Just Us by Charles Homans

For this article, Charles Homans starts with the questionable press tour undertaken by a juror who served in a grand jury case examining one slice of the monumentally criminality of the amoral dimwit who placed second in the 2016 election and yet was allowed to serve as the forty-fifth president of the United States. It expands from there to be a fascinating consideration of all the ways various structures and institutions are dependent on highly fallible human beings, even as we collective embrace the fallacy that those systems are wondrous and perfect. This article is published by The New York Times Magazine.

The Enduring Allure of Choose Your Own Adventure Books by Leslie Jamison

I’m always behind on The New Yorker, but my stack is currently taller than ever. So if I share something from that publication in this space, the article is sure to be months old. That’s my acknowledgement that Leslie Jamison’s wonderful — and cleverly structured — piece on the Choose Your Own Adventure books already made the digital rounds a while back. I finally got to it this week and found it utterly irresistible, in part because of how effectively Jamison captures the appeal of these stories, which I devoured ravenously in my youth.