Been wanting to inject a bit of context into the WaPo discussion this week. An important note is nearly every publisher has experienced similar precipitous declines in audience since 2020. No sugarcoating! COVID/election year was a peak traffic moment for almost everyone. Then came social platform algorithm changes; news fatigue; subscription fatigue; and rapidly changing reader habits.

At middle school basketball game at the Barclays center, the girls behind us are cheering for the opposing team. One bursts out: “If we lose, I’m going to smack one of those Chinese girls.” I talk to her. She denies it. Her mother comes over and gets in my face. #thisis2023 Not unusual, of course, but talking to two other Asian American parents nearby…we talked about the heart-pounding. The fear.

Speechless at this extraordinarily brave, visceral, and important story by Luke Mogelson, who spent two weeks embedded in the front lines, documenting the unimaginable. War reportage at its finest. Journalism in its most vital function: bearing witness. newyorker.com/magazine/2023/… Meet Doc, a former marine with a degree in computer science who worked for Google. “A thick scar spanned his neck, from a bar fight in North Carolina during which someone had sliced his throat with a box cutter.”

In this week’s @newyorker, I write about Mai Ngai’s new book, “The Chinese Question.” The gold rush made California the substrate for an experiment in multiracial democracy that had little precedent in the country’s history. Hint: it didn’t end well. newyorker.com/magazine/2021/… “The Chinese of the gold-rush era are mostly anonymous to us today. The absence of their voices from historical accounts perhaps contributes to the mistaken impression that they were passive in the face of abuse.”

SIREN @JaneMayerNYer⁩: a well-funded national movement has been exploiting Trump’s claims of fraud in order to promote alterations to the way that ballots are cast and counted in 49 states, 18 of which have passed new voting laws in the past 6 months. newyorker.com/magazine/2021/… “Dark-money organizations…have relentlessly promoted the myth that American elections are rife with fraud, and, according to leaked records of their internal deliberations, they have drafted, supported, and in some cases taken credit for state laws that make it harder to vote.”

Extraordinary details here via @sbg1. Beginning in late 2020, Milley began having daily 8 am calls: “…both engines are out, the landing gear are stuck, we’re in an emergency situation. Our job is to land this plane safely...” newyorker.com/news/letter-fr… “Milley repeatedly met in private with the Joint Chiefs. He told them to make sure there were no unlawful orders from Trump and not to carry out any such orders without calling him first…”

So much here in @williams_paige investigation in this week's @newyorker: harrowing scenes from Kenosha; what happens when guns are everywhere; revelations about Rittenhouse family's meeting with Enrique Tarrio six days after the Capitol insurrection. newyorker.com/magazine/2021/… Rittenhouse, holding his rifle, reached some parked cars just as a protester fired a warning shot into the sky. Rittenhouse whirled; the bald man lunged; Rittenhouse fired, four times. The man fell in front of a Buick, wounded in the groin, back, thigh, hand, and head.

NEW @ronanfarrow @jiatolentino investigation on the conservatorship that stripped Britney Spears of her rights, and the pop star’s fight to regain control of her life. newyorker.com/news/american-… Jacqueline Butcher, a former friend of the Spears family who was present in court for the conservatorship’s creation, in 2008: “At the time, I thought we were helping,” she said. “And I wasn’t, and I helped a corrupt family seize all this control.”

“If we continue to permit the introduction of this strange people, w/ their peculiar civilization, until they form a considerable part of our population, what is to be the effect upon the American people and Anglo-Saxon civilization?” -Sen John F. Miller, of California, 2/28/1882 “Can these two civilizations endure, side by side, as two distinct and hostile forces? Is American civilization as unimpressible as Chinese civilization? When the end comes for one or the other, which will be found to have survived?"

NEW from @ericlach: Ron Kim was bathing his 3 kids when phone rang. The governor was so loud that Kim’s wife and daughters grew upset. “I will go out tomorrow and start telling the world how bad of an Assembly member you are, and you will be finished.” newyorker.com/news/our-local… Neither Kim nor his wife slept that night...Cuomo kept up the pressure through the weekend. That Saturday, Cuomo’s aides and other intermediaries called Kim, trying to get him to talk to the governor.

