Someday they should let the Falcons play a single game without people mentioning the most emotionally crushing moment in franchise history. as a treat

A weird ending note for a weird year: I wrote a manifesto for journalists in 2026. leahsottile.substack.com/p/66-clarity

"So many young people lack community, they say. How did you find this? Well, I didn’t find it. We built it." - @samanthajgross.bsky.social www.bostonglobe.com/2025/12/25/m...

Toad got to Frog’s house. He looked in the window. “Good,” said Toad. “Frog is not home. He will never guess who raked his leaves.”

In theory, I want to give you more detail about my column, but I'm also struggling to find anything more concise than: We Live in Hell.

the calm is but the wrapper and envelope of the storm; and contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal powder

A palate cleanser: "So raise your glass to Aunt Mary, to all who loved her, and to the wonderful tradition she created." www.bostonglobe.com/2025/12/20/l...

Every line, spot, blemish and blood vessel of President Trump's inner circle was captured by Christopher Anderson’s lens in Vanity Fair. The Post talked with the photographer about his reaction to the photos and the process behind them: https://wapo.st/48KZXBY

People say you’re driving a moral panic, that you’re blocking good regulation, that there’s no point in resisting. And then you enforce a phone ban and miracles happen (qualitatively): nymag.com/intelligence...

It was a cold that got into the bone, into the marrow, and would not be dislodged.

If you can believe it, January 1, 2026 marks ten years since the armed takeover of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. For Portland Monthly, I wrote about how the ensuing decade was dominated by anxious men and a culture of lawlessness. www.pdxmonthly.com/news-and-cit...

ProPublica spoke to about 150 people who had lived in homeless encampments when cities cleared them out in “sweeps.” We distributed notecards so people could tell us about the toll in their own words. ➡️ This is what they wrote: https://propub.li/3MTlm33

Go to bed; tired is stupid.

Horrifying

Art Briles has been hired as the head football coach at a D2 school and so is back in the news. If you want to understand why this hire is upsetting for many, here's the long piece @dansolomon.com and I wrote back in 2019 about How Baylor Happened: web.archive.org/web/20190208...

“Do you know how to read?” “No. It is one of the black arts.” He nodded. “But a useful one,” he said.

Caroline Kennedy’s daughter Tatiana Schlossberg announces she has terminal cancer with a year to live in an essay in the New Yorker: www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

Relying on ChatGPT to teach you about a topic leaves you with shallower knowledge than Googling and reading about it, according to new research that compared what more than 10,000 people knew after using one method or the other. Shared by @gizmodo.com: buff.ly/yAAHtHq

Hubba Hubba was more than a place specializing in sex, and sexy. The soon-to-close Cambridge shop was the kind of place people could walk in the door and find solutions to problems the straight-laced world couldn’t solve.

This was the best thing written on this over-saturated topic

“I want their morale as low as possible because a team with low morale is ineffective.” Meet the veteran who chases ICE on a scooter

Autocorrect has become our worst enema.

New: Reuters has tallied job losses, suspensions and investigations stemming from the reaction to Charlie Kirk's Sept. 10 assassination. Its findings: More than 600 Americans have been punished, and the figure is likely to be an under-count. www.reuters.com/investigatio...

You know what media is NOT bending the knee in the Trump era? College journalists! The Harvard Crimson's brutal takedown of the lecherous ex-prez Larry Summers is just the latest example of students showing a failing 'grown-up' media how it's done My new column www.inquirer.com/columnists/a...

Toad played the piano, and he did not miss a note.

What happened to Ryan Borgwardt? Deep inside Green Lake County, Wisconsin, Jamie Thompson investigates, tracking what turns out to be a globe-spanning story about family, responsibility, and what makes a good life. Our favorite this week www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

A real loss. Rest in power, Alice Wong.

For two months, the U.S. government has been racial profiling as masked federal agents hunted for immigrants throughout Chicago. They’ve repeatedly snatched up U.S. citizens while traumatizing communities. “I felt like a piece of trash.” Here is our story www.chicagotribune.com/2025/11/15/l...

Oh wow @reuters.com got the photo here:

UP Chuck’s Kenton, MI

I'm glad @juliekliegman.com wrote this:

NEW: In text messages from 2017, Jeffrey Epstein seemingly represented himself as positioned to pass information from the Trump White House to Bill Gates through an intermediary, claiming intimate knowledge of Trump’s views in an exchange with a Gates adviser.

My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.

🚨BREAKING: STRIKERS WIN! The order affirms what we’ve said all along: The PG’s lawless union-busting cannot stand. We made sure it didn’t. We’re taking back what they stole from us. We won this strike.

Loving today's news that the mysterious "fedora man" outside the Louvre heist was actually a 15-year-old museum visitor who dresses like a 1940s French detective all the time, just because. apnews.com/article/louv...

One analytical model shows that, as of November 5th, the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. has already caused the deaths of 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children. https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/jUzNSc

A photojournalist was arrested by ICE at gunpoint — and his DACA status revoked. “Ya’akub isn’t being accused of breaking immigration law — his DACA protection doesn’t expire until May 2026. In fact Ya’akub’s lawyers say he hasn’t been accused of any crime.” thebarbedwire.com/2025/11/04/h...

He seemed not to know the uses of silence.

Snoopy Hooppole, IL

Two professors at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign said they grew suspicious after receiving identical apologies from dozens of students they had accused of academic dishonesty.

Three times in the past two weeks, editorials at the 'Washington Post' failed to disclose that they focused on matters in which owner Jeff Bezos had a material interest. n.pr/3X0UZtS

Would you rather have a fully nude, open casket funeral or an open information corpse funeral, your unlocked phone and laptop available for mourners to scroll through? Writer Kiki Dy explores this question and more in a new SLR original story. sundaylongread.com/2025/10/23/a...

The real-life impact of Trump and Musk’s freeze on USAID Drugs and food, intended for global aid, instead languished and rotted in warehouses — and some children withered and died. Sweeping, damning investigation by my @washingtonpost.com colleagues.

When you die, would you rather have an open-casket funeral for anyone to look at your body or an open-access funeral for anyone to look at your data -- Google searches, Reddit history, text messages, and beyond? If that question gives you pause, read this.

There are two Portland, Oregons. I live in the real one. open.substack.com/pub/leahsott...