I read a lot. Whether it be for teaching, for research, for pleasure, to stay informed, I do a lot of it. As such, I often think, "Damn, that was good." Many times I'll tell my wife or friends that I learned so much from a piece.

It is not rare, even, that I finish something  and think or say, "Holy shit, that was amazing." I think that something I read was so impactful it will change the way I think the rest of my life often. Just sitting here thinking about it, I can think of a handful of books and articles that are that impactful. 

"James" by Percival Everett is, in fact, one of those pieces. 

The book was just named the 2024 Pulitzer Prize winner for Fiction and it is completely worthy of the honor. 

One of my friends recently told me about a friend of her parents -- a well-to-do, older woman who claimed she did not know the horrors of slavery described in a fictional book she had read. She knew about slavery, but didn't realize how brutally the vast majority of slaves were treated. (This friend and I were in utter disbelief over the fact, but it explains a lot, I suppose.) 

Slavery is such a stain on humanity -- the absolute worst of human beings. But the best of humanity is art. Percival Everett's work here is just the best of human beings, the best of what the species is capable. 

​Holy shit... that was amazing. 

I started reading this investigative series today after listening to ProPublica's Eric Umansky discuss his reporting on The Daily podcast. The stories are about how police use body cameras and how the transparency and accountability that were supposed to follow body cam-usage rarely came to be.

The main article was released in mid-December last year, but  it had an immediate impact as the New York Police Department changed course and decided to stop the practice of denying body-cam footage of police shootings to civilian investigators.

But the one story in this joint investigation -- between ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine -- that really gave me pause was Umansky's own story about the night he and his neighbors witnessed a police cruiser hit a Black boy in the street and what happened after. It piques interest and makes one understand why a reporter would take on this cumbersome project. It's pretty amazing and it's the best thing I've read this week. 

More doom and gloom, but when human behavior doesn't change... duh. 

A Washington Post team didn't just do amazing reporting for this interactive piece, "Written in the Wood," it also made it so visually engaging that one would think it might be so simple for humans not to digest they actually might do it. And, dare I add, do something about it. 

The story is about trees in the Sonora Desert in Arizona and how researchers are screaming what these trees are trying to tell us about the climate crisis as it happens.

​I don't hold out much hope for us, but I do hope you give it a read.