Archives of The Sunday Post

Each week, the Sunday Post highlights a few articles good for slow consumption over a cup of coffee (or tea, if that's your pleasure). Settle in for a while; we saved you a seat. You can also look through the archives.

The Beleaguered Tenants of ‘Kushnerville’

Withholding maintenance as a power play, hardcore debt collection, and public shaming for late rent — sounds like a classic slumlord. Or, maybe, Jared Kushner. Here’s Alex MacGillis on what it’s like to live in a property owned by the president’s son-in-law.

The worst troubles may have been those described in a 2013 court case involving Jasmine Cox’s unit at Cove Village. They began with the bedroom ceiling, which started leaking one day. Then maggots started coming out of the living room carpet. Then raw sewage started flowing out of the kitchen sink. “It sounded like someone turned a pool upside down,” Cox told me. “I heard the water hitting the floor and I panicked. I got out of bed and the sink is black and gray, it’s pooling out of the sink and the house smells terrible.”

Cox stopped cooking for herself and her son, not wanting food near the sink. A judge allowed her reduced rent for one month. When she moved out soon afterward, Westminster Management sent her a $600 invoice for a new carpet and other repairs. Cox, who is now working as a battery-test engineer and about to buy her first home, was unaware who was behind the company that had put her through such an ordeal. When I told her of Kushner’s involvement, there was a silence as she took it in.

“Get that [expletive] out of here,” she said.

What If We Cultivated Our Ugliness? or: The Monstrous Beauty of Medusa

On the same day that The Washington Post praised Melanie and Ivanka Trump for being pretty, stylish, and silent, Jess Zimmerman posted a call for women to embrace ugliness. It’s hard to pull off without sounding like sour grapes, but she threads the needle brilliantly — not anti-beauty, just pointing out that there’s more than one game in town. Naming Medusa the patron saint of not-lovely women doesn’t hurt.

There is no male-controlled culture that by default sees women, that allows women to be seen. In my country the government doesn’t (yet) require us to cover our faces, but don’t confuse that for visibility: We’re obscured not by cloth but by disregard, by the way men are taught to devalue us and we are taught to devalue ourselves. It’s beauty — and specifically femininity, and even more specifically, sexual attractiveness to men — that burns through the veil.

People look through your face, or past it, when beauty doesn’t focus them, when there’s nothing there they want. They’re not afraid to meet your eyes—they just don’t see the point.

Better for them to be afraid. Better for them to think they’ll turn to stone.

See also Mary Beard, more scholarly but no less righteously pissed off, on monsters, myths, and women in power.

Never Write a Novel With an En-dash in the Title

If you missed the reading by Seattle’s Nicole Dieker last Tuesday (or even if you didn’t), you can catch up with her at The Awl, where she’s chronicled the journey toward self-publishing her first novel with great wit and self-effacing charm.

Whether your novel will be a success is still to be determined — though you can guess already that it might not, five-star reviews and Ferrante comparisons aside. It is successful because you did it. It is financially successful because you have not yet spent more, to publish and promote the novel, than you earned from the Patreon project. You can say all of these things but you know there is another marker of success out there — well, multiple markers, because you know that the trad publishing world counts a “successful” literary fiction novel as one that sells 3,000–5,000 copies, and you also know that there’s the type of success that derives from momentum; from being good and having everyone talk about you at the same time.

You do not think you will have that kind of momentum, for the same reasons you weren’t ever popular in high school.

The Exquisitely English (and Amazingly Lucrative) World of London Clerks

There’s a numbing volume of subculture reportage on the internet, rapidly catching up with the ubiquitous personal essay. Simon Akam’s piece on the British legal system — specifically, the political, financial, and class-haunted relationship between the barrister and the clerk — stands out. Informative, bemusing, and vital background reading for fans of Sarah Caudwell and many others.

At a chambers that had expanded and was bringing in more money, three silks decided their chief clerk’s compensation, at 10 percent, had gotten out of hand. They summoned him for a meeting and told him so. In a tactical response that highlights all the class baggage of the clerk-barrister relationship, as well as the acute British phobia of discussing money, the clerk surprised the barristers by agreeing with them. “I’m not going to take a penny more from you,” he concluded. The barristers, gobsmacked and paralyzed by manners, never raised the pay issue again, and the clerk remained on at 10 percent until retirement.

Each week, the Sunday Post highlights a few articles good for slow consumption over a cup of coffee (or tea, if that's your pleasure). Settle in for a while; we saved you a seat. You can also look through the archives.

The Public Square Belongs to 4Chan

Halfway down, Joseph Bernstein’s article on “He will not divide us,” a public art piece fronted by Shia LaBeouf, goes batshit crazy. Launched on January 20 at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, the installation was simple and in theory (although: really?) nonpartisan: a sidewalk-facing camera and a line of text for passersby to read aloud. Within a week it was a mosh pit of alt-right trolling, trash, and violence. Then the real fight started: between the artists, the museum, and the community.

By the third and fourth days of the installation, as young men in MAGA hats started showing up to the museum in larger numbers, "He Will Not Divide Us" began to resemble nothing so much as a social network made flesh. There were civil discussions. There were shouting matches. There were visitors squawking about Trump, about “the Jewish word for division, Soros,” about the revolution not being televised, about their mixtapes, about how Bitcoin would save the world, about WeSearchr, about yo, follow my Instagram. There were doxxes. There were well-intentioned founders with institutional backing and idealistic words about free expression; there were early celebrity adopters; there was an initial period of great hope; there was a worsening signal-to-noise ratio; and there were trolls and racists determined to test the boundaries of the new space with provocations and hate speech.

And then, there was chaos.

Gerhard Steidl Is Making Books an Art Form

Rebecca Mead profiles Gerhard Steidl, considered the best printer of photography books in the world — a craftsman so confident he was disappointed by the Gutenberg Bible. Fascinating look at the practicalities of printing (the fine details of ink, paper, and press) and the philosophy of books as beautiful and meaningful objects. As well as the book as more than an object:

Steidl’s family was poor, and his parents had received no formal education. There were few books at home, and it was momentous for Steidl when he received one — Hans Christian Andersen’s “Thumbelina” — as a Christmas gift. Steidl begged his sister to read it aloud to him immediately, and afterward he told his father how much he had loved it. Steidl’s father, angered that the children had finished the book so quickly, struck the sister. Years later, Steidl’s father explained that he had believed the book, having been read through, was now useless; before buying the gift, he’d never been in a bookstore.

See also Craig Mod this week on the maturing debate about print vs. digital reading: “Containers matter.”

Mysterious Island Experiment Could Help Us Colonize Other Planets

In 1843, a jealous James Hooker started a twenty-year evolutionary hack, shipping the first of hundreds of trees to barren, equatorial Ascension Island. Today the island’s “Green Mountain” is lush and abundant — and a new ecosystem is pushing out the old. This is what terraforming a new world might look like: the transformation of a Mars-like wasteland; a slow, painful struggle between native and alien species; and constant vigilance to prevent an epic system crash.

I visit Ascension’s famous Dew Pond. By the 1880s, Hooker’s “mist-catching trees” had formed a small pond at the mountain’s summit, the island’s first freshwater water body. Today, bamboo trunks form a 40-foot tall wall around the pond, knocking together harmoniously in the breeze.

A life-sized, plastic crocodile waits half-submerged in the pond with teeth showing. The faux reptile appeared there in the 1990s as a gag. It quickly developed its own mythology among the military residents. Should they remove the item? Or leave it? No one can agree what to do with it now. The same can be said about the artificial ecosystem all around.

Each week, the Sunday Post highlights a few articles good for slow consumption over a cup of coffee (or tea, if that's your pleasure). Settle in for a while; we saved you a seat. You can also look through the archives.

The Autocrat’s Language

This week Masha Gessen and Michael Errard both take a close listen to what's coming out of Donald Trump's mouth — not what he says, but how he says it.

Errard's piece is a quick read on Trump in transcription, validating (unfortunately) that our country's chief executive is just as batty as he sounds, and may be making us a little crazy, too, simply by the structure of his speech. That feeling of being gaslit every time you hear our president? This is how he does it.

Gessen's article is longer, more serious, and sort of terrifying if you have any interest and/or faith in language. Trump is overwriting the meaning of our language until, like an overused palimpsest, it no longer holds meaning at all. Here's a battle that writers are uniquely suited to fight.

Trump’s word-piles fill public space with static. This is like having the air we breathe replaced with carbon monoxide. It is deadly. This space that he is polluting is the space of our shared reality. This is what language is for: to enable you to name “secateurs,” buy them, and use them. To make it possible for a surgeon to name “scalpel” and have it placed in her open palm. To make sure that a mother can understand the story her child tells her when she comes home from school, or a judge can evaluate a case being made. None of this is possible when words mean nothing.

Where Health Care Won’t Go

Start with the premise that if treatment for a particular disease exists, then people deserve access to it, especially if treatment is relatively simple and affordable to the US health system. Now throw in racism, poverty, and national politics, and you get the infuriating situation in Marion, Alabama, where tuberculosis — utterly curable and manageable — has moved in to stay.

In October 2014, a nurse practitioner tore into [Shane Lee's] office with a fresh medical mask over her mouth, frantically waving an X-ray film. The mask, a tight-fitting turquoise respirator, was unusual. And then he looked at the radiography, which showed that the patient’s lungs were nearly completely whited out. It was the worst case of tuberculosis that he had ever seen.

