‘The Rich Don't Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?’

The New York Times

The New York Times ran an opinion segment this week with Jia Tolentino and Hasan Piker debating whether stealing from Whole Foods is a form of political protest. Tolentino admitted to stealing lemons while shopping for an elderly neighbor and didn’t feel bad about it. Piker said he supports it philosophically but doesn’t do it personally. They talked about the Luigi Mangione case. They talked about wage theft. They talked about how the social contract is broken because the rich don’t follow the rules they wrote.

I read through some of the more than 1,500 comments. The most popular responses, by a wide margin, were some version of: stealing is wrong, two wrongs don’t make a right, and these are privileged people cosplaying resistance. One commenter called it “gentrified shoplifting.” Another pointed out it’s easy to debate the ethics of theft when you’re white and the worst consequence is a conversation. For Black people, the consequence is a bodycam.

The same week this segment aired, a Black woman named Douniya was chased through a mall in Lynwood, Washington, by multiple Zara employees who were convinced she’d stolen merchandise. They grabbed her. They followed her to her car. They surrounded her vehicle. Police searched her car and found nothing. The bodycam footage shows the employees changing their story in real time. The responding officer told her it wasn’t the first time he’d been called to that store for the same thing. She wrote on TikTok: “There wasn’t a single employee there when I needed help. But they all came out of the woodwork when they thought a Black woman stole.”

Meanwhile, Noah Hawley (the creator of Fargo) published a piece in The Atlantic about attending Jeff Bezos’s private retreat called Campfire. His observation after a weekend among the richest people on Earth was they have “clearly left the world of consequences behind. Their actions are only ever judged by themselves.”

Three stories. One about the privilege of debating whether theft is protest. One about what happens when you’re Black and someone decides you look like a thief. And one about the people who left the entire conversation behind because the rules stopped applying to them a long time ago.

I’m a Black man. I don’t need a podcast to tell me which side of this I’d be on.

@chief_maloThose Zara employees who chased that lady through the mall lied about everything the moment the police got there and luckily the lady got the video surveillance of the incident because if not who knows what it would have happened

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Emma Grede’s Start With Yourself

Ebony Magazine

Emma Grede is the CEO of Good American, a founding partner of SKIMS, a guest shark on Shark Tank, and now an author. Her memoir Start With Yourself came out last week and the internet has not stopped arguing about it since. The fight is mostly about one comment describing herself as a “3-hour mom,” meaning she gives her four children three hours of fully dedicated time on weekends rather than hovering over every moment of their lives.

Women on TikTok responded immediately. The critique isn’t really about parenting philosophy. It’s about who gets to talk about ambition as a choice when Black mothers have historically had no choice but to work and parent simultaneously — not because of a philosophy, but because of systems that were never designed to support them. Grede grew up in East London, built a career in fashion, and co-founded two of the most visible consumer brands in the world alongside the Kardashians. She is genuinely self-made in ways that matter. But the conversation her book is sparking is less about her and more about who inherits the right to redefine what success looks like as a mother, and whose version of that redefinition gets treated as aspirational versus irresponsible.

Our Longing for Inconvenience

Hanif Abdurraqib, The New Yorker

I started buying vinyl again a couple of years ago. Not because I’m nostalgic for the format. Because I realized the music I was paying for on streaming platforms wasn’t actually mine. Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter and Renaissance — I bought both on vinyl because Apple can block you from accessing music you purchased if you don’t pay for something else they offer, like iCloud storage. Streamers pull albums without warning. Licenses expire. The thing you paid for can be revoked by the company that sold it to you.

Abdurraqib’s essay is about this exact instinct, but broader. He writes about the longing for Walkmans, VCRs, and physical media not because the technology was better, but because it required something from you. Inconvenience was the cost of ownership. The modern world has optimized so much friction out of daily life that we’ve lost the capacity to tolerate it. And what we call nostalgia might actually be grief for a relationship to time and attention and possession that convenience destroyed.

