The news at the moment is frantic, with fresh information flashed in front of us every few minutes. So much so that we can find ourselves missing the slow, thoughtful, considerate words that our brains – and souls – need. This weekly update can provide that for you. We do this by distilling the best of the web and recommending just three links every week that you absolutely must see.
No fluff, no fuss, just three exceptional reads. Here are this week’s recommendations:
They Want Your Child! (Rick Perlstein / The Forum)
Reactionary panics about what children learn in school are about as old as time. And they won’t ever go away. So if you want to fight bans of LBGT books, Florida GOP Governor Ron DeSantis’s lunatic crusade against math texts supposedly pushing social-emotional learning, or panics about the teaching of America’s true history that somehow supposedly teach white children to “hate themselves,” you really have no choice. You have to put Twitter or the TV aside. You have to start at the very beginning.
How a Mormon Housewife Turned a Fake Diary Into an Enormous Best-Seller (Casey Cep / The New Yorker)
Emerson’s new book and Sparks’s old one have something else in common: both demonstrate how good intentions can be compromised by single-mindedness. Sparks, for all her fact-fudging, seems to have had a genuine conviction that young people in crisis needed adults to do more to understand them—a conviction so smothered by anti-drug and pro-abstinence propaganda that it’s hard to appreciate her sincerity fifty years later. Emerson’s belief that anything bunk should be debunked is undermined by the Torquemada-like zeal with which he tries to hold one huckstering grandmother responsible for international moral panics and the dishonest tactics of the publishing industry.
Access to healthcare (America_is_the_bad_place)
@america_is_the_bad.place Replying to @nordrott #healthcare #America #ukvsusa #europevsusa #universalhealthcare #nhs #medicareforall #medicaldebt #hospital #insulin #medication #science #usa #americaisthebadplace #m4a #doctors ♬ original sound – America_is_the_bad_place
Image: Julius Jansson