MOTHER JONES / The Wrong Way by Jennifer Gonnerman

“Even after it was confirmed that the driver was not a terrorist and had not been armed, CNN did not dial down the fear and panic. Instead, many of its on-air personalities continued to play to their viewers' anxiety—and applaud the actions of the police.”

PRO PUBLICA / Hotter Than Lava by Julia Angwin and Abbie Nehring

“First designed nearly 40 years ago to help military special forces rescue hostages, flashbangs create a stunningly bright burst of light and an ear-splitting boom that temporarily blind and deafen anyone standing within a few feet of them. Last week, French special forces used flashbangs as part of a dramatic operation to free hostages held at a kosher supermarket in Paris. But when these modified hand grenades explode on the human body, they can cause severe injury or death.”

THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE / Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department by Civil Rights Division

POLITICO MAGAZINE / The Hunting of Billie Holiday by Johann Hari

“In 1939, Billie Holiday stood on stage in New York City and sang a song that was unlike anything anyone had heard before. ‘Strange Fruit’ was a musical lament against lynching. It imagined black bodies hanging from trees as a dark fruit native to the South. Here was a black woman, before a mixed audience, grieving for the racist murders. Immediately after, Holiday received her first threat from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.”

SLATE / Driven to Kill by Geoffrey Sant

“It seems like a crazy urban legend: In China, drivers who have injured pedestrians will sometimes then try to kill them. And yet not only is it true, it’s fairly common.”

Arguments and Provocations

Khaled Abdullah Ali Al Mahdi / Reuters

HARPERS / Lifting As We Climb by Randall Kennedy

A progressive defense of “respectability politics.”

DEMOCRACY JOURNAL / Museums Can Change. Will They? by Michael O’Hare

“Think about a world in which our great paintings and sculpture are mostly on view instead of locked up in the basements and warehouses of a handful of our largest museums. In which you didn’t have to go to one of a half-dozen big cities to see them, and didn’t rush through an enormous museum for a whole day because you paid so much to get in. In which you weren’t constantly afraid that you aren’t entitled to what you see, or competent to engage with it. That world is actually within reach, and the main reason we don’t have it is that the people to whom we have entrusted our visual arts patrimony have nailed each other’s feet to the floor.”

STANDPOINT / Is the West’s Lack of Faith Terminal? by Douglas Hall

“...life in modern liberal democracies is to some extent thin or shallow. I do not mean that our lives are meaningless, nor that the opportunity liberal democracy uniquely gives to pursue our own conception of happiness is misguided. On a day-to-day basis most of us find deep meaning and love from our families and friends and much else. But questions remain which have always been at the centre of each of us and which liberal democracy on its own not only cannot answer but was never meant to answer.”

SB NATION / Broke by Spencer Hall

“The part I want you to know about this particular anatomy is what it runs on, and what feeds its muscles and bones and the very mitochondria in its cells: football players, an unending cycle of fresh, healthy, and undestroyed bodies through the system.”

MEDIUM / The Web We Have to Save by Hossein Derakhshan

“Blogs gave form to that spirit of decentralization: They were windows into lives you’d rarely know much about; bridges that connected different lives to each other and thereby changed them. Blogs were cafes where people exchanged diverse ideas on any and every topic you could possibly be interested in. They were Tehran’s taxicabs writ large. Since I got out of jail, though, I’ve realized how much the hyperlink has been devalued.”

THE AWL / Our Incorruptible Dead Girls by Stassa Edwards

“There is a visual continuity of dead girls in cinema: Laid out on slabs, hair draped around pale bodies that belie the likely violence of their fictional deaths, they are peaceful, serene and silent. Covered by a medical examiner’s makeshift shroud or dressed in borrowed clothes, neither their bodies nor their narratives are their own.”

THE NEW YORKER / Overkill by Atul Gawande

“An avalanche of unnecessary medical care is harming patients physically and financially.”

THE GUARDIAN / One Lawyer’s Quest to Defend Extreme Pornography by Edward Docx

“Myles Jackman is Britain’s leading obscenity lawyer. But he does not merely defend the accused: his life’s great plan and purpose is to rid this country once and for all of its laws criminalising extreme pornography – laws that he regards as morally and socially iniquitous.”