Fuel Shortage Wreaks Havoc on Summer Air Travel

The Washington Post

My birthday is in July. I’ve been thinking about whether I’ll be able to get where I’m going. Then I felt embarrassed for thinking about it that way, because the fuel crisis connected to the Strait of Hormuz closure is about much more than whether my flight gets cancelled.

The Strait has been closed or severely disrupted for nearly two months. The IEA says Europe has maybe six weeks of jet fuel left. United has cut its planned schedule by 5%. Delta is looking at an extra $2 billion in fuel costs this year. KLM cut 160 flights. Oil is above $100 a barrel. The IMF downgraded global growth to 3.1% and warned that a prolonged conflict could bring it to 2%, which would be a near-miss for a global recession and something that’s happened only four times since 1980.

I’m turning 44 this year. I’ve lived through enough of these cycles to know the crisis hits, the prices rise, the recovery is uneven, and the people who were already stretched thin get stretched thinner. The inherited infrastructure everyone depends on (cheap fuel, open shipping lanes, affordable flights) was never as stable as it felt. It just felt stable because the consequences of its collapse were always somewhere else. Until they weren’t.

There’s Another Reason Gen Z Can’t Find Work

Jessica Grose, The New York Times

A new working paper from three economists analyzed 40 years of federal employment data and found that employed workers today are about half as likely to receive a competitive outside offer as they were in the 1980s. The job ladder — the mechanism that lets people move up by moving between companies — has been breaking for four decades. There are two reasons. Employer concentration and noncompete agreements that courts started enforcing more aggressively in the 1980s. Thirty-eight percent of workers have been subject to a noncompete at some point, including hourly and part-time employees who had no idea what they were signing.

I’m a millennial. I’ve been running the same math the economists are describing. I look at a salary attached to a major city and realizing the numbers only work if there’s someone else on the lease (more on this Monday!). Gen Z didn’t inherit a broken ladder. They inherited the debris of one that started breaking before they were born. The difference is they’re entering the workforce knowing what took some of us a decade to figure out.

Work for Food: New SNAP Rules Reshaping Who Gets to Eat

Krystal Nurse, Straight Arrow News

Clifford Glenn is 60 years old and lives in Pontiac, Michigan. Every week he walks to a church for a hot meal and groceries, keeps some for himself, and brings the rest to an elderly neighbor whose house he also cleans. Under new federal rules, Glenn has to work or volunteer 80 hours a month to keep his food stamps. He says he spends more than 80 hours a month walking around Pontiac looking for work.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates 2.4 million people will lose benefits. Glenn is classified as an “able-bodied adult without dependents,” which sounds clinical until you learn the definition: single, no children under 14, living in an area with unemployment below 10%. Pontiac’s unemployment is 8.6% — just under the threshold. The city lost its identity when the factories closed and never fully rebuilt it. The inherited belief underneath these rules is that hunger is a motivation problem. Glenn is already motivated. He’s feeding his neighbor.

Fortress Yellowstone

Joseph Bullington, In These Times

The ultra-rich are buying up land inside and around one of America’s last intact ecosystems. Yellowstone and the Greater Yellowstone area — the largest nearly intact temperate ecosystem in the world — are being fortified by people whose wealth was extracted from what the writer calls ecological sacrifice zones through mining operations, deforestation, industrial extraction in other landscapes, other countries, and other people’s land. The money that damaged one part of the earth is being used to own and protect another part of it.

This is an inheritance story told through geography. Who gets to inherit the earth is not a metaphor here. It’s a deed. The people with the resources to buy the last unspoiled places are the same people whose industries made the rest of the world worse. And the land they’re buying was never theirs to begin with. It belonged to the Indigenous nations who were removed so it could become a national park in the first place. One inheritance layered on top of another.

We Spoke to the Man Making Viral Lego-Style AI Videos for Iran

BBC/Top Comment podcast

I’m writing about this on Monday, so I’ll keep this short here. The BBC’s new podcast interviewed the person behind Explosive Media, the outfit producing those AI-generated Lego-style propaganda clips about the Iran war. He calls himself Mr Explosive. He initially denied working for the Iranian government, then admitted under questioning that the regime is a “customer.” His team is fewer than 10 people. They use the Lego aesthetic because, he says, it’s “a world language.” He appeared on the video call flanked by the colors of the Iranian flag with a green-feathered helmet on his desk.

