The New Yorker

At The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead profiles Margaret Atwood — Canada’s prolific queen of literature. Mead and Atwood cover the resonance of The Handmaid’s Tale in Donald Trump’s America, Atwood’s approach to feminism, and the purpose of fiction in today’s society. Beloved for her incisive mind along with her works, Atwood uses unlimited curiosity as her approach to a life well lived — whether that’s living in a tent while birding in Panama, engaging with her 1.5 million Twitter followers, or writing as a septuagenarian. “I don’t think she judges anything in advance as being beneath her, or beyond her, or outside her realm of interest,” says friend and collaborator, Naomi Alderman.

Faced with a terrifying past and an uncertain future, young refugees in Sweden are taking to their beds with uppgivenhetssyndrom, or resignation syndrome, “an illness that is said to exist only in Sweden, and only among refugees.”

A reported personal essay by Gary Shteyngart. The Russian-born novelist and memoirist confesses to an obsession with expensive mechanical watches, which intensified through the 2016 Presidential race. He quells his growing anxiety by taking tours of German watchmaking facilities, and comparing rarefied ticking treasures with other watch geeks.

One lawyer-philosopher had to coin the term “born-again paganism” to capture the theological doctrine he outlines in his 4-pound book about god and reverence and what daily life has to do with eternity. It’s kind of confusing.

How Robert Mercer exploited America’s populist insurgency.

A must-read by Sheelah Kolhatkar. An activist hedge fund thought it had the perfect target by shorting Herbalife, a company accused of being a pyramid scheme that preyed on poor people. It turned into all-out war between investors and the company.

Davidson does some deep reporting on a sketchy deal the Trump Organization oversaw in Azerbaijan. The building of the Trump Tower Baku is linked to notoriously corrupt oligarchs and financiers of terrorism.

Pauls Toutonghi lovingly recalls his grandfather, Philippe Elias Tütünji, a writer, poet, and translator from Aleppo, Syria. Tütünji immigrated to America during World War II and never gave up his dream to achieve success as a poet in his adopted homeland. Working menial and low-paying jobs to support his family, and “full of immigrant ambition,” he once visited actor Danny Thomas (who was born Muzyad Yakhoob Kairouz in 1912, in Lebanon) in a bid to entice Thomas to record the poem as a song — a feat Tütünji felt would make him a star.

Armed with a drawerful of butterscotch candy and a charge to safeguard America’s past, Carla Hayden may be the last person left in Washington with a hopeful eye to future.

On two forms of loss: grief and the misplacement of everyday objects.