BLOOMBERG VIEW / Columns by Megan McArdle

How the Internet Became a Shame Storm, The Economics Behind Grandma’s Tuna Casserole, The Antibiotics Arms Race, and Seven Reasons We Hate Free Range Parenting

THE HUFFINGTON POST / Dying to Be Free by Jason Cherkis

“The problem is not with heroin treatment at one facility in Kentucky over the span of a few months. The problem is with heroin treatment.”

THE POINT / When Nothing Is Cool by Lisa Ruddick

“One way to get members to commit to the group and its ideology is to make them feel ashamed of the varied, private intuitions and desires that might diversify their interests.”

SLATE STAR CODEX / Blog Posts by Scott Alexander

Against Tulip Subsidies and How Bad Are Things

Sports and Leisure

Mike Hutchings / Reuters

THE NEW YORKER / Off Diamond Head by William Finnegan

“Thick, dark-blue peaks seemed to jump up out of deep ocean, some of them unnervingly big. The lefts were short and easy, really just big drops, but Roddy said the rights were better, and he paddled farther east, deeper into the break. His temerity seemed to me insane. The rights looked closed-out (unmakable), and terribly powerful, and, even if you made one, the ride would carry you straight into the big, hungry-looking rocks of outer Black Point. If you lost your board in there, you would never see it again.”

GRANTLAND / The Sea of Crises by Brian Phillips

“In 265 years, 69 men have been promoted to yokozuna. Just 69 since George Washington was a teenager... Until the last 30 years or so, foreigners were rare in the upper ranks of sumo in Japan. But some countries have their own sumo customs, brought over by immigrants, and some others have sports that are very like sumo. Six of the past eight yokozuna promotions have gone to foreigners. There has been no active Japanese yokozuna since the last retired in 2003. This is a source of intense anxiety to many in the tradition-minded world of sumo in Japan.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES / The Heart Stopping Climbs of Alex Honnold by Daniel Duane

“With tenuous balance, he stood up on that foot, very, very slowly, hoping the sticky shoe rubber would adhere. A gust of wind could have blown him off. The index finger of his left hand, he says, was inches from a metal ring attached to an old piece of hardware stuck into the cliff. He found his eyes fixated on it, hoping he could grab it if he slipped.”

NAUTILUS / Is This New Swim Stroke the Fastest Yet? by Regan Penaluna

“Humans are land animals, and not natural swimmers. We have to learn how to swim, and it is up to us to find the fastest way to do so. The search may finally be coming to an end.”

ROADS AND KINGDOMS / The Secret Life of Cheese by Mark Hay

“This peculiar cheese—known as caligù or su callu, depending on whom you talk to—is one of Sardinia’s lesser-known but more ubiquitous specialties. It’s also one of the most primal dairy products you’ll encounter. Upon killing a kid, a farmer simply takes its milk-filled stomach, ties it off in a tight knot or sews it shut, perhaps covers it in mesh to keep the flies off, then hangs it from the ceiling of a cool, dark room. He then waits for a few months until the natural rennet within curdles and hardens the milk into a thick, creamy cheese and desiccation tightens the gut into a pungent, leathery rind.”

GRANTLAND / The Great American Water Park by Bryan Curtis

“Waterslide designers compete in a parallel-universe version of The Right Stuff, vying for height and speed records because — this can be the only reason — it seems like a really awesome thing to do. Of these men, Jeff Henry is the most brilliant.”

SLATE / How Things Break by Dave Mondy

“Once more, look at the two images—look at Ali’s expression. Such a slight change, telling us the photos were snapped milliseconds apart. Surely the superiority of Leifer’s moment is mere luck—no one could calibrate such a quick click, right? But those same semi-seconds are the twitchy difference between hitting a home run or routine foul, between slipping a jab or taking it on the chin. We credit athletes for their split seconds so why not the same for the folks photographing them?”

WASHINGTON POST / Why Him? Why Me? by Eli Saslow

“Two tragic collisions on the football field, separated by 26 years, have brought together a high school linebacker and a former college running back in search of the answer to a life-altering question.”

SMITHSONIAN / How Food Became Religion in Peru’s Capital City by Marco Avilés

“The Lima I saw that night was almost completely devoid of streetlights: a world of empty avenues and concrete apartment blocks, without a real restaurant in sight. It was nothing like the city that three decades later we’d be calling the culinary capital of Latin America—a city that journalists, chefs and visitors from all over the world would travel to in search of new dishes.”

