TheNewsGal, Edition No. 88

What a week! These are the standouts.

All the things

• What Miss Piggy Taught Me About Abuse: The consequences of believing that the way to a man’s heart is to wear it down. I didn’t see this coming. (Nichole Perkins, The Cut, ~5 min.)

• The Lure of the Caricature: Anger and the public sphere. The best Covid piece I read this week. And there are graphs! (Zeynep Tufekci, Insight, ~11 min.)

• “I Found Your Mom”: On a July night in 1979, Dolores Wulff vanished. Her 12-year-old son, Paul, would grow up to become a college football coach while never knowing his mother’s fate. Forty-one years later, he got a call from a detective. What a story. (Adam Rittenberg and Kyle Bonagura, ESPN, ~29 min.)

• The story behind the iconic Vietnam episode of Hey Arnold! This is pretty cool. (Kimmy Yam, NBC News, ~7 min.)

Courtesy Matt Ortile via Catapult)

• Baking her recipes keeps my mother near. Really sweet. Pun intended. (Matt Ortile, Catapult, ~11 min.)

• These People Who Work From Home Have a Secret: Why be good at one job, they thought, when they could be mediocre at two? But ... ew. (Rachel Feintzeig, Wall Street Journal, ~12 min.)

• I tackled my climate anxiety by becoming a parks department super steward. I’m a fan. (Stephanie Foo, Curbed, ~8 min.)

• The March of the Karens: The name has come to represent an entitled and belligerent white woman. But what does this narrative say — and elide — about racism and sexism today? Excellent/yikes. (Ligaya Mishan, T Magazine, ~16 min.)

• Covid killed her husband. Now it’s taking the only home her kids have ever known. Jeezuz. (William Wan, Washington Post, ~17 min.)

(Buddy Mays, Corbis)

• Your Own Harriet: The tremendous power of life choice representation. This is just so good. (Anne Helen Petersen, Culture Study, ~12 min.)

• Why do American grocery stores still have an ethnic aisle? Damned if we do and damned if we don’t. (Priya Krishna, New York Times, ~10 min.)

• How the Pandemic Now Ends: Cases of covid-19 are rising fast. Vaccine uptake has plateaued. The pandemic will be over one day — but the way there is different now. Ugh. (Ed Yong, The Atlantic, ~18 min.)

• Hayley Mills answers every question we have about The Parent Trap. Yaaaaas. (Tolly Wright, Vulture, ~9 min.)

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If you read one thing this week

(Danna Singer for The Atlantic)

• What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind: Grief, conspiracy theories, and one family’s search for meaning in the two decades since 9/11. My goodness. (Jennifer Senior, The Atlantic, ~58 min.)