Some interesting things to read this weekend in April

Dear Friends,

I want to start with a story in Esquire that’s as wrenching as can be. It’s written by Mark Warren and it tells the tale of Bubba Copeland, an Alabama pastor and mayor and family man who has some secrets. He cross-dresses; he writes erotic fiction he shouldn’t write. And those secrets get discovered and published online. “The story of the Internet is of tribes hurling rocks over the horizon at targets they cannot see, doing damage that they do not care to measure,” Warren writes. “In this case, those assumptions and that ignorance would make Bubba less a human being than an ideological target in a raging culture war.”

What happens next will break your heart, and the penultimate section of the story, describing a phone call to Copeland from his son, is one of the most dramatic that you’ll ever read. “I screamed it as loud as I could for as long as he was on the line, because I knew he was listening. I knew. I could see he was still on the call. I kept screaming. That’s all I knew to say was, I love you! It’s okay. I love you. It’s okay!” 

The National Magazine Awards were last week. It was, for the third year in a row, a great night for The Atlantic. You should read, or reread, the individual pieces that we won for by Tim Alberta, Jennifer Senior, and Sophie Gilbert. But I also appreciate how the awards introduce me to great stories in other magazines that I missed. For example, Mitchell Jackson’s piece about his old dope supplier and this wild piece from Texas Monthly about Mack McCormick, the chronicler of the elusive blues singer Robert Johnson. McCormick may have figured out the truth about the great blues musician, but he also may have misled other researchers for years and seems to have left behind notes poisoned by lies mixed within original discoveries. (You can see all the National Magazine Award nominees and winners here.) 

In technology, here’s a smart piece arguing that AI could actually reduce income inequality, written by the economist who showed that our last technological revolution—the Internet and information explosion—increased inequality. I was taken, too, by this smart, short essay about different forms of gender bias in AI. And I want to give a shout-out to Josh Tyrangiel who has published a series of terrific essays on AI in his new column for The Washington Post. I also enjoyed this TED talk from Divya Siddarth on AI and democracy. I was made nervous by this paper on how chatbots can be very good at persuading people to adopt new viewpoints, but maybe it’s OK. Here’s an interview in which Ray Kurzweil tried to persuade me that there’s a decent chance that people born today will live to be 500. 

I’ve tweeted this out, but I’m proud of this story from The Wall Street Journal about the economic and editorial success here: “How the Atlantic went from broke to profitable in three years.” I’ve also been enjoying the debate around our recent list of the Great American Novels. You should also read Ta-Nehisi Coates on O.J.

I was intrigued by this report on how people’s bodies respond to weight training, and the importance of doing sets. (I also love the idea of scientific studies in which people lift more weight on one leg than the other over a period of weeks. It’s weird! But I’m glad they do it for science.) And if I can’t sleep on Sunday night before the Boston Marathon, I’m going to remember that, actually, Olympians don’t sleep that well anyhow.

Lastly, I want to share David Frum’s gutting memoir of loss. “For me, the thought of my own death has never been a distressing subject,” Frum writes. “We live, we love, we yield the stage to our children. I hoped that when the time arrived, I would have the chance for farewells. If that wish were granted, I could with total content ride the train to my final destination. It never occurred to me that one of my children might board the train first, pulling away as her parents wept on the platform.”

There’s so much wonderful journalism in this world, and so much writing that can help us make sense of the hardest moments in life. If you find great stories I should share in the next edition of this newsletter, please send them my way.

Cheers * N

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