Since then, Marion, a town of 3,500 and the seat of Perry County, has been grappling with a historic outbreak of a disease that has vanished from worry in much of the United States. Thirty-four active cases have been found; if that doesn’t seem like a lot, consider that the rate of infection — what the World Health Organization uses to determine severity — is almost a hundred times the national average, and higher than the rates in India, Kenya, and Haiti.

The McSorley Poet

Rafe Bartholomew’s father tended bar at the famous McSorley’s Old Ale House for decades, then transformed himself by self-publishing The McSorley Poems. Great piece on pride, resilience, and the false romance of the writing/drinking life.

In the end, it took two years of course work and arriving right at the edge of a decision to leave McSorley’s for my father to realize he wanted to stay at the bar. He didn’t need to change careers to find satisfaction. He just had to find a way to inject the bartender’s life with a greater sense of purpose. The solution was obvious: He had to write again.

A matter of life and death: William Boyd on the rise of the surgeon-memoir

Most of us experience surgery from the sharp side of the knife, with all the attendant glory of hospital gowns, IVs, and iconic fluorescent lights. Scottish novelist William Boyd charts a recent increase in memoirs by the women and men who do the cutting — a reader’s guide to a professon in which the gruesome reality of flesh opens big questions of life, death, and trust in another human’s skill.

For the non-surgeon, I would claim, the sight of a dead human being, supine, spatchcocked, heart removed, would be a life-changing horror. The fact is that for surgeons the interior of the human body – its glossy organs, its swelling fluids, its lurid blood – becomes a very normal, unremarkable sight, an everyday arena of activity, very quickly losing its freight of torrid emotion and associated gag reflex. I put this to Moran and he admits to never having felt squeamish. Maybe this is the crucial first requirement.

On Self-Respect

Apropos of nothing, except a stray thought that the blaring noise coming from social media is just the opposite of what Joan Didion described in 1961 as self-respect — in a Twitter-like assignment to fill a gap in Vogue, left by another writer, exactly to the character.

The charms that work on others count for nothing in that devastatingly well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions ... The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others—who are, after all, deceived easily enough.

Each week, the Sunday Post highlights a few articles good for slow consumption over a cup of coffee (or tea, if that's your pleasure). Settle in for a while; we saved you a seat. You can also look through the archives.

The Writer Behind a Muslim Marvel Superhero on Her Faith in Comics

In case you missed the link in our warm-up to Free Comic Book Day, Jia Tolentino profiled Seattle’s G. Willow Wilson in a recent issue of The New Yorker. Wilson, author of the much-awarded Ms. Marvel reboot, is as likeable as her breakout superhero: gentle, direct, and taking absolutely no shit from anybody.

At the coffee shop, as a barista cleared our plates, we talked about how the stakes of every identity-politics debate feel heightened since November — and also about new alliances that seem to be forming in the election’s wake. Wilson spoke with some astonishment about the fact that she could include a gay secondary character in “Ms. Marvel” — the blond, popular Zoe — and still have mothers and daughters show up to her readings in hijabs. “It’s funny. Those right-wing bloggers who said my work was part of some socialist-Muslim-homosexual attack on American values, they really created the thing they feared. There wasn’t a socialist-Muslim-homosexual alliance before, but there sure as fuck is one now, and I love it."

How a Professional Climate Change Denier Discovered the Lies and Decided to Fight for Science

This week “Believe,” by Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal, is making the rounds with a characteristically cutting and charming assessment of why it’s so hard to change anyone’s mind. Over at The Intercept, Sharon Lerner interviewed Jerry Taylor, a one-time climate change denier, about his conversion to climate activist and how he’s working to shift others the same way. (Bret Stephens take note.)

If you talk about the need to transform civilization and to engage in the functional equivalent of World War III, you may as well just forget it. To most conservatives, that’s just nails on a chalkboard. Or if you say, you’re corrupted and a shill and ignorant. That’s no way to convince anybody of anything. What are the chances they’re going to say, Gee, you’re right? All that does is entrench someone in their own position.

Meet the world’s most powerful doctor: Bill Gates

Speaking of Seattle and superpowers … The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has a huge influence on global health, and their enormous philanthropic buying power put them on par with, and maybe above, international players like the World Health Organization. How does an 800-pound gorilla learn to throw its weight gently — and help prepare for its own exit?

Over the past decade, the world’s richest man has become the World Health Organization’s second biggest donor, second only to the United States and just above the United Kingdom. This largesse gives him outsized influence over its agenda, one that could grow as the U.S. and the U.K. threaten to cut funding if the agency doesn’t make a better investment case.

Things I haven't tweeted

A very short collection of tweets we wish Warren Ellis had posted.

Very excited about America these days. Really enjoyed the MAD MAX films, looking forward to the theme park

Each week, the Sunday Post highlights a few articles good for slow consumption over a cup of coffee (or tea, if that's your pleasure). Settle in for a while; we saved you a seat. You can also look through the archives.

Viet Thanh Nguyen Reveals How Writers’ Workshops Can Be Hostile

This is a scathing take on that most beloved institution of the MFA — the writing workshop — by Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer. Hard to say what’s most terrifying here: the thought that this set of attitudes and assumptions is readily accepted (and celebrated) throughout American literary culture … or that it’s becoming an infectious export globally. I’m going to shut up now and let Nguyen carry it:

We, the barbarians at the gate, the descendants of Caliban, the ones who have no choice but to speak in the language we have — we come bearing the experiences and ideas the workshop suppresses. We come from the Communist countries America bombed during the Cold War, or where it sponsored counter-Communist efforts. We come from the lands America occupied, invaded or colonized. We come as refugees and immigrants, documented and undocumented. We come from the ghettos, barrios, reservations and borders of America where there are no workshops. We come from the bedrooms and the kitchens of the American home, where we were supposed to stay, and stay silent. We come speaking languages other than English. We come from the margins, where English is broken. We come with financial aid and loans and families that do not understand what “creative writing” is. We come from communities we do not wish to renounce in the name of our individualism. We come wanting to do more than just sell our stories to white audiences.

Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria

Making every book in the universe searchable and instantly available online? Yes, please. Stealing income from authors and holding libraries hostage to skyrocketing access fees? No, thanks. That, in a nutshell, is the story of Google’s “Project Ocean,” a moonshot to scan every book on the planet.

James Somers threads the massive legal labyrinth of copyright and class action suits that’s holding the world’s largest digital library hostage — and demonstrates just how urgently we need a new model that mediates between artists and audiences in a sane and sensible way.

Somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25-million books and nobody is allowed to read them. It’s like that scene at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie where they put the Ark of the Covenant back on a shelf somewhere, lost in the chaos of a vast warehouse. It’s there. The books are there. People have been trying to build a library like this for ages — to do so, they’ve said, would be to erect one of the great humanitarian artifacts of all time — and here we’ve done the work to make it real and we were about to give it to the world and now, instead, it’s 50 or 60 petabytes on disk, and the only people who can see it are half a dozen engineers on the project who happen to have access because they’re the ones responsible for locking it up.

How eBooks lost their shine: 'Kindles now look clunky and unhip'

eBooks can be polarizing: friends and families set at odds, lovers torn apart over paper vs. Paperwhite. In a bit of good news for those holding up the side for physical books, headlines that once read “print is dead” are suddenly posting obits for electronic editions. Paula Cocozza argues that digital books are simply finding their level, but that won’t stop us from enjoying the public re-investment in the beauty of a well-made book.

Once upon a time, people bought books because they liked reading. Now they buy books because they like books. “All these people are really thinking about how the books are — not just what’s in them, but what they’re like as objects,” says Jennifer Cownie, who runs the beautiful Bookifer website and the Cownifer Instagram, which match books to decorative papers, and who bought a Kindle but hated it. Summerhayes thinks that “people have books in their house as pieces of art”. One of her authors’ forthcoming works features cover art by someone who designs album covers for Elbow. “Everyone wants sexy-looking books,” she says.

Dan Rather’s Second Coming

It’s deeply satisfying, from a narrative perspective, that the Trump presidency has invigorated both the transformation of Teen Vogue and a comeback by discredited elder statesman Dan Rather. Sort of like Don Quixote saddling up to ride with Furiosa … or not, if you’re not that kind of nerd. Ahem. Regardless: In this profile of Rather, Ben Baker describes a journalist who is passionate, articulate, and determined to win the last battle of his career.

For decades, Rather was fodder for critics who considered him too emotional, too liberal, too ambitious, too self-serious. He didn’t smile a lot; his folksy sayings could come off as downright weird. But the exact eccentricities that made at times for an awkward fit for network television, and his talent for thoughtful but unambiguous pronouncements of outrage, have been pitch-perfect for this new medium and moment. One of the leading voices of the Trump resistance is not some black-masked radical or a marching young woman with a pink knit hat but a man with gray hair, a name you know and a neatly knotted tie.

Good Luck, Morons

In a complete change of pace (no pun intended), here’s an engrossing article by Sara Estes about a batshit crazy footrace called the Barkley Marathons that may or may not be run by a man named Lazarus Lake.

