Ann Friedman - When a pivot becomes a spin

Like a lot of people, I suspect, this was the election cycle when I finally, fully, disengaged from polling and real-time results tracking. Instead of compulsively and anxiously visiting the election-hub pages of major news outlets, then feeling annoyed at myself for expending the energy, I just... didn't. I still read things like candidate profiles and features about ballot measures, but I managed to completely ignore the horserace stuff for probably the first time in my adult life. It felt great.

This thought from Sam Sanders resonated with me as a full-body YES: "What if the point of political journalism is not to predict outcomes but to clearly lay out what’s at stake in our political choices?" That's how I've always tried to link, and now it's also how I click and read. Stakes, not predictions.

"They will tell you that every election is the most important election of your life. They will say it with earnest." Taz Ahmed on being a devoted but jaded voter in a crumbling democracy. And from the Essence archives, Octavia Butler's rules for predicting the future.

The White House MasterClass series is a symptom of a mordant political culture in which power transforms a person into a celebrity, writes Sarah Jones.

"The appeal of calls for climate justice, impacting millions of people, is partly dependent on how big of a lump they can produce in your throat." Nazish Brohi revisits Pakistan's 2010 superflood and asks if imperiled people’s stories can ever prompt more than empty empathy.

Andrea Long Chu on the endurance of The Velveteen Rabbit and what we lose in exchange for adulthood.

The ugly story of how corporate America convinced us to spend so much on water. Emily Stewart reports on fear, marketing, laziness.

Autumn Fourkiller interprets a dream about a crone: "There are better years ahead, and perhaps you are experiencing them now."

Our climate-changed planet, in photos. There is no typical abortion story. Portraits of queer Americana. There's a new season of my favorite fashion podcast, Articles of Interest! Vibe Check on the decline of Twitter and the impact of Black Twitter.

"Stay safe. We are in this gas together, open."

They are in the process of demolishing this car wash, which means I am about to lose my favorite piece of unintentional neighborhood poetry, a relic from the early days of this ever-present pandemic. So I'm preserving it here: We are in this gas together.

"Yours was the first newsletter I ever signed up for and it’s still one of the ones I look forward to the most." -Sophie. I love my long-timers!