Editor’s note: Oops, I was a week early — TheNewsGal is off next week in honor of Labor Day.
Covid-19
(Kholood Eid, New Yorker)
Driving a bus during a pandemic, then an uprising — this is New York City transit worker Terence Layne’s survival story. (New Yorker, ~31 min.)
Reporter Helen Branswell is my go-to for the latest on Covid-19. Here, she games out four scenarios for how we might develop immunity to Covid-19. (STAT, ~10 min.)
What happened in Room 10 at the Life Care Center in Washington state, the first Covid-19 hot spot in the country? A story that gets bigger and better with each paragraph, this piece is as good as anything I’ve read about the pandemic since it began. (California Sunday, ~71 min.)
During the pandemic, Trevor Noah’s tackled work-from-home a little differently than his late-night peers. (Variety, ~16 min.)
Race, policing & Black Lives Matter
(Todd Heisler, New York Times)
Nobody’s told Breonna Taylor’s story quite like this. Wow. (New York Times, ~29 min.)
I was a U.S. diplomat. Customs and Border Protection only cared that I was black. (Politico Magazine, ~26 min.)
Racism denied Auburn’s first Black student a Master’s degree. Then, at 86, he returned. (Washington Post, ~8 min.)
Actually, there were many Tulsa Massacres: How the myth of a liberal North erases a long history of white violence. (National Museum of American History, ~10 min.)
A brotherhood of Black mayors, mostly from the South, have a group chat. As Covid-19, a cratering economy, and mass demonstrations sweep the nation, it’s been a lifeline. (Esquire, ~19 min.)
The enduring, pernicious whiteness of true crime. (The Appeal, ~18 min.)
Six Black women, six first-person accounts of hair discrimination in the workplace. (Glamour, ~17 min.)
New Orleans’ Black trash collectors went on strike in May. They were replaced by prison labor. (Discourse Blog & Enemy, ~12 min.)
Corey couldn’t take it anymore: How a Yale cafeteria worker smashed a monument to slavery and changed an institution. (The Cut, ~19 min.)
The phrase “people of color” needs to die. (GQ, ~4 min.)
How did Hall of Fame college basketball coach George Raveling come to own Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech? (The Undefeated, ~4 min.)
The best of the rest
(Gareth Cattermole, Getty)
Long live the king: A perfect, heartbreaking tribute to Chadwick Boseman. (Rolling Stone, ~7 min.)
When pregnancy is the only time a woman is treated as powerful. (GEN, ~9 min.)
Meet Lizzie Johnson, the San Francisco Chronicle reporter who covers California wildfires for a living. (Columbia Journalism Review, ~16 min.)
Inside the wildest insurance fraud scheme Texas has ever seen. I couldn’t put this one down … and I also couldn’t stop thinking as I read it, “What an asshole.” (Texas Monthly, ~29 min.)
Major American cities are suffering gaping budget holes. Is privatizing airports a no-brainer solution? (The Atlantic, ~10 min.)
The only Joe Biden story you need to read between now and Election Day. (I reserve the right to change my mind.) (New Yorker, ~62 min.)
My swim coach raped me when I was 17. USA Swimming made it disappear. (The Guardian, ~7 min.)
Former prisoners detail the horrors of the Chinese concentration camps where upward of a million Muslims have disappeared. (BuzzFeed News, ~14 min.)
How police are using “super recognizers” like me to track criminals. (VICE, ~9 min.)
If you read one thing this week
(Getty)
George Floyd’s death changed everything: An oral history of a movement’s early days as told by those who rose up, those who bore witness, those who grieved, and those who hoped. (Vanity Fair, ~42 min.)
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Thanks for reading.
Kirsten