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Now, the links you’re here for:
The fight to get citizenship for descendants of German Jews (Rosie Whitehouse, BBC)
“Interest in the campaign has snowballed. Couchman’s wife, Isabelle, deals with the hundreds of people who have contacted the group. “Some are very elderly and have suffered a great deal,” she says. “Some of them lost their entire families in the Holocaust.”
“While Couchman and a Cambridge University PhD student, Nic Courtman, lobby political parties in Germany, Isabelle runs a support network. “People are very emotional and they often cry on the phone when they contact me,” she says. “It can take months for them to decide if they want to pursue their battle.” Some are elderly Holocaust survivors, for example Kindertransport children, who are still traumatised by their experiences.”
Burning out (Sarah Trent, Longreads)
“That night, the next morning, and for many days after, trained search and rescue professionals and volunteers from across California and beyond drove into the smoldering heart of catastrophe. The Camp fire, which started the morning of November 8, 2018, and within hours had overtaken the town of Paradise, was unprecedented: in size, pattern, intensity, damage, and number of people missing, which climbed as high as 1,300. It required the largest search in state history — in conditions few of the searchers were trained for. But to leaders like Thomas, it seemed a portent of things to come: Wildfires are becoming more common and worse. And other disasters are, too.”
The homeownership obsession (Katy Kelleher, Curbed)
“Of course, most of this equation was, from the beginning, a fantasy—as much a metaphor as the uncanny ghost that traps unsuspecting buyers in its cycles of suffering. But while ghost stories represent the unspoken things that we fear most (chaos, abuse, sex, death, love), the myth of the American dream represents what we say out loud, the version of ourselves that we project into the world. As Americans, we want to believe in a meritocracy, even though the educational achievement gap has been growing steadily since the 1970s. We want to believe that all citizens can access homeownership, even though we’ve seen a recent drop in homeownership rates exclusively among African Americans. We want to believe that successful people are successful because they are deserving or God-chosen, not because they inherited huge amounts of money, wealth that was often built from exploitation and oppression. Ghosts allow us to speak about unspoken truths; the American dream gives us a solid framework on which to hang flimsy lies.”
I went to a convention for politics nerds and it filled me with dread, loathing, and existential terror (Eve Peyser, Insider)
“Politicon, it soon emerged, was politics Twitter come to life, a physical embodiment of the most noxious Facebook spats blasted algorithmically across your Fox News-loving uncle’s feed. Pundits on the left and right took cheap shots at one another, trading the sort of barbs one hears every day on cable news.
“The event was a tribute to political tribalism in the age of Trump, a place where team identity is everything. At Politicon, politics is understood not as a means by which to improve lives, but as blood sport. It left me empty, desperate for revelation.”
Hundreds of Florida inmates are serving drug sentences no longer in state law (Emily L. Mahoney, Tampa Bay Times)
“If she had committed her drug crime in 2016, rather than eight years ago, she would be free by now.
“Up to 1,000 Florida inmates find themselves in the same legal purgatory.
“An obscure clause in Florida’s Constitution dating back to the Jim Crow era has kept DeLeon and others like her stranded behind bars. And even after Florida voters repealed that clause last year, the state Legislature has not put it into action.”
Image credit: Rockin’Rita