Ta-Nehisi Coates on two ÔgodsÕ_Ñ_Michael Jackson and Kanye West, his own fortune Òto come of age in the last days of mysteryÓ before the social feed, fame, and America. As one reader puts it, the writing in this piece is Òbottled lightning.Ó http://bit.ly/atlantic-kanye
The piece that may have precipitated Steve Bannon’s dismissal from Donald Trump’s White House – a Scaramucci-style candid call to a journalist – on the record.
A review of a new book by Obama adviser Ben Rhodes (a speechwriter and Deputy National Security Adviser who was one of the few senior officials to remain in office throughout the whole presidency). The piece reflects on Obama’s style of leadership, the nature of power and governing, and the author’s own journey. It is also replete with anecdotes from behind the scenes of elite politics such as Rhodes discussing the TV show Entourage with David Cameron over after-state-dinner drinks at Buckingham Palace.
The celebrated writer Tom Wolfe died on Monday. Michael Lewis’s 2015 profile went deep into his biography and his writing to tell his story.
This eloquent piece looks at the sexual harassment allegations against Senator Al Franken and uses them as a springboard to examine humanity’s long history of identifying trustworthiness as a male trait and duplicity as its female counterpart – via Aristotle, Galen, Jezebel, Cassandra, Hamlet and others.
A piece examining how military drones actually work and interact with both their operators and so-called “customers” (soldiers on the ground).
A profile of three of the last polio sufferers in the US using an iron lung. The piece examines what life is like spent in one of these contraptions, used in a medical context for nearly 100 years.
A searching piece about Amazon and monopoly, published in a newspaper owned by Amazon’s CEO. If you have the time, it’s also worth dipping into the elegantly wrought 28,000 word ‘note’ in The Yale Law Journal that inspired the piece.
A piece examining the series of challenges Facebook has faced as it struggles to manage the intended and unintended consequences of its huge scale and the reach it has into many parts of its users’ lives.