I was surprised by his candor. He wasn’t hiding behind PR language or plausible deniability. He just said this is what we do, this is who pays for it, and we think it’s honorable. Most propaganda tries to obscure its own origins. This guy sat for a BBC interview and explained the business model.

What makes the Iranian government’s media strategy even more interesting is that it’s running in two directions at once. Outward, Lego for global audiences. Inward, something completely different. , a reporter whose book on post-revolutionary Iran comes out in June, wrote about how the regime has started reaching back into the country’s ancient, pre-Islamic past to shore up nationalist support. The same pre-Islamic history the Islamic Republic spent decades rejecting. As one historian told her, the turn is a tacit admission that “the ideology of Islamic revolution has failed.” A government raiding an inheritance it once tried to erase.

The TurboTax Trap

ProPublica

Tax day just passed and if you felt the familiar dread, this is why. ProPublica investigated 20 years of lobbying by Intuit, the company behind TurboTax, to make sure the U.S. government never built a free tax filing system. Most wealthy countries did this a long time ago. America didn’t, and it wasn’t an accident. Intuit hired former IRS officials, funded op-eds through minority advocacy groups, got Congress to pass a single sentence barring the IRS from spending any money on a public filing option, and designed its own “free” product with dark patterns that push users into paying once they’re too deep in the process to start over. Internal documents show the company knew its customers were confused and angry. One TurboTax rep told a caller that the “free free free” ad campaign had been “the bane of my existence.”

Americans spend 1.7 billion hours and $31 billion doing their taxes every year. That number was engineered. The inherited belief that taxes are supposed to be complicated isn’t a natural condition. It’s a business model someone spent two decades protecting.

From Hierarchy to Intelligence

Jack Dorsey and Roelof Botha / Block and Sequoia Capital

In February, Block CEO Jack Dorsey fired approximately 4,000 employees, about 40% of the company’s workforce, while reporting record gross profit. Then on March 31 he and his lead investor published this essay explaining why. The argument: corporate hierarchy is a 2,000-year-old information routing system inherited from the Roman Army, and AI has made it obsolete. Managers exist to relay information up and down the chain. AI can do that now. So the people who were the routing layer are no longer needed.

I’ve been writing about this pattern on my AI Governance Briefing for weeks. OpenAI is paying freelancers through a program called Stagecraft to document their own jobs so AI can learn to replace them. Oracle cut 30,000 workers to fund data center construction. The market keeps rewarding whoever frames layoffs as vision — Block’s stock jumped 24% after the cuts. The same week Dorsey published this manifesto, Anthropic refused a Pentagon contract over safety concerns and got blacklisted. OpenAI signed a Pentagon deal hours later and its valuation rose $110 billion.

The essay is worth reading because Dorsey is saying the quiet part with footnotes. Most CEOs wrap layoff memos in empathy. This one wrapped his in Roman military history and published it with his investor.

Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling

The New Yorker

I hadn’t heard of this story before this week. In 2019, a 19-year-old named Zac Brettler fell to his death from a fifth-floor luxury apartment overlooking the Thames. He was the grandson of a well-known London rabbi, grew up middle-class, went to a good school. After he died, his parents discovered he’d been living a second life under a different name, posing as the son of a Russian oligarch, claiming he was set to inherit $270 million. The apartment belonged to a violent gangster. The police called it suicide. His parents don’t believe that.

The first thing I thought of was Anna Delvey. I’m sure you remember the woman who pretended to be a German heiress and scammed New York’s elite. You can watch the trailer for the Netflix show made about her here. And then the movie Saltburn, which is basically the fictional version. All three are stories about people who absorbed the language of wealth, learned the costume, and tried to wear it. The difference is Brettler was 19 and didn’t survive it. Keefe, the journalist behind Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, uses the death to examine what London’s money culture makes available to anyone willing to perform it, and what happens when the performance meets someone who isn’t performing.

