The best things to read this week
I write periodic newsletters on my favorite recent stories. You can get them all by signing up for my mailing list here. In the meantime, here's one I just sent out.
Dear Friends,
It's been a while, but I've read so many good stories recently that it seems like I should start May off with a newsletter.
First off, here's a wild Amanda Schaffer story about a scientist convinced he had found a cure for herpes, but he knew he didn't have long to live. So he decided to go rogue with his research. It's a crazy tale, and it raises an interesting moral question: how many lives would you risk, if your days were numbered, to save many more? (And if you like this, here's another classic by Amanda, which you have to read to the very end.)
Then I just finished a great Ben Taub profile about a CIA operative who decides that it's time to stop trying to fix the world and, instead, come back and fix America. So he becomes a beat cop in Georgia. It's a story that will tell you a lot about Afghanistan but even more about Savannah.
The most emotionally intense piece I read this month was probably this by Sean Flynn about what people in Hawaii did when they believed a nuclear missile was coming their way. "If we're going to die," a husband says to his wife, "at least we're together."
Here, too, is a great piece by my friend Ben Smith about a strange reporting caper from his early years as an international journalist. And speaking of that, I spent a delightful hour and forty-three minutes talking to Tim Ferriss for his podcast—about how I became a journalist, how I like to structure stories, and why I got fired from my first job in about forty-three minutes less than it took me to record the podcast.
As always, If you enjoy this newsletter and think other folks would too, please forward to them or tell them they can sign up here.
I consult and provide specialty expertise on making plain the edges & challenges of program management, workforce agility, performance improvement, & cybersecurity. I know, I’m narrowing that list down.
6 年The Ben Taub article about the former Coast Guardsman & CIA officer becoming a Savannah cop is incredible. Thank you for sharing!
Storyteller, Communicator, Connector. [email protected]
6 年The Tim Ferriss conversation was hugely entertaining and informative. Now I need to find a way to get him to hire me for two bucks a word (working, of course, a four hour week...)
Founder @ TheChallenge.Org, Founder & Board Member @ Displate
6 年Powerful stuff with the Hawaiian missle threat alert. Was spending time there on Kauai last year April. Must be extremely tough to get such pristine peace disrupted..
Executive Creative Director(Writer) Brand Motion through Emotion: provoking positive new ideas.
6 年love this so much. thanks Nicholas Thompson.