EXCLUSIVE: @klonick spent 18 months reporting on the making of Facebook’s Oversight Board. Its decisions are binding, but its power is quite circumscribed in a lot of ways. Soon after it started hearing cases, it got the biggest one of all: Trump. newyorker.com/tech/annals-of… “...Trump personally called Zuckerberg to say that he was unhappy with the makeup of the board. He was especially angry about the selection of Pamela Karlan, a Stanford Law professor who had testified against him during his first impeachment.”

Take a bow ⁦@sbg1⁩. Her final “Letter from Trump’s Washington.” Incredible run. Tomorrow, her weekly column becomes “Letter from Biden’s Washington.” newyorker.com/news/letter-fr… This, more than anything, might have been the most surprising thing about Trump’s tenure: his ability to turn one of America’s two political parties into a cult of personality organized around a repeatedly bankrupt New York real-estate developer.

Very helpful @benwallacewells piece: "...a general pattern has become clear across the extremist factions: far-right and conspiratorial movements were, in effect, “mainstreamed and normalized” as they were channelled into the protests over the election..." newyorker.com/news/our-colum… “We see a spike in activity after every major war. Spikes in Klan membership align with the aftermath of warfare; the early militia movement aligns with the aftermath of warfare,” @kathleen_belew told @benwallacewells.

NEW: Luke Mogelson’s remarkable video footage of the Capitol invasion, from breaching the first barricades to rummaging through desks on the Senate floor. Stunning, frightening, revolting. newyorker.com/news/video-dep… “Is this the Senate?”
“Where the f—- are they?”

NEW from next week’s issue of @newyorker: Luke Mogelson, who has been reporting on MAGA protesters for months, provides a firsthand account of the Capitol invasion. newyorker.com/magazine/2021/… After this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you,” Trump told the crowd. The people around me exchanged looks of astonishment and delight.

Earlier this year, I read @lawrence_wright’s new thriller about a global pandemic, “The End of October,” and was dumbfounded at its prescience. Now he’s out with the definitive account of Covid-19,
taking up most of this week’s @newyorker. newyorker.com/magazine/2021/… From the "lost February": "Without the test kits, contact tracing was stymied; without contact tracing, there was no obstacle in the contagion’s path. America never once had enough reliable tests distributed across the nation, with results available within two days."

As Christians prepare anew to celebrate the Incarnation, I revisit early church history as a reminder of the devotion to the common good Jesus can inspire and lament how this has been, to a distressing degree, an ignominious year for the church in America. newyorker.com/news/daily-com… This is the fourth Sunday of Advent. The sense of weighty expectation feels heightened this year. The collect in the Book of Common Prayer reads as a collective yearning: “O Lord, raise up (we pray thee) thy power, and come among us, and with great might succour us.”

Important caveat from @DhruvKhullar: "we know for sure that the vaccines...prevent severe illness in almost all people who are inoculated...we’re not yet certain that the vaccines can prevent people from becoming infected or infecting others." newyorker.com/science/medica… "Moderna tested volunteers for the virus before the second dose, and found fewer asymptomatic cases among those who'd received it compared with those who hadn't––an encouraging, but by no means conclusive, sign of interrupted viral transmission."

.@JaneMayerNYer "they say her short-term memory has grown so poor that she often forgets she has been briefed on a topic, accusing her staff of failing to do so just after they have. They describe Feinstein as forgetting what she has said & getting upset." newyorker.com/news/news-desk… One aide to another senator described what he called a “Kabuki” meeting in which Feinstein’s staff tried to steer her through a proposed piece of legislation that she protested was “just words” which “make no sense.”

I wish everyone in America could read @DhruvKhullar's really thoughtful, measured piece. "The balancing of individual liberty and public health may now be the most contentious issue in American life." He talks to people from his hometown in Ohio. newyorker.com/science/medica… Meet Andrew Sigler, who works at a software company in northeastern Ohio, who is living a “relatively at-risk” life style. But then his 93-year-old grandfather got Covid. Did that change his views? Worth reading.

NEW from ⁦@praddenkeefe⁩: While opioid deaths have surged during the pandemic, the Sackler family has been quietly staging an end game in which it will keep most of its fortune—and be released from all future liability. newyorker.com/news/news-desk… “The Sacklers may be embattled, but they have hardly given up the fight. And a bankruptcy court in White Plains, it turns out, is a surprisingly congenial venue for the family to stage its endgame.”