Grappling With Technology

Yuya Shino / Reuters

MEDIUM / Are You Internet Sexual? by Emily Witt

“During the final minutes of her marathon, some of the chatters indicated they had stayed up all night with her, but she did not end with an extravagant sexual act. Instead she had put on another of her endless collection of cute floral dresses and sat against the wall next to a pile of books. She was pale, with circles under her eyes. In the last five minutes she honored her highest tippers by listing them by name.”

FUSION / I TURNED CAPS LOCK ON FOR A WEEK AND EVERYONE HATED IT by Kashmir Hill

A surprisingly subtle think-piece.

AL JAZEERA AMERICA / In a Small Town in Washington State, Pride and Shame Over Atomic Legacy by Leah Sottile

“That fall, the students of Columbia High voted to change their mascot from the Beavers to the Bombers, and the yearbook for that school year was dedicated to the atomic bomb. Mushroom clouds found their way onto the school crest, class rings and football helmets. In the 1980s the school became Richland High and adopted a new logo: a bright yellow capital R with a white mushroom cloud billowing up behind it.”

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS / Let’s all go to Mars by John Lanchester

These men reached for the heavens.

WILSON QUARTERLY / Eyes Wide Cut by Laura Kurek

“The most popular surgery is Asian blepharoplasty, the process of changing the Asian eyelid, commonly referred to as the ‘monolid,’ into a double eyelid. The second is rhinoplasty, or a nose job. The prevalence of these two procedures, especially the ‘double-eyelid’ operation, has led to a delicate question: Are South Koreans are seeking to westernize their appearance? Cosmetic surgeons and scholars tread lightly around the issue.”

CALIFORNIA SUNDAY / Uncharted by Lisa Hamilton

“This is not the hunt for a snow leopard or rare orchid. The plants are common, even abundant to the point of being known by some locals as just another weed they see everywhere. For our purposes, this makes it more valuable: The more plants we find, and the more diverse they are, the greater the possibility they offer to discover specific, useful genes later. We track down the plants in idyllic marshes and roadside ditches — again and again, and still the thirst for more seems to grow within everyone.”

NARRATIVELY / The Fresh Water Beast Beneath New York’s Streets by Nicholas Reale

“You’ve probably never heard of it, but the largest construction project in New York City history has claimed dozens of lives while chewing its way through bedrock for the past forty years—and the haunting memories are matched only by the grandeur of its ambition.”

FUSION / Why Testosterone Is the Drug of the Future by Alexis Madrigal

“Testosterone is not just any drug. It’s not nitrous oxide out of a balloon at a Phish show or a little weed in a brownie. “T” is, by most accounts, as close to a direct anti-aging medication as science has yet produced... Users report increased energy, more muscle mass, decreased body fat, greater sex drive, and a general sense of well-being. In short, it’s one of the most transformative substances a human can take.”

RADIOLAB / Hello by Lynn Levy

Attempts to speak with dolphins.

NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE / The Troll Agency by Adrien Chen

“Russia’s information war might be thought of as the biggest trolling operation in history, and its target is nothing less than the utility of the Internet as a democratic space.”

WAIT BUT WHY / The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence by Tim Urban

Terrifying.

NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE / The Serial Swatter by Jason Fagone

“Activists and political operatives have been swatted. Reporters writing about computer security have been swatted. Celebrities have been swatted: Ashton Kutcher, Justin Timberlake, Rihanna. Politicians trying to pass anti-­swatting bills, including a state senator in California and a state assemblyman in New Jersey, have been swatted at their homes. Video gamers, male and female, have been swatted.”

THE DAILY DOT / How to Destroy an American Family by Aaron Sankin and William Turton

“Their lives have been devastated by relentless cyberattacks. And there’s nothing they can do about it.”

THE HUFFINGTON POST / Welcome to Beautiful Parkersburg, West Virginia by Mariah Blake

“DuPont itself inspires a fierce loyalty. Many see it as the community’s economic lifeblood—and feel that anyone who challenges the company is threatening their livelihood, too.”

THE INTERCEPT / The Teflon Toxin by Sharon Lerner

“Although DuPont no longer uses C8, fully removing the chemical from all the bodies of water and bloodstreams it pollutes is now impossible. And, because it is so chemically stable — in fact, as far as scientists can determine, it never breaks down — C8 is expected to remain on the planet well after humans are gone from it.”