Links for June 12th
China, baseball substances, the Marvel universe, post-election threats, the NYC mayor's race, summer reading
Hello! Hope you’re having a good summer week here.
First up, I wrote about New York’s mayoral race, which is broadly chaotic confusion, and specifically a pretty tough identity crisis about the hard question of who American cities really belong to after the last 20 years.
Links
Megha Rajagopalan and two partners (an architect and a programmer!) won a Pulitzer yesterday for their ongoing reporting about the treatment of Uyghurs — their first Pulitzer and the first ever for BuzzFeed News! They were finalists in a different category, too, and so were other colleagues, and way more great people (editors, the art desk, our promotion teams) also put in a ton of work on these projects, so it was a big day of generosity. Think I’ve linked to some of these stories about Xinjiang before but they’re seriously incredible; through a totally innovative method, they found where China has built more detainment centers, and interviewed a significant number of former detainees about their surreal, horrifying experiences.
On a lighter note, the guys who make one of the substances MLB pitchers are using (Spider Tack) told the Wall Street Journal all about it! One of them is like, I can’t believe they can actually throw the baseball.
Tom and Lorenzo examined something that’s been grating these last few months: the treatment of Kumail Nanjiani for getting jacked for Marvel vs. the Chrises.
Reuters clearly spent some time reporting on the threats that high-profile and low-profile election workers received after the election; the interview with Brad Raffensperger’s wife and the texts they received are pretty upsetting.
The Times had a bunch of under-25 photographers shoot New York reopening, and the results are really filled with a lot of joy.
For a scene:
Lastly, here’s the actual crazy softball College World Series play I wanted to link to last week, rather than what I linked to (the schedule for my high school’s softball team).
Light book commentary
Not a specific book comment, but vis a vis that summer reading piece I linked to recently, since everyone’s dressed up like it’s the first three seasons of Friends, and the office is not in play until September, there is a strong “summer break” quality to this summer, and I was therefore thinking about various summer reading experiences.
Between 2002 and 2004, for like $6/hour, I worked the front desk at the neighborhood pool in the summer. Other than having to clean the locker rooms once a shift (a downside), I basically was paid to do crosswords and get all my summer reading done while trying not to lose my mind from boredom. This was: a wooden barstool chair behind a concrete counter, facing a plate-glass window, facing a parking lot and some non-quite-visible tennis courts, for six un-air-conditioned hours at a time.
But if it had stormed and the pool was kind of cleared out, then, you know, it’s like deep in the summer and it’s starting to get dark a little earlier, and through this plate-glass window you’re instead looking at deep blue-green trees and dark pavement that’s got that nice evening purple glow, and then inside, this concrete/glass room had one of those garage-gold overhead lights, which actually casts a pretty nice quality of light, and there was always a radio on in there. Like, school’s out, nobody’s really bothering you, and you’re reading a great book in this unexpectedly calm setting. That’s a nice night!
Still, hope you’re getting in better reading experiences than this. See y’all in July!
A note on all this
Thanks for subscribing. Hope you enjoy. The goal here is just to offer up some links you may have missed, and maybe the occasional commentary on something in politics or a book I may have read that you, the reader, might enjoy. If you have thoughts on any of this, hit me up at katherinemillernyc@gmail.com or just tweet at me.