Disney Begins 1,000 Job Cuts This Week Across the Company

Meg James, Los Angeles Times

I moved to Los Angeles to be an actor. I spent the first four years in that city trying to figure out if the thing I thought I wanted was actually mine or something I inherited from watching too many movies as a kid. I left because I realized I wasn’t passionate about being in front of the camera. But I still love the craft. I love going to the movies. I love what it takes to build a world on screen that an audience believes in.

Marvel’s visual development team was gutted this week. These are the artists, illustrators, character designers, and environment designers who built the look of the MCU for over a decade — the Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, Black Panther. Many had been there ten years or more. Nearly the entire team was let go. A skeleton crew stays to hire contractors on a per-project basis.

When I think about Black Panther and what Wakanda meant to people, I think about the fact that someone had to build that world before anyone could see it. A team of artists sat in a room and designed a place that didn’t exist, and it mattered to millions of people in a way that went beyond a movie. Those people are now being told their work will be done by freelancers assembled when someone decides a project is worth it. Which means someone gets to decide which worlds are worth building.

The Absolute Hell of Watching a Movie at the Alamo Drafthouse in 2026

David Ehrlich, IndieWire

I used to walk to the Alamo Drafthouse in downtown LA from my apartment. Great vibes. Great drinks. Great seats. The whole point of the place was that someone cared about the experience of watching a movie. The screens, the sound, and the respect for the audience. David Ehrlich’s piece is about what the Alamo has become after being acquired and optimized: QR code menus, aggressive upselling, a customer experience he compares to air travel. An institution built on loving movies, turned into a delivery system for snacks at the push of a button. If you ever loved going to the Alamo, this one stings. Some people probably love it now. That might be worse.

Brandy Norwood’s memoir Phases

NPR/Hanover Square Press (written with Gerrick Kennedy, )

I’ve been listening to and loving Brandy since I was a teenager. I remember the Wanya Morris relationship being a big deal at the time — and I remember it was framed as her having a schoolgirl crush or them being star-crossed lovers. In Phases, she names it differently: she was a teenager, he was an adult and what she once accepted as romance she now describes as a relationship where the age and power gap was deliberately hidden. The memoir goes further describing her mother’s management of her career to the inherited expectations about what success was supposed to look like for a Black girl who became famous before she could drive.

The Indian Exvangelical: Chapter One

The Gothamite

is the son of Indian immigrants who raised him in white American evangelical churches. His mother grew up in an orphanage run by a Canadian missionary. His father left Kerala for boarding school at eight, arrived in America an atheist, and converted at Cornell. Together they built a sealed household that included homeschooled children, no outside world until high school, and a family mythology organized around evangelical perfection. This is the first chapter of a memoir asking were his parents raising their children, or trying to redeem their own childhoods through them?

The Danger Behind Meta Killing End-to-End Encryption for Instagram DMs

WIRED

Meta spent nearly a decade publicly committing to default end-to-end encryption across all of its messaging products. Then it quietly announced it would remove the feature from Instagram DMs entirely. The reason given was not enough people opted in. The feature was buried behind layers of menus that most users never found. One cryptographer who worked on the rollout pointed out that public commitments to privacy are the only leverage users actually have and if those commitments can be reversed by designing a feature to fail and blaming users for not finding it, the privacy promise was never a product decision. It was a branding exercise with a shelf life.

Black Journalists Speak Out Against Alleged Retaliation and Discrimination at WJZ

, Baltimore Beat

Stephon Dingle grew up in Park Heights watching WJZ every morning with his grandmother. He won two Emmys covering Breonna Taylor’s case in Louisville, then took a pay cut to come back to Baltimore and work at the station he grew up on. Within a year of filing a harassment complaint, his assignments dried up, his role shrank, and eventually the station kept paying him while keeping him off the air until his contract expired. He’s one of eight Black journalists who formed what they call the Accountability Coalition, documenting patterns of retaliation and a culture of fear inside the newsroom. CBS laid off four people in Baltimore in October. All of them Black. NABJ has threatened to disinvite CBS from its August convention if the concerns aren’t addressed. I’m a Black journalist. None of this is surprising. That’s the problem.

