June Newsletter: Some Interesting Things to Read This Month

Dear Friends, 

Good afternoon! I’m on an airplane right now, which means I’m delighted to have just read a new, absolutely mesmerizing story in The Atlantic about the disappearance of MH 370. It’s by William Langewiesche, the greatest of all flight correspondents, and, among other things, I’ve now learned that it’s not so hard for a pilot to quietly asphyxiate all of his passengers as part of a demonic, suicidal quest. More encouragingly, I've also learned about a man, set on visiting every country on earth, who has been searching the beaches of the world for the wreckage of the plane—and finding quite a bit.

 If you’re into mysteries, can I also recommend this profile of Emmanuel Macron, by my old New Yorker colleague Lauren Collins, which raises the question: Are we really OK when Macron is just about the last, sane leader defending the liberal order? If that question troubles you, perhaps, like me, you worry that one contributor to the decline of the global order has been the rising power of a few tech platforms. So you might like the new scholarly paper by Lina Khan, explaining why platforms should be prevented from selling their own products in the marketplaces they run. Her last essay changed the terms of the anti-trust debate in this country, and this one’s pretty interesting too. And if you want to dig into one specific story about the problem, here’s an excellent investigation into radicalization through YouTube. Or this terrific report on how measles has spread in Brooklyn. Though, remember, tech can also be truly good.

I also highly recommend this story about the tortured life, and quest for redemption, of Megan Rapinoe’s brother, and this heartbreaking story from Rolling Stone about the epidemic of suicide among men in the American West. This is an excellent piece about how to continue to produce art as your mind starts to drift away. While we’re on the topic, this is a terrifying, but exceptionally well-done, story from the NY Times Magazine: “My cousin was my hero. Until the day he tried to kill me.”

In lighter news, can I recommend going on a really, really long walk? And you should also absolutely read this piece—“The Code That Crashed The World”— by my colleague Andy Greenberg, which just won the Loeb Award. And if you haven’t read it yet, George Packer’s new biography of Richard Holbrooke is a masterpiece.

Lastly, here’s a very short piece by me, about one of my running heroes, Gabe Grunewald, who passed away this month after a quest to help find cures for the diseases like the one that would end her life. As I wrote: “Running is one of the most human sports. It’s just you, and your body—against other people or against the clock. The best do it until their bodies give out, either because of age or injury. The rest of us do it as best we can: to get fit, to find relief from the other stresses of life, to be outside in the mountain air. Grunewald did it for herself, but also for so many others. As she said in an interview last fall “I would never have raised my hand to do this, but someone has to.”  

Best, *N 

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