Since 1986, the Barkley has been operating entirely under the radar, rising from a casual underground affair to a cult obsession. Few even figure out how to enter the Barkley, fewer still come close to finishing it. Today, people come from all over the world for the chance to annihilate their minds and bodies in a 60-hour, 100-mile, sleepless, nearly impossible gauntlet through the merciless mountains. Lost and alone, they struggle through hallucinations, extreme cold, heat, thunderstorms, sleet, and rock-bottom exhaustion while they navigate vast stretches of sinister, unmarked woodland with only a compass and their prayers.

Each week, the Sunday Post highlights a few articles good for slow consumption over a cup of coffee (or tea, if that's your pleasure). Settle in for a while; we saved you a seat. You can also look through the archives.

End Pain Forever

Steven Pete feels no pain. Even broken bones bring only a slight discomfort. For Pam Costa, any warmth burns like fire; she takes morphine every morning and sleeps on ice-cold pillows. Although the two Washingtonians live just over an hour apart, they’ve never met — but their cases are helping identify a gene that could be used to control chronic physical suffering. Erika Hayasaki documents this classic scientific detective story.

As a child, Costa would dawdle in the deep gutters lining the streets near her home, the cool, mucky water providing her momentary pain relief. In classrooms she would wrap her hands and feet around the poles of a desk, like a koala, to feel the coolness. And she’d sneak off to water fountains to wipe down her limbs with cold water.

Doctors didn’t know how to diagnose her. Some adults thought she had behavioral issues or depression. One physician said her symptoms were psychosomatic. The plum color was the only visible evidence that she might have any medical disorder at all. Then, in 1977, when Costa was 11, a letter arrived from the Mayo Clinic.

God in the machine: my strange journey into transhumanism

Ex-Evangelical Meghan O’Gieblyn is really, really good at describing what it’s like to lose your faith — to be dislocated in time, even to lose your sense of your own body as you lose your sense of God. That makes it easier to understand how a new, outlandish set of beliefs, the transhumanism favorited by tech elitists like Elon Musk, could slip unconsidered into the gap.

The deeper I got into the articles, the more unhinged my thinking became. One day, it occurred to me: perhaps God was the designer and Christ his digital avatar, and the incarnation his way of entering the simulation to share tips about our collective survival as a species. Or maybe the creation of our world was a competition, a kind of video game in which each participating programmer invented one of the world religions, sent down his own prophet-avatar and received points for every new convert.

By this point I’d passed beyond idle speculation. A new, more pernicious thought had come to dominate my mind: transhumanist ideas were not merely similar to theological concepts but could in fact be the events described in the Bible.

The Heart of Whiteness: Ijeoma Oluo Interviews Rachel Dolezal, the White Woman Who Identifies as Black

Ijeoma Oluo’s piece on Rachel Dolezal for The Stranger went viral this week, and rightfully so. Oluo perfectly expresses the frustration of trying to engage Dolezal, who is endlessly slippery and self-protective — just reading their exchanges is maddening. Then she neatly pivots out of the game of “she said, she said”: out of the pseudo-academic arguments, out of the crocodile tears, and back onto terra firma. Here’s hoping this can be her final word.

When the story first broke in June 2015, I was approached by more editors in a week than I had heard from in two months. They were all looking for "fresh takes" on the Dolezal scandal from the very people whose identity had now been put up for debate—black women. I wrote two pieces on Dolezal for two different websites, mostly focused not on her, but on the lack of understanding of black women's identity that was causing the conversation about Dolezal to become more and more painful for so many black women.

After a few weeks of media obsession, I—and most of the other black women I knew—was completely done with Rachel Dolezal.

Or, at least I hoped to be.

How to Read a Whole Damn Book Every Week

I don’t know, Kevin Nguyen; this is all fine practical advice, but doesn’t it boil down to — if you want to read more, read more? We don’t need a listicle for that, or a Fitbit so we can track page counts against our friends. However, in case you do want some highly amusing guidance on how to read in the absence of a comfy chair, a few hours, and glass of scotch, here it is.

Before you tell me how much you “enjoy the smell of print books” like some kind of psycho, let me try to sell you on the convenience of reading in the Kindle or iBooks app: you’ll always have your books with you, and most importantly, you can always get through a little reading in those lost minutes of the day — waiting in line for coffee, for the 4-train running behind schedule, and for the bathroom because you drank too much coffee. Those pages add up fast.

Each week, the Sunday Post highlights a few articles good for slow consumption over a cup of coffee (or tea, if that's your pleasure). Settle in for a while; we saved you a seat. You can also look through the archives.

Going It Alone

I-walked–2,000-miles-and-lived-to-tell-the-tale is a genre full of clichés. Crushing physical discomfort? Check. Naïve decisions that lead to near-disaster? Check. Ultimate success and personal transformation? Check. Check check check.

Friend of SRoB Rahawa Haile’s story is different. Haile — black, Eritrean, queer — hiked the Appalachian Trail alone in 2016, covering thousands of miles of wilderness dotted with pro-Trump signs and Confederate flags. Those oases of “civilization” were more terrifying than rattlesnakes and switchbacks. So was her return to an urban world in which Donald Trump had been elected president.

Every day I eat the mountains, and the mountains, they eat me. “Less to carry,” I tell the others: this skin, America, the weight of that past self. My hiking partners are concerned and unconvinced. There is a weight to you still, they tell me. They are not wrong. My footing has been off for days. There were things I had braced for at the beginning of this journey that have finally started to undo me.

Also read: Haile’s incandescent short essay on carrying books by black authors and the weight of the present moment across all 2,000 miles.

How 'S-Town' Fails Black Listeners

Did you love S-Town? I did. Like Maaza Mengiste, I listened “with my own childhood experiences in mind” — a wealth of stories and memories from Jackson, Gulfport, Meridian, some beloved, some angry, some sad. That’s what S-Town is meant to do, Mengiste says: make us think about how we’re living, who we are.

What if who you are is a gaping absence in the story, though? What if who you are is black? Here’s what S-Town sounds like to that set of ears.

This podcast is supposed to be about all those things we do not know of a person, all those things that we cannot imagine that make up their totality. In producing this podcast, however, the creators made an assumption that rings false, that frankly, rings white: that it is possible to move through this land and simply tuck race into a corner until it's convenient.

Confessions of a reluctant gentrifier

Eula Biss lives in one of Chicago’s “most diverse neighborhoods,” which means she and her husband, both academics, are able to afford an apartment with a view of Lake Michigan. They are the leading edge of gentrification, and they dread the cultural and social losses that come with it. This will feel familiar to many Seattleites …

“Gentrification” is a word that agitates my husband. It bothers him because he thinks that the people who tend to use the word negatively, white artists and academics, people like me, are exactly the people who benefit from the process of gentrification. “I think you should define the word ‘gentrification,’” my husband tells me now.

I ask him what he would say it means, and he pauses for a long moment. “It means that an area is generally improved,” he says finally, “but in such a way that everything worthwhile about it is destroyed.”

Telling Right from Wrong

Yonatan Zunger has been reflecting on the definitions of “right” and “wrong” for several decades. He has some good, practical advice for determining which is which, or at least thinking more carefully about the question. And some very clear views on the real-world consequences of muddy ethical thinking.

I’ve been regularly surprised at the depth of people’s urge not to discuss things like institutional racism or sexism, or generational poverty, or how power imbalances in society mean that seemingly “identical” behaviors are in no way identical. But if you fail to understand this, then you will routinely engage in “identical” behaviors which are anything but — for example, expecting that someone move in with their family until they can get back on their feet, when not everyone has a family they can do that with. The harm you cause this way may be entirely surprising and unclear to you, because you never learned about the things which cause your actions to lead to it. But if you had the chance to learn it and didn’t, then the moral bill is on you.

Each week, the Sunday Post highlights a few articles good for slow consumption over a cup of coffee (or tea, if that's your pleasure). Settle in for a while; we saved you a seat. You can also look through the archives.

When Pat Buchanan Tried to Make America Great Again

This piece by Sam Tanenhaus is a vivid history of Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, with direct lines via Pat Buchanan to Donald Trump’s victory last year. Judging by this retelling, politics has become considerably less witty — though no less petty. Time for the Twitterverse to up its game.

For [Garry] Wills, "Nixon's main problem, I think, was his nose," Buchanan recalls. He's serious. Nixon's ski-jump nose, beloved by caricaturists, was a staple of the period's cornball humor. Even Nixon worked up good-sport one-liners. ("Bob Hope and I would make a great ad for Sun Valley.") Wills, crammed beside him in a DC-3, under the dim overhead spotlight, was transfixed—not by the nose's fabled length but by "its distressing width, accentuated by the depth of the ravine running down its center, and by its general fuzziness . . . the nose swings far out; then, underneath, it does not rejoin his face in a straight line, but curves far up again, leaving a large but partially screened space between nose and lip" ...

Where have all the hard men gone?

For non-fans, sports are a blur of frantic movement punctuated by long, dull waits and nerve-shattering cheers and boos from true believers. It’s not easy to sell us on the storyline, but Kevin Alexander manages it in this piece on “Hard Men” — the bruisers and bullies who’ve held folkloric status on English soccer teams for decades and are now fading into history.

You can get a sense of their skill sets by looking at the nicknames of the Hard Men of the ’60s and ’70s, such as Chelsea’s Ron “Chopper” Harris and Liverpool’s Tommy “the Anfield Iron” Smith. (“Tommy Smith wasn’t born,” Bill Shankly once said, “he was quarried.”) My personal favorite is Leeds United’s Norman “Bites Yer Legs” Hunter. Another Leeds Hard Man, Joe Jordan, was nicknamed “Jaws” because he refused to wear dentures after losing four teeth to a kick in the mouth.