From the Confederacy to the White House: How Southern Beauty Traditions Went MAGA

Code Switch (NPR)

I wasn’t sure about this one at first — as a Black gay man, I don’t have a lot of interest in platforming the aesthetics of people who would rather I didn’t exist. But the episode isn’t about them. It’s about where the aesthetic comes from. In the antebellum South, white women were crowned queen at jousting tournaments, May Day festivals, and Confederate veterans’ reunions. All rituals designed to make racial hierarchy feel like tradition. Scholar Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd traces a direct line from those ceremonies through Bama Rush, beauty pageants, and into the look that now defines Trump’s inner circle. The aesthetic survived the Confederacy because it was never really about beauty. It was about who gets crowned.

Hungry? Welcome to Ravenous

Ravenous

Five former Eater writers got tired of watching the media industry gut food journalism and replace it with AI-generated lists and influencer content. So they built a worker-owned cooperative. No VC money, no corporate parent, and no generative AI. Many of the founders are former union shop stewards. Their obligations, as they put it, are to themselves, their ethics, and their subscribers. Whether that model survives contact with the economics of digital media is the open question. But refusing to start with the compromises most publications end up making is worth paying attention to.

World Inequality Report 2026

World Inequality Database

The largest global dataset on inequality has a new edition. Women earn 32% of what men earn when unpaid labor is counted. The wealthiest 10% are responsible for 77% of carbon emissions tied to capital ownership. And in Western democracies, the old alignment between class and politics has fractured. Educated voters now lean left while high-income voters lean right, a split the researchers call a “multi-elite” system. The numbers haven’t moved in the direction anyone promised. The report makes clear they weren’t designed to.

‘Given a Gun and Sent to Die’: Kenyans Lured to Fight for Russia in Ukraine

NPR

A man in Kisii County, Kenya, flew to Russia after being promised a job as a driver. He signed a contract in a language he couldn’t read. Weeks later, his family learned he was dead from a television broadcast. More than a thousand Kenyans have been recruited this way — promised skilled work, handed a weapon, given nine days of training and sent to the front lines. Compensation for the dead is available only to Russian citizens. The question of whose bodies are expendable has always had an answer. It just changes depending on who needs soldiers.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

HBO

The trailer dropped last week and it’s everywhere. I’m a millennial, so I grew up with these movies — and I didn’t expect to feel anything watching an 11-year-old I’ve never seen before walk through Platform 9¾. But here we are. The Succession showrunner is running it. The Game of Thrones director is behind the camera. The actors have signed 10-year contracts. The most expensive bet in entertainment right now is a story an entire generation already knows by heart. That says something about what we’re willing to pay to feel like we did when we were kids.

I make good money. Why do I still feel like this?

The American middle class wasn’t a natural outcome of hard work. It was a policy project — built by the GI Bill, union protections, public universities, and a tax code that funded all of it. Then every piece of that bundle was unbundled and repriced. names what’s left: two groups living inside the same squeeze at different price points. One can’t afford the basics. The other can’t afford the life they were trained to expect. Neither is accumulating capital.

OpenAI Is Shutting Down Sora

TechCrunch

Six months ago, Sora was the future of video. Disney committed a billion dollars. Downloads topped three million. This week, OpenAI killed it. The app was burning through an estimated $15 million a day in computing costs and earned $2.1 million in its entire lifetime. The Disney deal dissolved before a single dollar changed hands. Impressive demos are not products. And the inherited Silicon Valley belief that hype and demand are the same thing just lost another argument.

The Zombie Regulator

The New Yorker

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau returned $21 billion to Americans and recovered $5 billion in penalties from banks and tech companies. Now its employees are paid to sit at their desks and do nothing. One examiner copy-pasted the same line into her weekly accomplishments email for months: “I did not violate Director Vought’s stop-work order.” The agency built to protect people from financial ruin is being dismantled by people who were never supposed to run it.

