OK, I think I went overboard on this big batch of mainstream and less-mainstream reading recommendations. There's more than enough interesting content here to tide you over until Halloween.
Serious stuff
- The New York Times Magazine: "Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true." by Nikole Hannah-Jones [The 1619 Project]
- The Atlantic: "The Great Land Robbery" (The shameful story of how 1 million black families have been ripped from their farms) by Van R. Newkirk II
- Pacific Standard: "The Young Hands That Feed Us" (An estimated 524,000 children work unimaginably long hours in America's grueling agricultural fields, and it's all perfectly legal.) by Karen Coates & Valeria Fernandez
- ProPublica: "When Fracking Companies Own the Gas Beneath Your Land" by Mayeta Clark
- Rolling Stone: "The Climate Crisis Is Moving Us Toward a Food Catastrophe" by Eric Holthaus
- Grist: "Climate change’s deadliest effects are unfolding under the sea" by Molly Enking
- Grist: "Trash decisions" (In Seattle, homeowners dump their garbage in homeless encampments and the city uses trash buildup as a reason to clear encampments with no notice) by Erica C. Barnett
- My Inside Voices: "When it’s OK for a hero to stop being a hero" by Susan Jennings
- Los Angeles Times: "For our kids, the white guy with a gun is the face of terrorism" by Mary McNamara
- The Washington Post: "As summer camps turn on facial recognition, parents demand: More smiles, please" by Drew Harwell
- Nieman Lab: "Newsonomics: The 'daily' part of daily newspapers is on the way out — and sooner than you might think" by Ken Doctor
- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "Disconnected" (On the farm, spotty internet means trouble selling milk, slow downloads, constant frustration) by Kris B. Mamula & Jessie Wardarski
- The Conversation: "How African American folklore saved the cultural memory and history of slaves" by Jennifer Dos Reis Dos Santos
Less-serious stuff
- The New Yorker: "How Mosquitoes Changed Everything" (They slaughtered our ancestors and derailed our history. And they’re not finished with us yet.) by Brooke Jarvis
- Gizmodo: "What Would Happen If the Whole Internet Just Shut Down All of a Sudden?" by Daniel Kolitz
- Nieman Lab: "Junky TV is actually making people dumber — and more likely to support populist politicians" by Laura Hazard Owen
- CityLab: "Why Everyday Architecture Deserves Respect" by Darran Anderson
- The Philadelphia Inquirer: "This Philadelphia woman recorded three decades of television on 70,000 VHS tapes" by Gary Thompson
- NBC News: "Scientists are searching for a mirror universe. It could be sitting right in front of you." by Corey S. Powell
- The Outline: "The end times are here, and I am at Target" (On the strange experience of living through the only accurate doomsday prediction.) by Hayes Brown
- NPR: "Cash Back Guarantee: The U.S. Redeems Damaged Bills Because The Dollar Depends On It" by Josh Axelrod
- The Athletic: "Appreciating the passion and ability of Jayson Stark, the 2019 Spink Award winner" by Ken Rosenthal [Jayson Stark helped spread the word of the Steve Jeltz Fan Club, which I still have to write about, circa 1990.]
- Slate: "Why I Printed My Facebook" by Katie Day Good. Excerpt from this article, which was recommended by Dan Herman:
"All told, my Facebook archive was 10,057 pages long. I decided to discard the 4,612-page document of disembodied 'likes,' which brought the total down to a more manageable 5,445 pages. It took seven phone calls before I found a printing service willing to print a single document that large at a price I could afford."
We have seen lots of birds but no ducks yet. pic.twitter.com/BjGBD5X5lN
— PostcardFromThePast (@PastPostcard) August 18, 2019
Frivolous-yet-still-meaningful stuff
- The New York Times: "What America Gets Wrong About Tracy Flick" (In 'Election,' she's preyed upon by a teacher and almost cheated out of her rightful victory. But somehow she's the villain.) by A.O. Scott
- SKTCHD: "Paper Girls, Giant Days, Squirrel Girl and the Golden Age of the Hang Out Comic" by David Harper
- The Ringer: "Crisis on Infinite Courts" (On Novak Djokovic's confounding marathon win against Roger Federer in the Wimbledon final) by Brian Phillips
- The Guardian: "Theme parks, pubs and 'human zoos': how the Victorians invented leisure" by Peter Watts
- Atlas Obscura: "In England, You Can Camp in Abandoned Medieval Churches" by David Wilson
- Literary Hub: "The Little Known, Much Loved Cookbook That Was Ahead of Its Time" (On Patience Gray's Honey from a Weed) by Adam Federman
- Los Angeles Review of Books: "'Dungeons & Dragons' and Baseball; or, Robert Coover Fights the Robot Umps" by Ryan Lackey
- We Are The Mutants: "The Posthuman Heart of ‘Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons’" by Fred McNamara
- We Are The Mutants: "Devil in the Details: ‘The Occult Coloring Book’, 1971"
Another day another few thousand Cuban Missile Crisis telegrams. pic.twitter.com/2bopzLakxW
— Bill Geerhart (@CONELRAD6401240) July 11, 2019
Given the sheer volume of Cuban Missile Crisis mail, it is amazing and admirable that the Kennedy White House staff made every effort to reply. But sometimes, it was impossible. pic.twitter.com/SBRz2rN9QP
— Bill Geerhart (@CONELRAD6401240) July 13, 2019
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