Reading List: Buckle Up Folks, We’ve Got An Abundance Of Awesome Longreads To Get Through

Darlings, surprise! I am back up in Canada having surprised Father of the Missive Rob for his 65th birthday! It was quite hard to keep it a secret (and methinks Dad knew but oh well, we tried!) because I so wanted to share airport observations on Twitter. Like the fact that a woman walked past me laden in luggage, dropped all of it on the ground and threw her head back and yelled FUDGE, then looked around sheepishly to see if anyone noticed. It was basically the live action version of my personality on the internet but I was a grown-up with willpower and only texted the observation to a colleague of mine. Also, a cowboy-hatted welcome volunteer at Calgary International Airport greeted me with a full-throated HOWDY and I nearly dissolved in joyful tears.

TO THE LONGREADS!

Lyz Lenz, The End of Miss America (Jezebel) – This. Story. Is. SO. DAMNED. GOOD. And weird and timely and curious and absolutely beautifully written and and and and and just read it already (did you know that Gretchen Carlson was a violin prodigy? I sure didn’t! And you should read Lenz’s 2019 piece on her because woof it’s sharp as hell.)

Noam Scheiber and Kate Conger, The Great Google Revolt (The New York Times) – Last year, four Google employees engaged in workforce activism like the 2018 walkout were fired from the company. Scheiber and Conger use the experience of these ex-Googlers to illustrate the larger behavioral shifts of Silicon Valley companies as they evolve from warm and fuzzy disrupting start-ups that prize “friendly dissent” to, well, more-familiar big businesses with sky-high market caps. And that means traditionally capitalist actions regarding workplace organizing.

Alex Kantrowitz, How Saudi Arabia Infiltrated Twitter (BuzzFeed News) – this story is bonkers / terrifying. Via an FBI criminal complaint, it’s revealed how two Twitter employees “regularly accessed and delivered information that could’ve led Saudi intelligence to identify anonymous dissidents.”  

Tony Romm, Political ads are flooding Hulu, Roku and other streaming services, revealing loopholes in federal election laws (The Washington Post) – Did you know that the political ad interrupting your final favorite crime show bingewatch isn’t regulated in the same way that normal TV political ads are? I sure didn’t, and that makes me angry! And as Romm points out, this is the nugget of the whole issue: “Campaigns are spending more than ever to try to reach voters and influence their decisions, armed with powerful digital tools — yet federal regulations haven’t kept pace.”

R. Eric Thomas, Bury Me In One Of Elizabeth Warren’s Withering Glares At Michael Bloomberg (ELLE) – I guess this isn’t technically a long read , but holy hell did I need this this morning. And while you’re at it, you must read this hilarious excerpt Forget Dystopia, I'm About That Mid-Topian Life from Thomas’s book Here for It: Or, How to Save Your Soul in America, which I have now added to my Want to Read list.

That’s it, that’s all. Y’all are great. Be kind to each other, ok?

xoxo Amy