A Moral Tale: Vladimir Nabokov, bad Samaritan?

In a short piece packed with literary gossip and impeccable research, Levi Stahl puts a forgotten tale of Vladmir Nabokov, butterflies, and a dying prospector under the microscope.

After more than four hours of hiking, the two were descending a steep slope covered by ice-crusted snow when they lost their footing and began to slide toward the edge. Nabokov managed to snag a rock with his butterfly net, and Laughlin was able to grab Nabokov’s shoe while rushing past him. The net held, and the men survived.

That was not the only time death came near Nabokov that summer.

Buk

One strategy for interacting with beloved authors is to avoid eye contact at all costs and leave the room if possible. Jonathan Carroll favors a different approach.

Like so many people, I happened onto one of Bukowski’s collections of poetry in a university used book shop. I stood there a long time, drinking down his poems for the first time like they were cold Coca Cola on a hot day. I’d never read anything like them and it was a thrilling experience. In my 20 year old college boy “I want to be a writer too someday” voice I wrote all of that to him. A few weeks later I received an envelope from the Sunshine Inn Motel in San Pedro, California.

Each week, the Sunday Post highlights a few articles good for slow consumption over a cup of coffee (or tea, if that's your pleasure). Settle in for a while; we saved you a seat. You can also look through the archives.

Letter From a Drowned Canyon

Lake Powell, Lake Mead — we created these outsized watering holes by replacing natural wonders like Glen Canyon with human wonders like the Glen Canyon Dam. Now America’s manmade lakes are going dry. Rebecca Solnit (with Edward Abbey looking closely over her shoulder) asks what might reappear as the desert reclaims itself.

When the Sierra Club pronounced Glen Canyon dead in 1963, the organization’s leaders expected it to stay dead under Lake Powell. But this old world is re-emerging, and its fate is being debated again. The future we foresee is often not the one we get, and Lake Powell is shriveling, thanks to more water consumption and less water supply than anyone anticipated. Beneath it lies not just canyons but spires, crests, labyrinths of sandstone, Anasazi ruins, petroglyphs, and burial sites, an intricate complexity hidden by water, depth lost in surface.

Fleeing Boko Haram, Thousands Cling to a Road to Nowhere

Dionne Searcey and photographer Adam Ferguson bring National Route 1 — the desert highway outside Diffa, Niger, where thousands have gathered to take shelter from the Boko Haram — vividly to life. Cheers to The New York Times for continuing its impressive experiments with digital, and especially for bending the medium to the story, rather than the other way around.

Construction stopped two years ago after attacks by Boko Haram spiked. [The road's] intended destination — oil fields near the border with Chad — is far away, about 80 miles beyond the choppy lip where the pavement suddenly cuts off, like an interrupted thought.

The Chinese are gone. Now, desperation spans the horizon instead: tens of thousands of ragged huts made from millet stalks, scraps of fabric, torn flour bags and sheets of tarp. From the air, they look like scattered piles of hay.

Many have been living here for more than two years.

Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman review — nice dramatic narratives, but where’s the nihilism?

Neil Gaiman reads in Seattle tonight, to a sold-out house. Here’s Ursula Le Guin with a charmingly curmudgeonly critique of Gaiman’s new and already beloved retelling of the Norse myths.

Gaiman plays down the extreme strangeness of some of the material and defuses its bleakness by a degree of self-satire. There is a good deal of humour in the stories, the kind most children like — seeing a braggart take a pratfall, watching the cunning little fellow outwit the big dumb bully. Gaiman handles this splendidly. Yet I wonder if he tries too hard to tame something intractably feral, to domesticate a troll.

Ethics and paying rent

Mike Monteiro, the acerbic conscience of the design industry, is perpetually pissed off, but that doesn’t make him wrong. On the role design plays in shaping history and the slippery self-deception of “creating change from the inside”:

I get that you like making things. But making things at the expense of someone else’s freedom is fucked. Not putting what you’re designing through an ethical test is not only just lazy, it’s dangerous. Feigning ignorance that ethics is not part of your job as a designer is no longer valid. Knowing that it’s part of the job and ignoring it is criminal.

Each week, the Sunday Post highlights a few articles good for slow consumption over a cup of coffee (or tea, if that's your pleasure). Settle in for a while; we saved you a seat. You can also look through the archives.

Trump the Destroyer

Olivia Nuzzi published a long and detailed profile of Kellyanne Conway this week. It’s a can’t-look-away article, somewhere between trainwreck and victory march. (Side note: Like a lot of other people, I’m pretty sure I could manage to dislike Conway in person. Her particular brand of fact-bending makes my teeth itch.)

You should read the profile, which is crazy fascinating, but then follow up with this awesomely sardonic essay by Matt Taibbi on how neatly we’ve been suckered into co-creating, with Trump, a “WWE future where government is a for-profit television program.” Ahem.

Trump leans over and pauses to soak in the love, his trademark red tie hanging like the tongue of a sled dog. Finally he turns and flashes a triumphant thumbs-up. A chant breaks out:

"U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!"

Reporters stare at one another in shock. They were mute bystanders seconds ago; now they're the 1980 Soviet hockey team. One turns to a colleague and silently mouths: "U-S-A? What the f ... "

Inhaling Life With Jim Harrison

A friendship forged in the kitchen — superstar chef Mario Batali on eating and cooking with superstar writer Jim Harrison. Would love to have been at a quiet corner table to observe these giants at dinner.

We once shared a slightly overlong supper at the Michelin three-star restaurant Eleven Madison Park, in New York, where he fidgeted through most of the complex meal, announcing early on in his loud baritone to the entire dining room, “Maaaario, you know I am much more of a trattoria kind of guy,” and finally sending his chicken back to the kitchen, because the chef had somehow denied him “THE FUCKING LEGS . . . where are THE FUCKING LEGS . . . ?”

Chasing the First Arcade Easter Egg

Game designer/developer Ed Fries went searching for the ultimate Easter egg: an inside joke hidden so deeply in a vintage game that even its creator had forgotten how to trigger it. Fries scoured code, jury-built an emulator, and rebuilt a classic arcade machine to find it. (via Ars Technica)

I was kind of stunned. If this was true it would certainly predate the earliest video game Easter egg that I knew of and the one that is most often cited as being the first: “Adventure” for the Atari 2600 from 1979. I did a little searching online and found that there was an even earlier Easter egg in the game “Video Whizball” which was released in 1978 for the Fairchild Channel F game console.

But there was a problem. Ron didn’t remember exactly how to bring up the Easter egg. He remembered showing it off to some buddies at a county fair when the game first came out, but that was 40 years ago!

Inside the Hunt for Russia’s Most Notorious Hacker

Malware is sort of like an Easter egg — if you cracked open the pastel treat and found a rotting yolk that emptied your bank account electronically. Or, in this case, helped tilt an election and change the shape of a country.

Garrett Graff traces the hunt for Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev, or “Slavik,” the malware artist who designed the “the Microsoft Office of online fraud.” Great story of a breathtaking cat-and-mouse battle between Slavik and the investigators that tracked the elusive hacker from petty online theft to potentially influencing the US presidential outcome.

[Tillman] Werner, as it happened, knew quite a bit about Evgeniy Bogachev. He knew in precise, technical detail how Bogachev had managed to loot and terrorize the world’s financial systems with impunity for years. He knew what it was like to do battle with him.

But Werner had no idea what role Bogachev might have played in the US election hack. Bogachev wasn’t like the other targets—he was a bank robber. Maybe the most prolific bank robber in the world.

Each week, the Sunday Post highlights a few articles good for slow consumption over a cup of coffee (or tea, if that's your pleasure). Settle in for a while; we saved you a seat. You can also look through the archives.

The Fate of the Critic in the Clickbait Age

This one’s close to home. Arts culture and reviews are on the decline as news publications go digital-first — criticism just doesn’t drive the clicks and pageviews that are the darlings of the modern editorial office. Some publications are finding creative workarounds, like this Dallas bookstore and this book review site. But if we think the critic’s voice matters, we need to get smart about using data with intuition and experience, not instead of.

The drive to revamp cultural coverage has overtaken major newspapers, including the New York Times, just as the wider public has been rediscovering the virtue of traditional reporting. In the wake of the 2016 Presidential campaign, with its catastrophic feedback loop of fake news and clickbait, people have subscribed in surging numbers to so-called legacy publications. Do these chastened content-consumers really want culture pages dominated by trending topics? Or do they expect papers to decide for themselves what merits attention? One lesson to be learned from the rise of Donald Trump is that the media should not bind themselves blindly to whatever moves the needle.

The Roots of Cowboy Music: The Search for a Black Self in the American West

Carvell Wallace covered the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, walking alone through a sea of ten-gallon hats, exploring the complex cultural roots of cowboy music, and asking what it means to put America first. He’s nailed the tone in this one: straightforward, generous, even a bit sentimental — but not letting anyone off the hook.

