter Beinart, The New York Times

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The Postscript

This week, elsewhere on The Postscript.

Losing the News

The Charleston Gazette-Mail, once known for its dogged accountability journalism, survived a merger and bankruptcy. Will it survive a new owner with ties to the industries its reporters have covered?

Stories That Matter: How a Collaborative Multimedia Investigation Changed Police Dog Rules and Won a Pulitzer

Reporters from The Marshall Project, AL.com, IndyStar, and the Invisible Institute dug into the use of "bite dogs" by law enforcement, leading at least three jurisdictions to institute reforms.