TheNewsGal, Edition No. 79
What a week! These are the standouts.
All the things
The uncanny, fluorescent world of the Costco influencer. It’s all so weird. (Molly Osberg, Jezebel, ~5 min.)
America Has a Drinking Problem: A little alcohol can boost creativity and strengthen social ties. But there’s nothing moderate, or convivial, about the way many Americans drink today. OK, this is super interesting. (Kate Julian, The Atlantic, ~27 min.)
Watching my dad die changed my life. Trust me on this one. (Cascade Tuholske, Outside, ~6 min.)
It Came From the ’70s: The story of your grandma’s weird couch. How could I not read this? (Lisa Hix, Collectors Weekly, ~24 min.)
Law and Wooder. Just the best review of Mare of Easttown. (Aaron Bady, Los Angeles Review of Books, ~13 min.)
The sound of silence on abortion. Corporate America’s activist streak ends here. (Linda Greenhouse, New York Times Opinion, ~7 min.)
Nicholas Braun on Zola, Succession rumors, and, yep, those Crocs. Cousin Greg is a muffin. (Ben Allen, British GQ, ~18 min.)
Cooking Backwards: On becoming a kitchen archivist. Some spent the pandemic perfecting homemade bread. One woman cooked her way through old family recipes. (Pamela Petro, Guernica, ~19 min.)
The Snitch: In Scott Kimball, the FBI thought it had found a high-value informant who could help solve big cases. What it got instead was lies, betrayal, and murder. Crazy good. (Jordan Michael Smith, The Atavist, ~28 min.)
First Passage: A journey toward motherhood in the age of glacial loss. Gorgeous and haunting and penned from an icebreaker in the Antarctic. (Elizabeth Rush, Orion Magazine, ~21 min.)
The State of Ohio vs. a Sex-Trafficked Teenager: The criminal justice system mishandled 15-year-old Alexis Martin’s case. Now she’s living with the consequences. Stunning, in every way possible. (Jessica Contrera, Washington Post, ~40 min.)
A frantic warning from 100 leading experts: Our democracy is in grave danger. This is the stuff that keeps me up at night. (Greg Sargent, Washington Post Opinions, ~6 min.)
Inside Silicon Valley’s mayo marketing madness. Of course there were mayo wars. (Larissa Zimberoff, Wired, ~8 min.)
If you read one thing this week
The peril of not vaccinating the world. Good god. (Sue Halpern, New Yorker, ~11 min.)