To hear Steiger talk about it, ranching — "cowboying," as he called it — is the most natural and beautiful thing in the world. Simple and spiritual. Honest and pure. This view explains why so many people make their pilgrimage to Elko every year, carrying guitars and banjos, fiddles and musical saws, dressed in white hats and turquoise, boots and fringe. They are in love with a lovely thing. It gives them a sense of place, a sense of belonging. It is a celebration of culture. It is, in many ways, a family reunion.

And for me, as always, I just see ghosts.

From Escapism to Activism, the Indie Mag Scene is Woke

Print is a conversation; digital is a crowd. Now that we’re past the delirious early days of our fling with social media, it’s easier to see what the printed page is uniquely good for.

The love affair between print, politics, and protest is no new romance. Shuffle down the mag pile marked “protest” and you’ll find the underground press of the 60s and 70s, and feminist titles like Spare Rib. Reach further back and you’ll find the clandestine press of the French Resistance, British political pamphlets of the 18th century, and much more. But now that digital and social media provide so many other means for political protest and debate, why does print remain an essential part of the political media diet?

Why Is Silicon Valley So Awful to Women?

Why? For a multitude of reasons — unconscious bias, a clubby educational system, assumptions about where genius comes from — that boil down to “because they can be, and they make a lot of money while they’re doing it.” Thanks to Susan J. Fowler and other women who are speaking up, that’s changing. Liza Mundy interviewed dozens of women who’ve survived and succeeded in the tech industry for this story.

“Until we see changes in the way we work, I don’t think we’re going to crack this nut,” Correll says. “I worked with one company that insisted that the best way for good ideas to emerge was to have people on teams screaming their ideas at each other. When you watch these teams work, they literally scream at each other and call each other names. They believe this dynamic is essential to scientific discovery—absolutely essential. I said, ‘Could you at least say you disagree with someone without saying you think they are an idiot?’ ”

Persisting in Dark Times: Lessons From a War Crimes Researcher

Muira McCammon spends hours daily reading about, looking at, and listening to the documented record of humanity at its worst. She turned her researcher’s eye on the survival strategies of her profession.

I kept asking Seccombe how he handled the psychological taxation of performing document analysis on so many pages of trial evidence about Nazi experiments in human freezing, oxygen deprivation (high-altitude), poison gas, and chemical sterilization. How did he endure the onslaught of details about the removal of bones for anatomical research, Jewish skeleton collections, forced sterilization programs, and the mass murder of civilians? I needed to know what he did to relax at the end of the day. “I try to leave the work behind,” he said, “but sometimes I still get nightmares.”

Nearly a year later, I still write to Seccombe almost weekly. When we really need a break, we tend to discuss our latest “canine-friendly moments.” Neither of us owns dogs. We just like to talk about them.

Each week, the Sunday Post highlights a few articles good for slow consumption over a cup of coffee (or tea, if that's your pleasure). Settle in for a while; we saved you a seat. You can also look through the archives.

My Life as a Hemophobe

Isabella Rotman’s short comic about what it’s like to faint at the sight of blood is a stellar mix of styles — existential, autobiographical, and educational all at once.

Hat tip to Jason Kottke, whose personal take on a similar phobia is equally worth reading.

A Eureka Moment for Two Times Reporters: North Korea’s Missile Launches Were Failing Too Often

The New York Times’ “Insider” series is shamelessly geeky about how reporting happens. Here’s the behind-the-scenes on David Sanger and William Broad’s investigation of how the US is using electronc tools to sabotage North Korea’s missile program. A flash of insight based on two journalists’ unique expertise, hours in the stacks and stacks of drafts, and the thorniest possible negotiation.

Then came the sensitive part of these investigations: telling the government what we had, trying to get official comment (there has been none) and assessing whether any of our revelations could affect continuing operations. In the last weeks of the Obama administration, we traveled out to the director of national intelligence’s offices: a huge complex in an unmarked office park a few miles beyond the C.I.A.’s headquarters in Fairfax County, Va.

Inside Oliver Sacks’s Creative Process

Another inside peek, this one into the colorful and sprawling sketchbooks where Oliver Sacks recorded, created, and refined. Maria Popova won privileged access to Sacks’s papers, not yet available in a public archive, and highlights a selection that’s delightful both for its variety and for its reflection of the constant, frenetic effort required to track Sacks’s agile and demanding mind.

Using whatever paper and writing instrument he had on hand, Dr. Sacks jotted down ideas as they occurred to him — unedited, un-self-censored flights of fancy, captured before they flew away and later domesticated into the thoughtful, exquisitely structured, immensely insightful formal writings for which he is so beloved.

Going underground: inside the world of the mole-catchers

To kill or not to kill — and how much to care along the way? The question is driving dissent through what you’d think (if you thought of it at all) would be the most quiet of professions: traditional mole-catching.

For a mole-catcher to be successful today, he or she must engage the client with the most romantic notions of his profession. This, at least, is the theory of Duncan Emmett, a mole-catcher in his 60s who has the long beard of a wizard. “If you take that magic away, if you take that showmanship away, then all you are left with is the killing,” Emmett told me at a dimly lit pub near his home in Biggleswade, Bedfordshire. “Because you have to kill the mole, haven’t you? That isn’t an easy thing for a lot of people to bear.”

The revolutionary message of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Donald Trump is definitely a Big Bad. So where’s our Buffy?

It’s probably no coincidence that most of the super-villains that succeed the Master don’t look like super-villains at all. After all, fangs and demony-red eyes aren’t nearly as terrifying as the qualities that define the Big Bads, who embody the ugliest of human traits—cruelty, obsession with loyalty, vengefulness, blazing conviction in their own superiority, an out-of-control temper. They want to remake reality to suit these whims.

Each week, the Sunday Post highlights a few articles good for slow consumption over a cup of coffee (or tea, if that's your pleasure). Settle in for a while; we saved you a seat.

Three Iconic Musicians on Artistic Creation — and Its Importance Now

Wyatt Mason’s humility lifts this interview with Kendrick Lamar, Beck, and Tom Waits beyond its style-magazine setting. Maybe because Mason asks “some stupid questions,” each of the three musicians responds directly and unpretentiously, offering up their take on songwriting and the relationship between music and the world in times of crisis. E.g., this anecdote from Tom Waits’ days as a firefighter in Jacumba, California:

The captain says: ‘WAITS!!! Take that hose and start putting out some of these chickens.’ So there I am aiming at these flying, screaming, burning chickens, and I had never seen a chicken fly before, but boy can they fly. ... There had to be a hundred or so of them and the blast of water would douse the fire and they would come crashing to the ground — and then another and another. There was no time to think or prepare.”

Here it was, as Waits closed out his story, here it was again, here was where songs come from: “It was an emergency,” he wrote, “and when dealing with emergent behavior there is nothing to do but respond. I was in the moment. And it was not the fire I imagined or dreamed of. It was the fire I got.”

Quest For Solace

After the deaths of her daughter and husband, Katherine Keith re-taught herself to live on a thousand-mile dogsled race through the Alaskan wilderness.

Her parka finally zipped over her four other coats and two Smartwool shirts, she starts putting Velcro-strapped booties on her Alaskan huskies, a tedious task even in ideal conditions. It's like putting Velcro boots on a baby, only instead of two feet there are four and instead of one baby there are 11, and instead of being inside a warm nursery, she is outside in Alaska in February. She's barehanded, with fingers that have been wrecked by the cold for days already.

The danger of this cold is very real and goes beyond frostbitten finger tips. With more than 200 miles left in her first Yukon Quest, Katherine, 38, can't afford mistakes.

Shh! Don’t Tell Them There’s No Magic In Design Thinking

I’m not sure I agree with Jared Spool’s description of “design thinking” here. The term’s power, at IDEO and elsewhere, is less about changing perceptions of design, more about using design strategies to solve other kinds of problems — in transportation and education, for example. Still, it’s good to see someone call it out for what it is: useful jargon, but no magic bullet.

For the longest time, I didn’t get it. It seemed like we just added a new name to an old thing. Nothing was different. I thought it wouldn’t last.

But it did. Everywhere I’d go, there would be presentations where folks would talk about how they’ve introduced design thinking into their organization. (My wife and I would play this game. If we hear someone say “design thinking” in a presentation, we’d each try to be the first to say “I’M DESIGNING WITH MY THOUGHTS!”)

PPE: the Oxford degree that runs Britain

The British educational experience has a host of familiar touchpoints for readers: coming of age, empire building, and quidditch, to name just a few. Here’s a more current and less innocent lens from Andy Beckett. The PPE — a degree in philosophy, politics, and economics — has birthed generations of British political leaders. How did a single Oxford degree become so influential? And where is it leading England?

Oxford PPE remains opaque to outsiders. It is often mentioned in the media but rarely explained. Even to know what PPE stands for is to be unusually well-informed about British education and power – often, to be part of the same Oxford milieu as the PPEists. When I asked one former party leader what he got from the degree, he said with studied insouciance: “Why would you want to write about PPE?” As the establishment often says when scrutinised: nothing to see here.

Each week, the Sunday Post highlights a few articles good for slow consumption over a cup of coffee (or tea, if that's your pleasure). Settle in for a while; we saved you a seat.

4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump

Two good ones this week on a particular alt-right (or whatever) subculture:

Laurie Penny has spent solid time with Milo Yiannopoulis and his young male entourage, and her account from the tour bus during the Berkeley riot is mesmerizing and exceptionally well written. Make sure to pair it, though, with this counter by Aura Bogado, on what happens when you code white privilege as innocence.

