This one’s a doozy, friends, packed with two weeks’ worth of stories. Settle in.
Black Lives Matter
American police shot and killed at least five other men on the day George Floyd died. (BuzzFeed News, ~15 min.)
In 1954, a group of moms in suburban Ohio were sick of waiting for their kids’ schools to integrate. So they started marching — and they didn’t stop for 18 months. (The Atavist, ~51 min.)
Tamla Horsford died under mysterious circumstances, the only black attendee at an all-white overnight party. What on earth happened? (Atlanta Magazine, ~16 min.)
Black social media influencers’ popularity has exploded over the past month, largely from white followers. But what does it really mean? (BuzzFeed News, ~10 min.)
Rashad West was a small-business owner who ran a popular Asian eatery in Minneapolis. Then the video footage from his restaurant showed definitively that George Floyd was not resisting arrest. (Level Magazine, ~9 min.)
“You want a Confederate monument? My body is a Confederate monument.” (New York Times Opinion, ~5 min.)
The deeply reported story of a contentious Black Lives Matter protest in Bethel, Ohio, a small town that is 96% white, and whose residents went all in on Trump in 2016. (BuzzFeed News, ~26 min.)
COVID19
Evelyn Hockstein, Washington Post
The human cost of a $20 hamburger in the age of coronavirus. Great story idea, great execution. (Washington Post, ~17 min.)
There’s a reason that the kind of reopening we’re experiencing is a nightmare. (The Atlantic, ~5 min.)
Workers across nine industries share how the pandemic has upended their lives. (California Sunday, ~15 min.)
I love a good nerd story, and this one, about how British medical journal The Lancet has been tackling the coronavirus, fits the bill. (New Yorker, ~11 min.)
The pandemic has thrown families around the world into chaos and uncertainty. Here’s how six family units — in Nairobi, Hong Kong, Madrid, Budapest, New Delhi, and Rio de Janeiro — are coping. (Washington Post, ~26 min.)
A scathing (and funny-if-weren’t-so-serious) case against reopening schools. (Esquire, ~7 min.)
Over the course of Ramadan, an unemployed doctor played good Samaritan for his increasingly sick circle of family and friends. I couldn’t put this one down. (The New Humanitarian, ~26 min.)
The pandemic experts are not doing well. (The Atlantic, ~9 min.)
In her father’s obituary, a devastated and furious daughter says Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey “has blood on his hands” for reopening the state too soon. I can’t believe we haven’t seen more of this. (Washington Post, ~2 min.)
The best of the rest
The oral history of The Onion’s historic 9/11 issue. (MEL Magazine, ~24 min.)
The new Baby-Sitter’s Club Netflix series is perfect. I should know — I read every book as a kid. (Vulture, ~5 min.)
Since Beirut’s civil war ended in 1990, the city has been overtaken by an increasingly hot mess of raw sewage. This lyrical essay on what it’s like to live there is somehow gorgeous. (The Baffler, ~15 min.)
Behold, a most lovely Carl Reiner story. (Twitter, ~2 min.)
Meet Lindsay Hecox, a college sophomore and cross-country runner fighting Idaho’s recent ban on transgender athletes in women’s sports. (Sports Illustrated, ~17 min.)
Over the past century, American workers’ wages, benefits, and rights have been ravaged. But there may be hope yet. (Bloomberg, ~30 min.)
What if doctors stopped prescribing weight loss as the first treatment for any ailment that walks in the door? This should be mandatory reading in the medical field. (Scientific American, ~25 min.)
Simone Biles, we don’t deserve you. (Vogue, ~28 min.)
World powers haven’t made a real, concerted effort to fight war crimes and crimes against humanity since the genocide in Srebrenica in 1995. What gives? (The Guardian, ~6 min.)
This story, about how the Trump campaign is forcing President Obama out of a quiet retirement, is packed full of delicious details. (New York Times, ~15 min.)
A Bay Area megachurch pastor kept quiet after learning that a church volunteer was attracted to children. Then the pastor’s son went public with his dad’s deception … and that’s not even the craziest part of the story. (Religion News Service, ~16 min.)
Forty years ago this summer, nobody saw Airplane! coming. (Esquire, ~8 min.)
On top of Mount Everest with climber Mark Synnott as he tries to solve the mountain’s greatest mystery: Did Sandy Irvine and George Mallory reach the summit 29 years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay? (National Geographic, ~19 min.)
Inside the political education of Killer Mike. A compulsively readable profile from start to finish. (GQ, ~25 min.)
If you read one thing this week
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Thanks for reading.
Kirsten