Below, our favorite stories of the week.
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Below, our favorite stories of the week.
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GROSS: You’ve been very open about your life and — or, you know, comparatively open about your life.
FISHER: Spread eagle.GROSS: (Laughter) And certainly, you know, you’re very revealing in your new memoir. Have there been consequences in your life for, you know, what some people might think of as oversharing?
FISHER: Oh, I think I do overshare, and I sometime marvel that I do it. But it’s sort of — in a way, it’s my way of trying to understand myself. I don’t know. I get it out of my head. It creates community when you talk about private things and you can find other people that have the same things. Otherwise, I don’t know — I felt very lonely with some of the issues that I had or history that I had. And when I shared about it, I found that others had it, too.
GROSS: Have there ever been consequences when someone overshared about you?
FISHER: No, that would be really hypocritical.
— From “Fresh Air’s” interview with Carrie Fisher in November. The actress and writer, most famous for her work in the Star Wars franchise, died on Tuesday at the age of 60.
Update: Carrie Fisher’s mother, the actress Debbie Reynolds, has died at the age of 84 one day after the death of her daughter.

From “Singin’ in the Rain”
In her interview with Terry Gross, Fisher says:
I just admire my mother very much. She also annoys me sometimes when she’s, you know, mad at the nurses. But, you know, she’s an extraordinary woman, extraordinary.
There are very few women from her generation who worked like that, who just kept a career going all her life and raised children and had horrible relationships and lost all her money and got it back again. I mean, she’s had an amazing life, and she’s someone to admire.

Long after winter has ended, hating on Christmas remains popular sport, as much a holiday tradition as eggnog and overspending. In the New Republic in December, 1990, James S. Henry published an essay outlining his yuletide complaints and what he sees as Christmas’ flaws. The magazine republished Henry’s piece online for Christmas this year, so I thought I’d share it here, too. The stats might be dated and popular toys no longer the same, but the case Henry builds is as evergreen as a spruce. Each New Year I hope we live in a world with less hate and more understanding. But complaints? I have a few. Happy Holidays.
Christmas destroys the environment and innocent animals and birds. These have perhaps not been traditional concerns for economists. But when one takes account of all the Christmas trees, letters, packages, increased newspaper advertising, wrapping paper, and catalogs and cards, as well as all the animals slaughtered for feast and fur, this holiday is nothing less than a catastrophe for the entire ecosystem. According to the U.S. Forest Service, 33 million Christmas trees are consumed each year. Growing them imposes an artificially short rotation period on millions of acres of forest land, and the piles of needles they shed shorten the life of most household rugs and pets. All the trees and paper have to be disposed of, which places a heavy burden on landfill sites and recycling facilities, especially in the Northeast.
This year, according to the Humane Society, at least 4 million foxes and minks will be butchered just to provide our Christmas furs. To stock our tables, the Department of Agriculture tells me, we’ll also slaughter 22 million turkeys, 2 million pigs, and 2 million to 3 million cattle, plus a disproportionate fraction of the 6 billion chickens that the United States consumes each year. To anyone who has ever been to a turkey farm, Christmas and Thanksgiving take on a new and somewhat less cheerful meaning. Every single day during the run-up to these holidays, thousands of bewildered, debeaked, growth-hormone-saturated birds are hung upside down on assembly-line racks and given electric shocks. Then their throats are slit and they are dropped into boiling water.

Below, our favorite stories of the week.
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At Vanity Fair, Allen Salkin examines the downfall of Pure Food & Wine proprietor Sarma Melngailis. It all seems to stem from her involvement with Anthony Strangis, an ex-gambler she met on Twitter and then married, and whose alleged “coercive control” may have led the vegan icon and Wharton graduate to destroy her business and become a fugitive from the law:
A source close to Melngailis describes a scenario in which Strangis resorted to cult-like techniques, including gaslighting, sleep deprivation, and sexual humiliation, to control her. (Strangis, through his court-appointed attorney, Samuel Karliner, denied all these allegations but did not elaborate on his denials in responding to 80 questions from Vanity Fair.) Perhaps if you can understand how a sane, successful businesswoman comes to believe the insane idea that her dog can live forever, everything else snaps into focus—how that person might be accused of bilking her investors of $844,000, owe her employees more than $40,000 in unpaid wages, financially strip her restaurant, and now find herself awaiting trial, with a potential 15-year sentence. She had thought all harm would be magically reversed, just as Leon’s life span would be extended, according to her camp.

