Illustration by Leah Mandel
To The First Lady, With Love
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Gloria Steinem, Jon Meacham, and Rashida Jones, New York Times
Michelle Obama is flawless. She and her poise, candor, and power have forever changed the course of history, no joke. Here are four beautiful letters of gratitude to a first lady who's somehow cooler than Jackie O and Eleanor Roosevelt combined.
Also from NYT this week: Sir Elton John Interviews One Of His Favorite New Musicians (spoiler: it's Whitney's Julien Ehrlich).
Hillary Clinton’s Debate Performance Was ‘Nasty’ (In A Good Way)
Eric Levitz, Daily Intelligencer
This is my favorite, most comprehensive look at just how Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump at his own game, as they say, by doing her homework.
Greenland Is Melting
Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker
Speaking of the debates, remember how there was a shocking lack of questions on climate change (a "failure of journalism," according to David Leonhardt)? Well, the earth is still melting — turns out we can't stop the world from spinning just because this election is crazy. "[Greenland's] ice sheet is so big — at its center, it’s two miles high — that it creates its own weather," Kolbert wrote. "Its mass is so great that it deforms the earth, pushing the bedrock several thousand feet into the mantle. Its gravitational tug affects the distribution of the oceans." Read to understand what the melting of Greenland really means.
Why Moonlight Is A Small Miracle Of A Movie
Jason Parham, Anupa Mistry, Patrick D. McDermott, and Cord Jefferson, The FADER
This is a badass roundtable on Moonlight, a queer, black coming of age story directed by Barry Jenkins, and is possibly the year's best film. There are some spoilers in here, but the movie just came out today so run and watch it and then read this immediately after.
What I Learned About Love While Getting High
Tim Murphy, BuzzFeed
An intense personal history about one man's experience in a relationship with an older gay couple in New York that fueled his drug addiction, this one will blow you away.
Also from BuzzFeed this week: Meet Fancy Bear, the Russian group hacking the U.S. election; Hyperpartisan Facebook Pages Are Publishing False And Misleading Information At An Alarming Rate.
Where Women With Zika Fear Prison
Nina Strochlic, National Geographic
If you are not pregnant, don't plan on getting pregnant anytime soon, and are able to access birth control, it's easy to ignore Zika virus. However, if you live in a country in which birth control is not only illegal, but even miscarrying can put you behind bars, the picture is vastly different. That's what's going down in El Salvador right now.
Also: FiveThirtyEight has the scoop on how they're attempting to combat the virus down in the Florida Keys.
The White Flight Of Derek Black
Eli Saslow, The Washington Post
Eight years ago, a 19-year-old Derek Black said this: “The Republican Party has to be either demolished or taken over. I’m kind of banking on the Republicans staking their claim as the white party.” Now, Saslow wrote, "white nationalism had bullied its way toward the very center of American politics, and yet, one of the people who knew the ideology best was no longer anywhere near that center. Derek had just turned 27, and instead of leading the movement, he was trying to untangle himself not only from the national moment but also from a life he no longer understood."
8 (Completely Plausible) Alternate Histories Of The Internet
Brian Feldman, Select All
Early this morning, a bunch of major sites (Twitter, Reddit, Airbnb, to name a few) were inaccessible, mainly on the East Coast of the U.S., because of a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack. Some joked it was the Russians practicing for November 8. Whatever it was, it's a good opportunity to think about how we use the 'net, and all the things the internet isn't, but could have been.