Below, our favorite stories of the week.
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1. America Is Still the Future
Andrew Sullivan | New York Magazine | Jan 22, 2017 | 29 minutes (7,461 words)
Sullivan reflects on his time as a foreigner in the U.S. and how he learned to embrace the country’s flaws and virtues during his journey to become a citizen.
2. Murderous Manila: On the Night Shift
James Fenton | New York Review of Books | Feb 9, 2017 | 13 minutes (3,416 words)
“No one will be safe until many, many more have died.” In a dispatch from Manila, James Fenton describes the current war on drugs in the Philippines and two types of killings: “buy-bust” operations and EJKs, or extrajudicial killings.
3. Where “It” Was: Rereading Stephen King’s “It” on Its 30th Anniversary
Adrian Daub | LA Review of Books | Sep 11, 2016 | 10 minutes (2,551 words)
Was ‘It’ really about a murderous clown, or was it about our ability to forget the horrors of the past?
4. Michele Kirsch: My Life As a Cleaner in London
Michele Kirsch | The Independent | Oct 25, 2015 | 9 minutes (2,481 words)
Michele Kirsch on working as a cleaner in London, England, and the fascinating, unspoken social rules that keep a cleaner-cleanee relationship “shipshape and Bristol-fashion.”
5. Fiction Confidential
Maria Bustillos | Eater | Jan 25, 2017 | 17 minutes (4,333 words)
Before he became the patron saint of every tattooed-chef-in-a-gentrifying-neighborhood, Anthony Bourdain wrote novels. What can they tell us about the man behind the bad-boy persona?
