Welcome back to Must Reads, our weekly roundup of what we’re reading and loving. Before you dive in, don’t miss Paul Iddon’s feature last week on Trump’s planned Syria withdrawal.
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Surely You’re a Creep, Mr. Feynman (Leila McNeill for the Baffler)
In addition to enjoying the license to shape the stories about themselves, men like Feynman and Marcy have also been able to control the broader trajectory of science. Marcy was a senior leader and pioneer figure in astrobiology, and his influential and respected position in the field made him an arbiter of the field’s data. This meant that women who required access to that data for their own work were often in an impossible position. As Ruth Murray-Clay, an associate professor of astrophysics and astronomy at UC Santa Cruz, told BuzzFeed, “You don’t want to make an enemy with someone who has access to data you might need.”
I almost married a con man (Abby Ellin for Marie Claire)
The next morning, he left a series of Post-its on the bathroom mirror, in the refrigerator, and on the stove, a scavenger hunt of sticky notes. He apologized for being such a disaster, telling me how lucky he was, how excited he was to make our union official. I brushed my hurt aside. About a week later, I borrowed his laptop to type an email while mine was being charged. A note he’d drafted for his ex-wife before going to Afghanistan a few months earlier popped up. “I’m sorry for all I put you through,” he wrote, adding that if he survived the mission he would do his damnedest to “make things right” between them. It felt like a Brillo Pad had scraped against my insides, leaving them bloody and raw. I called him at his Pentagon office. “Do you want to get back together with your wife?” I demanded.
What it felt like when ‘Cat Person’ went viral (Kristen Roupenian for the New Yorker)
The truth is that my memory of that period is largely fragmentary, displaced in time and space. I remember that that weekend was very, very cold; my dog had a U.T.I., so I had to keep going outdoors even as the rain froze into snow. I remember logging out of Twitter and then sneaking back onto it from my phone. I remember my friends, on a group chat, sending me a screenshot of someone on Twitter saying, “I cannot imagine her group texts rn”—the social-media snake eating its own tail. I remember Callie hugging me as I cried. I remember the e-mails coming and coming—first, fan letters from people who’d discovered my story and liked it, then anti-fan letters, from people who’d discovered my story and didn’t. I received many in-depth descriptions, from men, of sexual encounters they’d had, because they thought I’d “just like to know.” I got e-mails from people I hadn’t talked to in years who wondered if I’d noticed that my story had gone viral. And, as the days went on, I got e-mails requesting interviews from outlets all over the globe: the U.S., Canada, England, Australia. Everyone wanted me to come on the air and talk about my story. Emphasis on my.
How Cartographers for the U.S. Military Inadvertently Created a House of Horrors in South Africa (Kashmir Hill for Gizmodo)
Despite appearances, John and Ann are not criminals. John is a lawyer who works on property law and human rights cases—helping asylum seekers and returning land taken in the past from black South Africans. Ann is a nurse who has spent most of her life in labor and delivery rooms in Africa and the Middle East. She moved from Ireland to Zambia when she was 22 because, she says, she “wanted to work in the sun”; there, she met John’s father, who was from South Africa. No, they are not criminals. They just happen to live in a very unfortunate location, a location cursed by dimwitted decisions made by people who lived half a world away, people who made designations on maps and in databases without thinking about the real-world places and people they represented.
Land Not Theirs (Madison Davis for The Common)
As kids, we were encouraged to list our wishes for Santa, and even now in a post-Christian adulthood, I fantasize about the relief a Christmas miracle would provide. Because I have just a few weeks to come up with eight thousand dollars in order to register for spring classes. The most obvious resolution would be that I take the semester off, move back to Ohio, work hard, and live frugally so I can save enough money to return in the fall. But I know that the likelihood of returning to school after a long break is small, because most who leave do not return.
Photo: Lisa Leonardelli