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By Nicholas Thompson, CEO The Atlantic
The Best Things To Read
Here's what I'm reading (and writing!) this month.
 
Nicholas Thompson
CEO at The Atlantic
 
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Some interesting things to read this weekend in May
Dear Friends,

This past week, we lost one of my journalist heroes, Roger Angell, at the age of 101. He wrote for The New Yorker from 1945 until 2020. He was the only baseball writer inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. He wrote an astonishing piece about aging, and if there was a Hall of Fame for aging well, he would have been in it, too. Every sentence of that piece is a job, starting with the first two. “Check me out. The top two knuckles of my left hand look as if I’d been worked over by the K.G.B.” Or this bit, picked essentially at random. “I’ve endured a few knocks but missed worse. I know how lucky I am, and secretly tap wood, greet the day, and grab a sneaky pleasure from my survival at long odds. The pains and insults are bearable. My conversation may be full of holes and pauses, but I’ve learned to dispatch a private Apache scout ahead into the next sentence, the one coming up, to see if there are any vacant names or verbs in the landscape up there. If he sends back a warning, I’ll pause meaningfully, duh, until something else comes to mind. On the other hand, I’ve not yet forgotten Keats or Dick Cheney or what’s waiting for me at the dry cleaner’s today.”

I started working at The New Yorker when he was 90, and he was unfailingly kind to me. When my job became running the website, he was one of our most generous and prolific bloggers, forever offering me ammunition when other staff writers proclaimed that web writing was just for the young. In my last months in that job, he wrote about his joy at seeing The Cubs win, and his horror at the possibility that Donald Trump might. My favorite piece of his thought might be this profile of Bob Gibson. And you should of course read David Remnick’s remembrance of Roger. It ends with a memory of the two of them leaving the Mets’ clubhouse after the team lost the 2000 World Series. “Roger got behind the wheel and, driving alarmingly fast on the Grand Central Parkway, he talked about next year.” He will be profoundly missed.

I spent last week in Los Angeles, where we launched our “A Forest for the Trees,” a 28,000 square foot art exhibit inspired by our Atlantic cover story last year, “Return The National Parks to The Tribes.” You’ll be surrounded by redwoods, you’ll be tricked by magic, you’ll be seduced by fire. The reviews have been wonderful. Or as one critic wrote, “If you are remotely within the Southern California region I want you to stop what you’re doing right now and make plans to catch this.” But it’s also a good excuse to read some great environmental journalism. Here is John Muir on Yosemite, written in The Atlantic in 1899. Here’s a beautiful piece on bristlecone pines. And while I was out west, I bumped into Jaron Lanier, one of the pioneers of virtual reality, and was reminded of Jennifer Kahn’s profile of him. If you don’t know his life story—including his youth alone in a geodesic dome in New Mexico—you should read this.

This week, I’m off to Davos, where I’ll be moderating events on economic change, technological risk, the metaverse, ocean treaties, and Web 3.0. If you’re there, say hello! Meanwhile, the best coverage of the soap opera that is the Elon Musk attempted purchase of Twitter has been by Matt Levine at Bloomberg. It’s not easy to combine real humor with real understanding of the deal terms. I also liked this interview of Mark Zuckerberg, particularly the first 40 minutes or so while he talks about the metaverse—and the prospect that we will be able to create entirely realistic digital twins of ourselves, which sounds great until you think about what would happen if you got hacked. And Katherine Eban continues her incredible investigation into the origins of Covid and whether there was possibly a lab leak.

Meanwhile, my last suggestion is this startling piece on the evangelical church, written with profound empathy and understanding. The question of whether the church should be political—and whether pastors who aren’t political can thrive—is one of the most complicated in American life.

Finally, some more words from Roger Angell: “Getting old is the second-biggest surprise of my life, but the first, by a mile, is our unceasing need for deep attachment and intimate love.

 
 



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