Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

Are China, Canada, and Mexico really to blame for fentanyl?

Over the past decade, the synthetic drug fentanyl has devastated the United States, killing more than a quarter of a million Americans, making it, according to some officials, the deadliest drug in US history.   And over the past two months, even amid signs that the fentanyl crisis is starting to wane, the drug has also […]

This little-known company is a major funder of right-wing politics. You’ve probably eaten their chicken.

At midnight one day in spring 2023, a team of animal rights investigators decked out in biosecurity gear snuck onto a massive chicken farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, an hour and a half drive from Baltimore. The operation was raising some 75,000 birds for Mountaire Farms, the nation’s fourth-largest chicken company. When the investigator Joseph […]

Why are so many college basketball players from other countries?

Vox reader Brian Diederich asks: Why and how do so many collegiate basketball teams — both men’s and women’s — now have so many international student-athletes? If you’ve turned on March Madness this year, you’ve witnessed the most international players ever in college basketball’s signature competition.  Across both the men’s and women’s brackets, 264 athletes […]

How not to text, explained

It’s been a big week for the group chat.  On Monday, the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg published a story revealing that National Security Advisor Michael Waltz accidentally added him to a Signal thread where top Trump cabinet members were discussing upcoming military strikes in Yemen.  First, the Trump administration denied that top Trump officials shared […]

The best reason to be hopeful about the world, in one chart

I was an English major in college, and my favorite poet was the first-generation Romantic William Wordsworth. For one thing, there’s the name, the best example of nominative determinism in the annals of English literature. But what I most love about Wordsworth is the way he acts as a bridge between the formal, at times […]