In a similar spirit (if you’re not sure what that spirit is, go read Graham Greene’s “The Destructors”): Dale Beran’s piece on 4Chan, the online forum that birthed Gamergate, and how it grew from a few kids who liked anime to a worldwide collective with the power to change our country’s future.

Trump supporters voted for the con-man, the labyrinth with no center, because the labyrinth with no center is how they feel, how they feel the world works around them. A labyrinth with no center is a perfect description of their mother’s basement with a terminal to an endless array of escapist fantasy worlds.

Trump’s bizarre, inconstant, incompetent, embarrassing, ridiculous behavior — what the left (naturally) perceives as his weaknesses — are to his supporters his strengths.

Code Rouge: Cracking the Case of the Counterfeit Makeup

Simple to make, lightweight to ship, and a breeze to unload over EBay and Alibaba, counterfeit makeup is easy money. David Gauvey Herbert follows “Operation Big MAC,” a DEA-led initiative to take down cosmetic companies’ biggest enemy: the multitude of small-time sellers that are costing name brands billions every year. A crazy mix of high drama and petty theft, and maybe just a touch of schadenfreude for the original flim-flam industry ($20 for a tube of lipstick? how’d you talk us into that?).

Greenberg and rookie inspector MacDonald initiated surveillance on the family’s home. For months, two to four vehicles at a time would park nearby, watching business associates pick up inventory. Agents also tailed the couple as they drove around town. They went to school, the gym, and restaurants, but never seemed to hold 9-to-5 jobs. And yet over four years, investigators tallied $629,000 in cash deposits to the couple’s bank account, plus an additional $100,000 in Amazon sales.

Harold Denton, nuclear regulator who calmed fears at Three Mile Island, dies at 80

Harold Denton was an archetypal American hero — cool under pressure, fearless when the chips are down — whose country called him to meet an equally archetypal crisis: a nuclear emergency on Three Mile Island. Do right, save the world. The Washington Post revisits his story.

News reports speculated on several apocalyptic scenarios, including the possibility that an explosion could rip through concrete walls four feet thick. The most serious risk was a meltdown, in which the reactor’s superheated core could burn through the building’s base and burrow into the earth.

Mr. Denton was monitoring events from NRC’s headquarters, but President Jimmy Carter said a federal official should be at the scene to take charge. On March 30, two days after the initial accident, Mr. Denton flew to Three Mile Island in a White House helicopter.

He found the power plant to be in “absolute chaos,” he told The Washington Post at the time.

Complicated. Weird. Beautiful! The secret Google project to put an aquarium full of tiny, wiggly water bears inside your phone

I hadn’t thought to mourn the death of Google’s Ara, the modular phone project that closed last year, “hamstrung by time, money, and worst of all, reality” — until I read this. A phone full of water bears? Yes, ridiculous, but gloriously so. Also a very readable, very geeky inside look at the outer edge of tech innovation.

As Google neared completion of what would become a last-ditch effort at the shell for an Ara prototype, the company commissioned a team of Brooklyn engineers, designers, and artists to dream up the craziest idea imaginable and squish it down to fit inside a phone.

If you could build an entire phone out of blocks, like a high-tech Lego set, what would you create?

Each week, the Sunday Post highlights a few articles good for slow consumption over a cup of coffee (or tea, if that’s your pleasure). Settle in for a while; we saved you a seat. You can also look through the archives.

Keeping up with the Times

This feels like the perfect week for Gabriel Snyder’s in-depth look at how the “failing @nytimes” is adapting to a rich but chaotic content environment. Since a leaked copy of the Times’ “Innovation Report” made unlikely headlines in 2014, the publication has engaged in an ongoing experiment to keep “Timesian” journalism relevant and pay-worthy.

Passion, tenacity, and resilience are what make reporting great; they may also be the keys to the paper’s survival in a digital, post-Trump world.

At stake isn’t just the future of a very old newspaper that has seen its advertising revenue cut in half in less than a decade — it’s the still unresolved question of whether high-impact, high-cost journalism can thrive in a radically changing landscape. Newspaper companies today employ 271,000 fewer people than they did in 1990 — around the population of Orlando — and with fewer journalists working with fewer resources, and more Americans getting their news on platforms where the news could very well be fake, the financial success of the Times isn’t an incidental concern for people who care about journalism. It’s existential.

Michael Flynn, General Chaos

Out of a flood of quick takes and Twitter threads around Michael Flynn’s resignation from the National Security Council, Nicholas Schmidle’s long-form profile knits it all together: the rocky first weeks of the Trump presidency; revelations from The Washington Post; and the inner workings of a “Byzantine court” administration. With so much attention on the star of our new national reality show, we need this reminder that the Trump administration is an outcome and not an aberration.

Flynn remembered Election Night fondly, a moment of triumph. “I like to think that I helped get Donald Trump elected President,” he told me. “Maybe I helped a little, maybe a lot.” One of Trump’s first major decisions was to appoint Flynn his national-security adviser, calling him “an invaluable asset to me and my Administration.” Flynn told me, “Service was something our family was always encouraged to do.” He went on, “I made some mistakes, but I’m still serving. It’s like being a priest, you know. I’ve been called to serve.”

The Forgotten History of 'The Oregon Trail,' As Told By Its Creators

And finally: Kevin Wong returns to the Sunday Post with an oral history of the iconic video game. A great story of three Minnesota teachers who created a classic teaching tool purely for the pleasure of it — and so much nostalgia for Gen Xers who learned about both BASIC and typhoid from a tiny blinking cursor.

"This would be a perfect application for a computer," I said. "Instead of shaking dice to determine how far you went, the program could take into consideration how much you spent on your oxen and your wagon and how much of a load you were carrying."

"Well," Don replied, with a tone of resignation, "That sounds great, but I need it next Friday."

Doris Lessing’s library: a life in 4,000 books

To an incurable book snoop, this seems like the opportunity of a lifetime: Nick Holdstock was given free access to Doris Lessing’s books in order to inventory them after her death. It’s a massive project (Lessing’s collection, Holdstock says, “seemed untouched by what Walter Benjamin called ‘the mild boredom of order’”), to which he brings a storyteller’s eye, tracking Lessing’s studies, her eccentricities, and her ongoing conversation with the books she loved.

Best of all, Lessing had drawn faces next to several passages. They wore hats and had particular expressions. The eyes in the face drawn next to the tautological statement “It is not hidden knowledge but useless knowledge unless you have the capacity to use it”, were looking sideways at the text, perhaps doubtfully. No such equivocation was on the face drawn next to the sentence “You start by mastering the ability to learn”. It was smiling, its hat jauntily perched.

Fifty Shades Darker: It’s The Economy, Stupid

La Donna Pietra follows Fifty Shades Darker through six degrees of separation back to Jane Eyre and then examines the economic underpinnings of both. Smart and smartass and much more fun than you’d think.

Granted, Jane Eyre is rather short on explicit sex scenes. Likewise, Fifty Shades Darker is rather short on believable character development. That said, Jane Eyre also features characters telepathically calling to each other across great distances and ridiculous melodramatic plot contrivances about madwomen locked in attics, so it’s not like realism is much of a metric here.

The Surprising Rise of the “S---gibbon”

There’s something irresistible about really good, creative swearing, maybe because the average joe (that’s me, not you) pulls from a small pool of threadbare curse words. Last week, Pennsylvania senator Daylin Leach delighted the Twitterverse by challenging Donald Trump in terms both blunt and unexpected.

Ben Zimmer tracks the origins of the headline-making epithet. Purely etymological interest, of course.

As Leach’s “fascist, loofa-faced, shit-gibbon” line made the rounds on social media, he didn’t back down from the characterization (which was inspired by reports that Trump had threatened to “destroy the career” of a Texas state senator over the civil asset forfeiture issue). His spokesman Steve Hoenstine doubled down ...

The Troll Taunter

Emily Temple-Wood joined the Wikipedia community as a 12-year-old and spent a decade on the receiving end of gender-based threats and harassment. Her solution? Relentlessly post profiles of her harassers’ greatest fear: strong, smart, successful women.

Jake Orlowitz, the head of The Wikipedia Library, was at the annual Wikimedia conference in Mexico City in July 2015 when he witnessed Temple-Wood’s anger and frustration boil over. “Out of nowhere, Emily turns red and chucks her cell phone against the wall,” recalls Orlowitz. “She was not in the mood for another death threat, and that’s what had come to her inbox. But at this point, it’s very clear that somehow, Emily is fueled by every challenge.”

Fuck That Gator

This is fascinating: an unavoidably clickbait-y piece about a family’s attempt to reclaim their personal tragedy from social media. Tommie Woodward was killed by an alligator while swimming in a bayou in eastern Texas; posthumously, he became the butt of viral online mockery. It’s easy to see how irresistible the story of Tommie’s death would be — you’d have most readers at “gator” — but also: what a breakwater the Internet can be for simple human empathy. Thomas Golianopoulos does a good job balancing both threads.

