Vox Sentences - How Barnes & Noble survived

Happiest end of 2023 to you and yours! I’m Meredith Haggerty, a senior editor on Vox’s culture team. I work with our writers on stories about entertainment, celebrity, and money. 

This time of year, I also take on an unofficial second job watching so many Hallmark holiday movies, far more than are healthy or safe to consume. I put those lost hours to use this week in a (hopefully) fun little piece we called “Why are Christmas movies all about kissing? A theory.” You might have noticed that there are a whole lot of yuletide-themed rom-coms out there, a combination that could be considered counterintuitive. Personally, I tend to be surrounded by my family during the holidays, and that makes for very few meet-cutes. How did the movies decide this season of overeating, bundling up, and talking to your uncles was sexy?

Vox also got into some slightly more serious topics this week, so let’s take a tour of the smart, useful, and sometimes sobering reporting from my colleagues. And this will be our last Vox Recommends of 2023 — thanks for reading, and we’ll see you back here in 2024. 

—Meredith Haggerty, editor

How a fight over data made South Dakota’s bad syphilis outbreak worse

Keren Landman took a hard look at the alarming spread of syphilis through Native communities in South Dakota, and the bureaucratic roadblocks that made the whole mess that much messier. Talking to the chief public health officer of the Great Plains Tribal Leaders’ Health Board and dozens of others, Keren paints a picture of just how frustrating the lack of information sharing at the state and federal level really was, and the dignity-stripping — and deeply familiar — effect it had on the Indigenous communities unable to get the help they needed.

🎧 How Barnes & Noble survived

Maybe you too remember when Barnes & Noble was the big bad guy of the bookstore business — not just in You’ve Got Mail, but in real life. Today, the onetime bookstore giant is dwarfed by Amazon but battling its way back through a rebrand and expansion. Today, Explained talked to The Verge’s Nilay Patel and prosecutor Brendan Ballou about the store’s second life. For book lovers, shopping enthusiasts, and people who need to use a decent bathroom at the mall, it’s a story worth listening to. Barnes & Noble could have died a villain, but somehow it lived long enough to see itself become the hero.

The very best books of 2023

Speaking of books, Vox’s book critic Constance Grady gave us her picks for the latter half of the year (for the first six months, check out her list from July). How can we have a Vox Recommends newsletter and not include the Vox Recommended list of books? There are some truly fantastic selections, and with Constance’s lovely, witty write-ups you’ll know exactly which ones are your taste (or, perhaps, the taste of a person you need a last-minute gift for). I’d like to give a big “plus one” to her first rec: Chain-Gang All-Stars, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. She describes the book as The Hunger Games but with “beautiful sentences and coherent racial politics.” I would heartily agree, and also say, “It’s rad, check it out.” 

📹  What all Christmas movies have in common

Oh, I’m sorry, did you think we were done with Christmas movies in this newsletter? Clearly no. Vox Video’s Ed Vega dove deep into the genre and came back with the thing all these movies actually have in common: Christmasy-sounding music. (As much as I am loath to admit it, some holiday films — like the instant-classic Violent Night and the family favorite A Christmas Story — don’t have romance plots.) How can everything from studio blockbusters to the barely budgeted off-brand streamer original have that jingle bell sound? Watch and find out. 

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