Noteworthy reads from the last week:
“After Lethal Injection,” Maurice Chammah, Andrew Cohen, and Eli Hager
“The question in Oklahoma is not whether capital punishment should continue, but how.”
“Against the Barricades,” Katie Ryder
“Today’s online commerce of words necessitates repetition—hence the fetishization of keywords, which become, in practical terms for editors and magazines, the correct labels for ideas, for observations, for all parts of thought. Cliché is quite literally the currency. We kid ourselves every time we discuss the devolution of public language as if it exists separately from this commoditization.”
“Mothers of Invention,” Parul Sehgal
“As an institution, the family is in the curious position of being regarded as both crucial to human survival and inimical to human freedom.”
“As Savchuk and other former employees describe it, the Internet Research Agency had industrialized the art of trolling.”
“Homo Economicus Slouches Toward Retirement,” Sarah Burnside
“Adam Smith’s mother, Margaret Douglas, not only cooked his dinner but lived with him for most of his life. Marçal argues that the absence of such people from Smith’s vision of the market has created a fundamental flaw in economic thinking.”
“On Longer Lives and Longer Deaths,” Julie Livingston
“America has many open secrets. The nursing home is one of them. We try not to think too hard or too long about its residents or its low-wage staff.”
“The Complex Power Coupledom of Chris Hughes and Sean Eldridge,” Sarah Ellison
“or his 30th birthday, Hughes threw a party at the Queen Anne-style Brooklyn Historical Society, with a piano quartet that played Brahms. It was something a rich man would do, but it was also something that an old rich man would do. That was part of Hughes’s appeal. He had entrée to the world of technology, but he still preferred to read French novels in French.”