Some outlets used an image from Tommie’s Facebook page of him chugging a Miller High Life while wearing a T-shirt that reads “Classy Motherfucker”; a news anchor for KFDM, the CBS affiliate in nearby Beaumont, breathlessly noted “the hundreds and thousands of pageviews and hundreds of comments” that the story generated on its website. Another circulated photo portrayed Tommie as the epitome of dudedom: grungy reddish-blonde chin strap beard, middle finger up, wearing a goofy cowboy hat, wraparound Guy Fieri shades, and a “This Guy Needs a Beer” shirt. On Facebook, strangers littered Tommie’s wall with comments like “lol rip dumbass” and “What. A. Dumb. Fuck.” A controversial hunt for the killer gator ensued, which only compounded the attention.

Tommie’s friends and family refuse to allow his final actions define the 28 years that preceded it. He loved Van Halen, Marilyn Monroe, and Ken Griffey Jr. He was good with his hands. He enjoyed assembling computers, building sandcastles with his nephew, fishing, swimming, camping, and grilling. He had an adoring big sister, a mom, a best friend, and an identical twin brother, Brian, all left to wrestle not just with grief over a freak tragedy, but also the aftermath of public humiliation.

How Black Books Lit My Way Along The Appalachian Trail

Friend of the Seattle Review of Books Rahawa Haile did the absolutely amazing, inspiring, and so very, very hard thing she set out to do: she hiked the Appalachian Trail. Here's her first report back about what she chose to carry, and why it meant something important to her. Can we just say it? She's one of our biggest inspirations in a time when we need inspirations so bad.

For many, the Appalachian Trail is a footpath of numbers. There are miles to Maine. The daily chance of precipitation. Distance to the next campsite with a reliable water source. Here, people cut the handles off of toothbrushes to save grams. Eat cold meals in the summer months to shave weight by going stoveless. They whittle medicine kits down to bottles of ibuprofen. Carry two pairs of socks. One pair of underwear. Abandon enclosed shelters entirely and opt for a tarp. Everything pulls double duty when you are hauling it 2,189 miles over mountains whose trails consist of slick roots and sharp rocks. Pants zip off into shorts. (That second pair of socks can be worn as mittens.) Floss today is thread tomorrow for stitching deteriorating shoes when the next town with a decent outfitter is 80 miles away. Few nonessentials are carried on this trail, and when they are — an enormous childhood teddy bear, a father’s bulky camera — it means one thing: The weight of this item is worth considerably more than the weight of its absence.

The False Lords Of Misrule

Peter Pomeranstev on what some absolute assholes, mostly in power, like to joke about. What is it about fascists and fascination with penis size, bodily functions, and sex? I'm sure it has nothing to do with the roles their father's played in their lives.

Speaking of fascists, is anybody else totally wary of the term "AntiFas" for anti-fascists? It's a truncation that has little poetry, only saves one syllable, and is about as punk rock as saying you're AntiGlut when you try not to eat bread.

What do Trump, Putin, the Presidents of the Czech Republic and Philippines, right-wing anti-EU Europeans and the British Foreign Minister have in common? Ideology? Not always. Gender? Closer – but the answer is simpler: their sense of humour. These men all constantly joke about private parts, fucking and shitting, often partnered with boasts about excessive screwing, eating and drinking. Their bawdy lingo tells us more about their political strategy and strengths than any manifesto: populism and penis jokes go hand in hand.

STEVE BANNON WEEK: Portrait of a Schlub

Speaking of asshole fascists white supremacists (with special thanks to Nancy Pelosi this week), Seattle's own Willie Fitzgerald penned a very satisfying essay on American White Supremacist Fascist Asshole in Chief this week:

There’s something about this photo in particular that reminds me, against my will, of Terry Richardson. Maybe it’s Bannon’s blank, vacuous stare, as if the photographer had caught him mid-(probably very racist) thought. Maybe it’s the washed-out color palette, or maybe it’s that penumbral effect around his head and shoulder. This picture is like an inverse of Richardson’s American Apparel ads; it shows the objectifier, not the objectified. Instead of a billboard showing a wan young woman in a leotard, we get the man who listlessly ogles her on a billboard while his car is stopped in traffic.

The Successful Boycott of #DeleteUber and a New Era of Activism

The thing about Uber that drives most people I know crazy is their arrogance. Their corporate motto appears to be "it is better to ask forgiveness (by lawsuit) than ask permission." They more-or-less forced Portland to accept them, and they more-or-less did this wherever they wanted to expand. They seem, from the outside, immune to criticism or feedback.

So it was wonderful to see them blink during #DeleteUber, and do a political about-face that was startling in its abruptness. I guess that's what happens when you lose 200,000 customers overnight.

It's not like Lyft is gonna save you from ethical dilemmas — their investors include Peter Thiel and Carl Icahn, after all — but knowing that whatever ethically-challenged way of transportation you've used (and all of them have their own varying degrees of baggage) is bendable by public protest makes it feel like, just maybe, the consumers are calling the shots after all.

It took one ill-advised tweet from Uber, which announced surge pricing had been suspended around the airport, to finally force the company to re-evaluate its business practices. More than 200,000 users—under the hashtag #deleteUber—removed the app from their smart phones, and Vice reported that officials within Uber grew increasingly worried that the social media-driven movement would have a ‘significant impact’ on the company’s U.S. operations. Just six days later, Recode’s Kara Swisher reported that Kalanick, who also serves on President Donald Trump’s business advisory council, had excused himself from the group.

A Yazidi refugee, stranded at the airport by Trump

There are endless articles about this week's executive order limiting refugee entry into the United States, and you should read as many of them as you can stomach, and then keep reading. Trust credible sources, understand the legal and social issues, keep your eyes open despite your exhaustion and grief.

Donald Trump has taken or promised many scary, ugly actions in his first week in office, but this is the first with immediate and brutal human impact. Here's just one story: Kirk W. Johnson, founder of The List Project, on racing to unite a young Iraqi couple in the last hours before the refugee ban took effect.

I didn’t want to believe that our government would claw back a one-week-old visa from a Yazidi wife of an interpreter. For one thing, that would require a ruthless efficiency. Why would an Iraqi officer checking in passengers in Erbil care about what Trump had signed ten hours earlier? Why would the airlines care, so long as the ticket was paid for and the visa valid?

Khalas waited patiently for my answer. I asked what they wanted to do.

“We escaped ISIS at Sinjar!” he exclaimed. “How much harder can this be?”

Trust me, I don't want to talk about this shit either

I think we can all sympathize with Chuck Wendig, who was asked by one blog reader to go back to giving writing advice and for Pete's sake stop talking about Trump:

I’d rather talk about literally anything else. Otters! Bees! Cool new sex moves! Books I’ve read, movies I’ve watched, ancient beasts that I have hunted through eldritch wood! I would much rather talk about writing, or cursing, or arting harder, or poop jokes, or pee jokes (though at least there, our current president allows me to pull double-duty). But I wake up every day and I just peek at the news with one half-lidded eye through gently lifted Internet blinds and boom, it’s like that scene in Terminator 2 where the nuclear blast annihilates everything.

How an international treaty signed 50 years ago became the backbone for space law

Space law! Did anyone's heart not just leap up a little bit? Friday marked the 50th anniversary of the 'Outer Space Treaty,' a practical and also gloriously idealistic document that's guided international relations in space (in space) for the past half-century. Loren Grush has a quick review of the primary articles of space law and their application (and limits) as space travel becomes more common and commercial.

Right away, the Outer Space Treaty establishes that all nations should have free access to space, and that exploration of the cosmos should be a peaceful enterprise. Such exploration should also be done “for the benefit and in the interests of all countries,” quickly setting up the importance for international cooperation in the realm of space travel.

But immediately after creating this “fair use” of space, the treaty makes one important caveat: space and celestial bodies cannot be appropriated by a nation. That means a country can’t claim the Moon as its own ...

How Peanuts Used Marcie To Explore Unhealthy Relationships

Most of us know which Peanuts character we are — and maybe, painfully, which character others consider us to be. But few have traced the history of a single character with as much persistance and understanding as Kevin Wong, who empathizes deeply with Marcie's insecurity, self-doubt, and struggle to navigate relationships with the strong and iconic personalities around her.

It took time, and a gradual building of confidence, to know that my acquaintances would respect me more, not less, for asserting myself. Marcie’s storylines were often built around this discovery. Through her longer arcs she learned the value of asserting her self-worth and identity, whether by sticking up for someone else, sticking up for herself, or just by vocalizing her opinions.

Agency Style, for Your Eyes Only

Reassuring somehow to know that the Central Intelligence Agency has sufficient respect for correct (or at least consistent) usage to nurture a style guide all its own. Geoffrey Pullman explores the CIA's stance on the Oxford comma, the apostrophe, and other questions critical to our national grammatical security. (via Language Hat)

Naturally I checked to see whether the CIA bans the passive voice. Given how often agency business require reference to events without revealing the identity of the participants, it seemed unlikely. The entry for “passive voice” turned out to be inscrutable: “See active voice.”

Piecing together the Sunday Post is usually easy and a pleasure; in fact, it’s an excuse and justification for the most idle pleasure possible: endless scrolling through the world of online content, mind half alert, fingers on autopilot.

But the Internet after the inauguration of our 45th president is no place for the idle or unalert. As much as Donald Trump has dominated the media, social and otherwise, since his presidential bid began, this week has been different. A single subject, on every front page and in every channel. Not a single voice, though — a cacophony. Anger, sorrow, and calls to arms; reflection, determination, and calls to hope.

What deserves to be heard in a week like that? Writing that clarifies, that provokes thought, that reveals. Writing that reminds us: the written word is a powerful voice. Use it.

