TheNewsGal, Edition No. 68

What a week! Here's what you missed.

All the things

(Valero Doval, Texas Monthly)

• How Hank the Cowdog made John R. Erickson the king of the canine canon. I’d never heard of Hank! A fun read about an unlikely literary hero. (Christian Wallace, Texas Monthly, ~32 min.)

• I spent 25 years monitoring far-right extremists for the U.S. government — no one listened. Good god. (Daryl Johnson, Newlines Magazine, ~10 min.)

• Billie Holiday deserves better: Men continually failed the singer when she was alive. They’re still doing it. Excellent and important. (Soraya Nadia McDonald, The Undefeated, ~12 min.)

• Unpacking the fight over H.R. 1, the massive voting rights bill. A perfect explainer. (Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern, Slate, ~7 min.)

• The fall of Armie Hammer: A family saga of sex, money, drugs, and betrayal. I couldn’t stop reading this, and I was never even a fan. (Julie Miller, Vanity Fair, ~32 min.)

• Daycare makes the world more tender. A must-read, kids or not. (Kathryn Jezer-Morton, Romper, ~7 min.)

• More than 60 people — from Anthony Fauci to Chet Hanks — share what it was like in the Oval Office, in the Utah Jazz locker room, and backstage on Broadway on March 11, 2020, the day Covid swallowed everything. Excellent, and feels like a much quicker read than it is. (BuzzFeed News, ~64 min.)

• What I learned from reading books by women from every country in the world. Love everything about this. (Sophie Baggott, The Guardian, ~4 min.)

(Francesco Lastrucci, Smithsonian Magazine)

• Inside Naples’ world-famous pizza culture. I never wanted this story to end. (Franz Lidz, Smithsonian Magazine, ~22 min.)

• Becoming a parent during the pandemic was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I’m looking at my new mom friends differently after reading this. (Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic, ~16 min.)

• Facebook’s AI algorithms gave it an insatiable habit for lies and hate speech. Now the man who built them can’t fix the problem. The first piece I’ve read on this subject that was both approachable and compelling. (Karen Hao, MIT Technology Review, ~31 min.)

• Confessions of an influencer whisperer: How Amber Venz Box and her “Harvard of Influencing” taught social media stars how to monetize their brands — and got everyone else to spend billions on Instagram. Fascinating. (Jo Piazza, Town & Country, ~11 min.)

• The year of choosing dangerously. Just trust me on this one. (Maggie Koerth, FiveThirtyEight, ~10 min.)

• Everyone is beautiful and no one is horny: How modern action and superhero films fetishize the body, even as they desexualize it. Smart and sharp and funny. (RS Benedict, Blood Knife, ~13 min.)

• A Kansas bookshop’s fight with Amazon is about more than the price of books. More of this, please! (Casey Cep, New Yorker, ~18 min.)

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If you read one thing this week

(Courtesy of USC Shoah Foundation)

• Best friends separated in the Holocaust just reunited. They were “laughing like they were still 9 years old,” family said. (Sydney Page, Washington Post, ~8 min.)