Lay It Down

Hazlitt

John Samson Fellows — the Weakerthans’ frontman, once called the prairie poet voice of his generation — has stopped making music. He was diagnosed with major depressive disorder and hospitalized. Now he weaves on a loom in his Winnipeg basement, makes small fabric pieces, and gives them to people he loves. He converted to Quakerism and rewrites hymns to sing at protests. “Everything dies,” he said. “We’re upset by change and by things dying and passing away, but sometimes they really need to.”

What Happened When I Began to Speak Welsh

The Yale Review

At his grandmother’s funeral, the service was in Welsh. Her first language. His mother’s too. He didn’t understand a word. Years later, he opened Duolingo and started trying to learn the language his family carried for generations — the same language the British government once punished children for speaking in school. He may never be fluent. The essay isn’t about fluency. It’s about what it feels like to reach for something your family was forced to let go of, and find it still there, just barely.

Why Minneapolis Continues to Stand Up Against ICE

ProPublica

A ProPublica journalist photographed the people in his own Minneapolis neighborhood who stepped up after ICE arrived. A 64-year-old cancer survivor patrols with a whistle. A cafe owner organizes rides for her staff. A pastor’s church has fed thousands. One neighbor put it simply: “Legal immigration, illegal immigration? That’s not my call. That’s not my fight. By the time you’re my neighbor, you’re my neighbor.”

Seven things here. The Blackbird Spyplane piece is one of the best, and exactly why this roundup exists.

Searching for Meaning in My Grandmother’s Wild Life—and Finding Something Else Entirely

Vogue

A writer interviews family and friends to preserve her grandmother before dementia takes too much. What she finds is a woman who drank, left marriages, kept a kiln in her flat, and lived on communes — a life that doesn’t match the gentle figure she grew up knowing. The piece is about what happens when the archive you build reveals someone you weren’t prepared to hold.

A$AP Rocky Is Living His American Dream

Esquire

A celebrity profile that is about return: what success looks like when the neighborhood that made you is still part of the story. The most interesting thing here is not fame, but the question underneath it: what you owe the people who knew you before any of this made sense.

Thinking of a ‘No Buy’ 2026?

The Independent

Under the language of budgeting is an older American belief: that discipline is a form of virtue, and that hardship can be redeemed if it improves your character.

Introducing The SIL, a Vintage Site Where Provenance Comes First

Vogue,

A vintage platform built around provenance sounds niche until you remember how much modern consumption depends on pretending objects come from nowhere. This is about why things feel different when their former lives are allowed to stay attached.

Memory of Winter

Emergence Magazine

Zoë Schlanger writes about plant emergence, climate volatility, and the gamble of coming back to life too early. Underneath it is a larger question: what happens when the old cues stop working, and survival starts depending on whether you can tell the difference?

Open-Source AI Hardware Could Weaken Big Tech’s Grip on AI

Rest of World

A handheld AI device out of India runs offline, supports 22 languages, and is being released as open-source hardware. The older question underneath is who gets to own the infrastructure of intelligence — and whether “open” can survive the same consolidation that swallowed the early internet.

This Life Gives You Nothing

A writer picks up Proust to make an Instagram reel and accidentally remembers what reading is for. The essay underneath the bravado is about what constant mediation does to attention — how screens don’t just distract you, but restructure the way you see, until looking at a real hillside feels indistinguishable from looking at a photo of one. The question it lands on is whether your attention still belongs to you, or whether you surrendered it so gradually you didn’t notice.

Eight things for this week’s What I’ve Taken. One of them goes up in smoke.

Sinners at the Oscars

Variety + ABC

Ryan Coogler’s vampire-blues epic went into the Oscars with a record 16 nominations and left with four wins. The performance makes the case better than the awards count does: Sinners put Black musical inheritance on center stage.

The Victims Who Fought Back

ProPublica / The New York Times Magazine

Oklahoma passed a law to reduce sentences for domestic violence survivors imprisoned for fighting back against their abusers. Prosecutors have made sure it barely works. The legal system inherited its assumptions about who counts as a victim — and those assumptions are surviving even the laws designed to challenge them.