And so it begins

Post-inauguration, George Will, pointedly, and David Remnick, thoughtfully, both remind us that our government has built-in protections against misuse,  even with an “unenlightened statesman” at the helm — and that an informed and engaged citizenry is first among them.

But Dan Rather’s impassioned, outraged response on Facebook may be the definitive statement on the Trump inauguration (via Meena Jang at The Hollywood Reporter):

Of the nearly 20 inaugurations I can remember, there has never been one that felt like today. Not even close. Never mind the question of the small size of the crowds, or the boycott by dozens of lawmakers, or even the protest marches slated for tomorrow across the country. Those are plays upon the stage. What is truly unprecedented in my mind is the sheer magnitude of quickening heartbeats in millions of Americans, a majority of our country if the polls are to be believed, that face today buffeted within and without by the simmering ache of dread.

I have never seen my country on an inauguration day so divided, so anxious, so fearful, so uncertain of its course.

What Art Under Trump?

No rose-colored glasses for Margaret Atwood, who is well aware that artists are imperfect and their work is often trivial — and yet —

With the Trump era upon us, it’s the artists and writers who can remind us, in times of crisis or panic, that each one of us is more than just a vote, a statistic. Lives may be deformed by politics — and many certainly have been — but we are not, finally, the sum of our politicians.

The Great Exception

In November, in response to the election outcome, Rebecca Solnit made her treatise Hope in the Dark freely available online. This week she writes again on hope and resistance: “There is another America rising and taking action, and it is beautiful.”

Among other examples, she highlights ongoing efforts by California’s legislation to protect its citizens as our nation’s values shift, starting with a bold and quickly viral statement published Nov. 9 of last year. Andy Kroll has the dramatic political (and human) story behind that statement:

At 6 a.m., Dan Reeves, de León’s chief of staff, got into his car to drive back up to Sacramento from L.A. He stopped at a Carl’s Jr. to help with a hangover and then started making calls. As drafts of the joint statement flew back and forth between the two offices, Reeves had each version read aloud to him while he was driving the I-5. Cut that line. Too slow. Good, good, good. Rendon’s people wanted more time, but Reeves insisted the statement go out as soon as possible. The staffs settled on a final draft at 10:57. Rendon and de León signed off an hour later, and at just past noon, the two offices hit send.

The statement, released in English and Spanish, had come a long way from de León’s phone call and Rendon’s late-night riffing. But the opening line had remained intact just as Rendon had first written it: “Today, we woke up feeling like strangers in a foreign land ….”

Yes, science is political

I’m dead certain that when Warren Ellis said “science will fuck you,” what he meant was that science is splendidly and gloriously implacable, tenacious, and defiant. Science isn’t cold, uncaring facts —  it’s art with evidence. Powerful stuff.

The New Scientist has a four-part special tracking intersections between scientific endeavor and the new administration, starting with a piece from Sally Adee on how activists and protestors can cover their electronic tracks as Trump expands surveillance.

Bill McKibbon, at Wired, reminds us that dismantling the Paris accord strikes not just at environmental action but at the “building blocks of our common home — science and diplomacy and also civility.”

And Elizabeth Lopatto, science editor at The Verge, speaks out on why their science coverage can’t and won’t ignore Donald Trump.

Science is a way of seeing that provides us with facts. What we do with those facts is deeply political. Determining whether pollution harms people is a matter of scientific inquiry, but deciding what to do in response to that data is politics. Who uses the water and land, and how? Those aren’t scientific questions — they’re political ones. Do we value the safety of our citizens or the profits of our corporations? What’s the balance between the two? Those are also political questions.

Tower of Babble

If you truly want nothing this weekend but to indulge in some righteous rage, here are two highly satisfying diatribes.

Jesse Berney is a little indignant:

Of course he’s getting rid of the NEA and the NEH. What use does Donald Trump have for the things that make life beautiful and good? He surrounds himself with gilded ugliness. He’s a billionaire who hangs a Renoir reproduction in the $100 million abattoir he lives in, because why would he want an original? He has enough money and fame to access to the finest tailors in the world, and his suits don’t fit. His hair is stupid.

And a gloriously breathless temper-tantrum from Joe Kloc. Not even sure to how excerpt from this, here’s one almost-random sample:

Trump, who once dumped a glass of wine on a journalist who wrote a story he didn’t like, told his supporters that journalists were “liars,” the “lowest form of humanity,” and “enemies,” but that he did not approve of killing them. “I’m a very sane person,” said Trump ...

Today is the day we start taking the country back

Finally, in case you missed it (as the kids say), both of the co-founders of this publication have responded to the Trump inauguration and deserve the final word. Martin McClellan bears witness through the lens of Marcel Duchamp, and Paul Constant has marching orders for Seattle Review of Books readers:

If you think of an institution that you hold dear, chances are good that institution will be under attack over the next four years. It’s going to be brutal, and it’s going to happen on multiple fronts.

So here’s what you do. You pick the areas that you care the most about, that you understand really well. And then you fight for them.

How Albert Woodfox survived solitary

One week after joining the Black Panthers, Alfred Woodfox was arrested for robbery. Implicated in the murder of a prison guard, he spent 41 years in solitary confinement, longer than any American in history. His story, documented by Rachel Aviv, is one of extraordinary strength of mind —  and the willful persistence of independence despite unbelievable social and physical constraints.

On February 19, 2016, his sixty-ninth birthday, Woodfox packed his belongings into garbage bags and put about a hundred letters in a cardboard box. He put on black slacks and a black bomber jacket that a freed Angola prisoner had sent him.

Not until he was outside did he believe that he was actually going to be freed. It was a warm, clear, sunny day. He squinted and held the hem of his jacket. When he reached the front gate, he raised his fist and gave a closed-lip smile to a small crowd of supporters.

Michael led him to his car, a blue Corvette. Woodfox shuffled when he walked, as if shackles still connected his feet. Biting his lip and crying, Michael helped his brother into the passenger seat and showed him how to fasten the seat belt.

How ‘Sherlock of the library’ cracked the case of Shakespeare’s identity

Robert McCrum has a delightfully bookish profile of Heather Wolfe, whose contribution to Shakespeare scholarship should but probably will not close the age-old question of who wrote the most celebrated plays in the English language. Among her other work is “Project Dustbunny,” which analyzes hair, dust, and skin to trace the habits of 17th century readers. Dr. Wolfe, we are at your feet.

Dr Wolfe is a willowy, bright-eyed manuscript scholar, a paleographer specialising in Elizabethan England who in certain moods of candour might put you in mind of Portia or perhaps Cordelia. She’s also a Shakespeare detective who, last year, made the career-defining discovery that is going to transform our understanding of Shakespeare’s biography. In the simplest terms, Wolfe delivered the coup de grace to the wild-eyed army of conspiracy theorists, including Vanessa Redgrave and Derek Jacobi, who contest the authenticity, even the existence, of the playwright known to contemporaries as Master Will Shakespeare.

Richard Prince Just Showed Artists a Way to Fight Trump

Petty pleasure or genuine act of defiance, there’s something viscerally satisfying about Richard Prince’s decision to disown his own creation after its purchase by Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. Prince has been called a flim-flam man and worse for selling art based on images lifted from Instagram, but like the artists who have refused to perform at the inauguration on January 20  —  and unlike Silicon Valley’s tech elite  —  he’s hitting Trump in the only place that seems to hurt: the president-elect’s delicate ego.

Jerry Saltz on learning to fight on a new cultural and political battlefield.

Even if this en masse disowning is only an isolated action, limited to those artists lucky enough to live off their work, just a drip in the middle of this building shitstorm of a presidency, I gleaned an artist trying to take back his name, his work, do something, anything. To do this in a time that is calling to us all to take action rather than to simply default, using our energies to criticize how others use their energy.

Prince's act of disownership opens up an incredible window of resistance.

A message to my doomed colleagues in the American media

In the wake of Donald Trump’s first press conference as president-elect, a cautionary tale for American media from Russian journalist Alexey Kovalev.

This man owns you. He understands perfectly well that he is the news. You can’t ignore him. You’re always playing by his rules  —  which he can change at any time without any notice ... Your readership is dwindling because ad budgets are shrinking  —  while his ratings are soaring, and if you want to keep your publication afloat, you’ll have to report on everything that man says as soon as he says it, without any analysis or fact-checking, because 1) his fans will not care if he lies to their faces; 2) while you’re busy picking his lies apart, he’ll spit out another mountain of bullshit and you’ll be buried under it.

How I Got My Attention Back

If you can set aside the irony of yet another online essay railing against the Internet — which is gutting our attention spans, killing our ability to experience the sublime, and probably kicks puppies when nobody’s looking — Craig Mod has some good reminders about what happens when we turn on the content spigot and why we should occasionally turn it off.

Today, I could live on Twitter all day, everyday, convincing myself I was being productive. Or, at least inducing the chemicals in the mind that make me feel like I’m being productive. Read more news. Send more replies. Start more threads. Each incoming reply activating a corresponding dopamine pop. Largely pushing nothing in the world forward.

Maybe I lost my attention because I’m weak, lonely, pathetic. Maybe everyone else has total control; they can resist all the information spun by algorithms — all the delicious dopamine hits in the form of red circles. Bing! Maybe it’s just me.

But … I want my attention back.