Nate Parker’s film, The Birth of a Nation, and Manchester by the Sea, starring Casey Affleck, were the toast of the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. Both promised to dominate Oscar season. And both male stars had a history that included allegations of sexual impropriety. Nearly a year later, Parker’s Oscar hopes have evaporated entirely — in no small part because people talked incessantly about the allegations against him. Affleck, by contrast, has emerged as the frontrunner for Best Actor, the conversations about the past allegations corralled into single paragraphs in laudatory profiles.
The reasons why are complex — but increasingly clear.
At BuzzFeed, Anne Helen Petersen explores assorted reasons why Casey Affleck’s star keeps rising, despite talk of the settled sexual misconduct suits against him, while Nate Parker’s star has fallen after he was acquitted of rape charges.

Cody Delistraty | Longreads | December 2016 | 10 minutes (2,632 words)
It is difficult to define Rebecca Solnit. Is she an historian, a cultural theorist, a journalist, an activist? She cites reserved intellectuals like John Berger and Lawrence Weschler as influences, and she is also on the front lines of protest: she was an outspoken proponent of Occupy Wall Street; she was in Standing Rock, at the Dakota Access Pipeline, where protestors recently gained an unexpected victory; and she co-founded the Stop Trump project, which ideologically resists the U.S. President-Elect while uncovering the potential malfeasance that led to his election in the first place.
Born in Connecticut and educated at San Francisco State University and U.C. Berkeley, the 55-year-old has been an independent writer living in northern California since 1988. She’s authored seventeen books, ranging in topic from art to politics to geography to community to feminism. She won the Lannan Literary Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and she’s currently a contributing editor at Harper’s, where she writes the bimonthly Easy Chair column.
Her essay “Hope in the Dark,” which she gave away as a free ebook after Trump was elected, was written twelve years ago as an instructive piece on what went wrong with the Iraq War protests. Its relevance resurged after Trump was elected.
I spoke with Solnit about reclaiming the notion that political protest works, understanding the role of hope, the lessons of Hilary Clinton’s defeat, not ceding resistance, and whether Trump was even elected president at all.

It’s always the same: a morning arrives in November, and my friend, as though officially inaugurating the Christmas time of year that exhilarates her imagination and fuels the blaze of her heart, announces: “It’s fruitcake weather! Fetch our buggy. Help me find my hat.”
“A Christmas Memory,” Truman Capote
’Tis the season! A time for awkwardly posed Santa photos, awkwardly getting tipsy at office holiday parties, awkwardly offensive carols, and awkwardly feigning excitement over receiving a Harry & David fruitcake. For many of us who celebrate Christmas, foods are as closely bound to the experience as gift-giving. And making fun of fruitcake has become a time-honored tradition — though thanks to the success of this dedicated fruitcake besmirchment campaign, I suspect many of us have never actually tasted, let alone received or re-gifted, a traditional fruitcake.
This reading list celebrates oft-maligned holiday foods like fruitcake and mincemeat pie, along with unlikely new candidates like White Castle and KFC.

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here, the best in under-recognized stories.
* * *
Michael J. Mooney
Dallas-based freelance writer, co-director of the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference.
I saw this story posted and shared a few times when it first ran, but in the middle of an insane election cycle, it didn’t get nearly the attention it deserves. This is the tale of Lauren Connor, a woman who fell off a boat and disappeared amid the crashing waves of the Chesapeake Bay. It’s about the search to find her, by both authorities and her boyfriend, and about a woman whose life had prepared her perfectly for the kinds of challenges that would overwhelm most of us. This is a deadline narrative, but it’s crafted so well—weaving in background and character development at just the right moments, giving readers so many reasons to care—that you couldn’t stop reading if you wanted to.
Kara Platoni
A science reporter from Oakland, California, who teaches at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and is the author of We Have the Technology, a book about biohacking.
A clear-eyed, thought-provoking retelling of Michelle-Lael Norsworthy’s long legal battle in hope of becoming the first American to receive sex-reassignment surgery while in prison. Her lawyers argued that the surgery was medically necessary and withholding it violated the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. But, they argued, rather than grant the surgery and set a legal precedent, the Department of Corrections instead ordered her parole. The piece is a nuanced take on what it’s like to transition in prison—at least 400 California inmates were taking hormone replacement therapy when the article was published in May—where trans women are vulnerable to sexual assault and survivors are placed in a kind of solitary confinement, stuck in limbo in a prison system where it’s unsafe for them to live with men, but they are generally not allowed to live with women. And it asks a bigger question: What kind of medical care must the state cover?
Azmat Khan
Investigative Reporter, New America Future of War Fellow.
At first, it may seem like a simple essay about cultural appropriation, but this opus on the nameplate necklace is so much more than that. It is a beautiful ode to black and brown fashion. It is a moving history of how unique names became a form of political resistance to white supremacy. And it is the biting reality check Carrie Bradshaw so desperately needed. Read more…

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here, the best in business and tech reporting. Read more…
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