Good Reads:
The 2026 Pulitzer winners were announced yesterday and they even managed to pick a couple that weren’t from the New York Times, such as Aaron Parsley’s gripping and terrifying story from last August’s Texas Monthly about the night a flooding Guadalupe River tore the house out from underneath his family. If you missed this story last summer, take a deep breath and read it now.
Alissa managed to keep both kids on the countertop, one hand on each, still trying to reassure them. As the house came undone, she grabbed one in each arm. This is the part that will forever haunt me. If I or anyone else had been closer to them, we would have helped her. We would have grabbed one of the kids. But we didn’t know that we were about to be plunged into the water. We simply didn’t know.
This is a hard swerve tonally but I think we need one after that, so here’s a very different throwback to Hallie Bateman’s delightful 2014 newsletter Pen Parade—specifically the time Hallie wrote the newsletter with a carrot dipped in ink.
Heather Havrilesky’s Ask Molly is one of my favorite newsletters because it keeps evolving and taking new risks, and this week’s post is a perfect example:
Glow replenishment is expensive. It’s branded under the name Shark, a vacuum cleaner company. Their formulas are developed in Korean skincare labs. Under high capitalism, entire countries are encountered as specialty boutiques selling either skincare and kimchi or baguettes and perfume, anime and sushi or handbags and gelato.
Israel’s Gaza Model is expensive. It’s an exhaustive five-step exfoliation system that rids the landscape of empire-clogging impurities like schools, old people, gardens, gas stations, young women, café and gaming centers, tea kettles, pets, mosques, cookbooks, best friends, bottles of wine, bridges, bakeries, jewelry boxes.
Good Reads About Bad Reads:
Don’t read Lulu Garcia-Navarro’s yet another Tucker Carlson profile in the New York Times Magazine, instead read Parker Molloy’s overview of the many “But Really Actually What Does Tucker Carlson Believe For Really Real?” pieces, including this new one. We all benefit more from critique of Carlson’s one tedious rhetorical trick than we do from letting him play it over and over, even on a well-meaning journalist who is trying her best.
And sorry that the New York Times is such a punching bag today1 but also don’t read Eli Saslow and Erin Schaff’s gauzy American pastoral tear-jerker “The Last Days of Butter Ridge” which is packed with romantic depictions of rough-hewn but good hearted olde timey Trump voter dairy farmers and yet surprisingly devoid of facts or financial analysis. As Saslow would have it, the Watson family of northern Pennsylvania have been betrayed by a perfidious Donald Trump and forced to sell their hardscrabble dairy farm. Instead watch farmer Sarah Taber’s video about why farmers actually voted for Donald Trump, and then read her posts exploring these particular poor dairy farmer fracking landlords’ actual financial situation. It turns out that “The Last Days of Butter Ridge” is more like a large landholder with diversified income streams winding down the most unprofitable part of his business (for now) to live off passive energy extraction income instead. And also young Boyd will raise his pet cow Parachute, who will probably get her own New York Times profile soon enough.
Sentences With Threatening Auras:
This is essentially the dropshipping strategy brought to healthcare…
For the next few weeks of this column, I will dig into questions about the viability of the American university system.
This is what ten years of finger and toenails looks like, and it’s not nearly enough.
And So On:
Singleride.nyc: “Travel the longest route you can on the NYC Subway without visiting the same station twice.” Good game to play while you listen to Train Jazz. A thread from Annie “Depths of Wikipedia” Rauwerda: “‘openai [dot] com’ was once the personal homepage of a guy named glenn (2001), and ‘tiktok [dot] com’ was the quaint shared homepage of a couple as their relationship progressed from dating to married with a baby (2000).” Artemis II Photo Timeline. A great reporting fellowship on Martha’s Vineyard. Mina Kimes is hosting the Scripps National Spelling Bee! “On Polymarket, the Journal found, 67% of profits go to just 0.1% of accounts.” Neat. Today in Crabs. New AFib treatment unlocked? “Rectal exam stabilized man's irregular heartbeat.” I guess it’s worth a shot. TMZ asked John Hinckley Jr. what he thought about the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting. Lol. “OpenAI has a goblin problem.” Don’t we all.
Today’s Song: Gang this Slayyyter album absolutely rips. If I win the ASME I’m gonna make them play “I’m Actually Kinda Famous” as my walk-on music.
Josh Millard raves: “I leveraged my new tumblr-coded Timberlake ramen knowledge in the work Teams this very morning! Tabscord works!” If you have no idea what that means, you should become a paid member and join the Tabs discord to find out. If you do know what it means, you should also become a paid member and join the Tabs discord because you sound our like our kind of person.
1 Editor’s Note: Not actually sorry.
