The April 20 issue of The New Yorker was a bumper crop of gripping, if depressing, reading:
- Sarah Stillman’s previous New Yorker article on the police’s reliance on drug confiscations to fund their departments — and we know now that it was standard operating procedure in Ferguson as well — is followed up by an equally exhaustively researched article on child kidnappings for ransom by the U.S.-Mexico border — and the DHS nightmare they’re plunged in after rescue. “Where Are The Children?” (The New Yorker)
- Oliver Sacks, on the late Spalding Gray: “The Catastrophe” (The New Yorker)
- Luke Mogelson has a really funny piece of fiction, “Peacetime;” how is it possible that he can put on a reporter’s hat and write in-depth articles about ebola in Liberia and executions in Aleppo as well? (The New Yorker)
- Ah, those were the days. Not really: I do look back at those early days after I ditched dial-up — and I gave full rein to my acquisitive, obsessive impulses with an almost-total disregard for creative labor — I hang my head in shame, and am disgusted at the time I wasted. And money: we’re talking spindles and spindles of CD-Rs and DVD-Rs. Stephen Witt, “The Man Who Broke the Music Business” (The New Yorker)
- More malfeasance, this time from my people. Doug Bock Clark, “The Bot Bubble: How Click Farms Have Inflated Social Media Currency” (The New Republic)
- More on the Kult of Karl Ove, in three parts. William Pierce, “Reality Hunger: The Six Books of Karl Ove Knausgaard, Part I” (Los Angeles Review of Books)
- “…There is a constant hum in the pit of my stomach that reminds me I can be evicted from this country at the drop of a hat, or at least banished to the margins with a reminder that, no, I don’t belong. …The reminder is in the form of my name, my first name…” Madhurima Chakraborty, “By Any Other Name” (The Hairpin)
- Just don’t drop what you’re doing to read this. Derek Thompson, “The Procrastination Doom Loop—and How to Break It” (The Atlantic)
- Kelly Sundberg’s essay will be in The Best American Essays 2015 anthology; this is an absolutely devastating piece. “It Will Look Like A Sunset” (Guernica)
- I’m guilty and I want to be forgiven. Reeves Wiedeman, “Every Day Should Be E-mail Debt Forgiveness Day” (The New Yorker)
- “When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.” One more essential read from Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Nonviolence as Compliance in Baltimore” (The Atlantic).
- This is just lovely. Maria Popova, “The Workhorse and the Butterfly: Ann Patchett on Writing and Why Self-Forgiveness Is the Most Important Ingredient of Great Art” (Brain Pickings)