Love in the Time of A.I. Companions

The New Yorker

These tools are arriving in a culture already accustomed to thinner and thinner forms of care. What they normalize is companionship stripped of reciprocity, obligation, and any expectation that care should ask something of us in return.

Computing in the Age of Decolonization

Rest of World

India spent decades pursuing technological sovereignty. What it built instead was a deeper dependence on the firms it set out to escape. Postcolonial ambition became a route to new forms of subordination — not because the ambition was wrong, but because the structures it confronted proved more adaptive than anyone anticipated.

Inside the Criminal World of Southeast Asia’s Scam Compounds

Aeon

Workers trafficked into cybercrime compounds in Cambodia and Myanmar exist in a space where victim and perpetrator collapse into the same person. Nobody — not governments, not NGOs, not the workers themselves — has a clean name for what’s happening.

Instrumentalisation Is Making Everything a Means to an End

Aeon

Friendship improves health outcomes. Nature reduces cortisol. Art boosts creativity. When did we stop valuing anything for its own sake? The essay names a cultural inheritance so pervasive it is easy to miss: the belief that nothing matters unless it produces a measurable return.

Cultural Fluency Is the Strongest Currency for Media in 2026

Nieman Lab

Legacy media institutions abandoned cultural fluency precisely when it became most valuable. Now community-rooted outlets and culturally embedded creators are inheriting the audiences those institutions trained themselves not to see.

Ogoh-Ogoh

Field video, Ubud, Bali

The night before Nyepi, the Balinese day of silence, I watched communities parade enormous demon effigies called ogoh-ogoh through the streets, then stage their destruction in smoke and flares. These took months to build and lasted one evening. The ritual turns fear into something visible, public, and temporary — name what haunts you, build it so everyone can see it, then let it go.

Seven this week. I’d start with the one about Bisbee.

When AI Picks the Targets

The Washington Post

The story is not just that AI is now helping wage war in real time. It is that institutions built to diffuse responsibility have found a tool that can do it faster. When target selection starts to move at machine speed, the inheritance is not only technological power, but a familiar temptation to treat judgment as something that can be outsourced.

Can AI Save Local News?

The Wall Street Journal

The headline promises a story about technology. What it actually delivers is the inherited business model of American journalism — and how decades of institutional decay hollowed out the very thing local papers were built to do.

Is Inherited Wealth Bad?

Aeon

An economist makes a counterintuitive case: rising inheritances are a sign of a healthy economy, not a sick one. The numbers are interesting — a modest bequest can compress inequality among heirs because $100,000 is life-changing for someone with $50,000 and irrelevant to someone with $10 million. The essay never asks what happens to the people who inherit nothing at all.

Vigilantes at Dawn

Longreads

In 1917, armed men wearing white armbands rounded up nearly 1,200 striking miners in Bisbee, Arizona, forced them into cattle cars, and drove them into the desert. A century later, a journalist traces her great-grandfather’s escape over the mountains and asks the question that makes this more than a history piece: as deportation lists circulate again, what do the descendants of immigrants owe the dead — and the living?

35 and 1

Longreads

A woman’s son is born on the exact birthday of the brother she lost to an overdose a decade earlier. Out of 365 days, this one. What follows is an essay about grief, motherhood, and how absence keeps finding new places to live.

An Action-Figure Maker’s Outsized Tribute to His Late Brother

Aeon (short film, 15 mins)

A Scottish artist who builds handcrafted figurines of cultural icons turns, for the first time, to the person who taught him the craft: his brother, who died. The film is quiet and precise — hands working, memories surfacing — and it circles a question the artist never quite answers: whether he is building a tribute or trying to keep someone from disappearing entirely.

Poisonous Objects

The New York Review of Books

Carolina A. Miranda reviews two Los Angeles exhibitions examining what Confederate monuments do — not commemorate history, but enforce it. At MOCA, Kara Walker took a bronze equestrian statue of Stonewall Jackson, cut it apart with a plasma cutter, and reassembled it into something monstrous. The piece asks a question the original sculptor never intended: if the monument was built to make white supremacy look noble, what does it look like when you strip the aesthetics away?