What I’m reading and watching
My top recommendations from the week!
Good morning! I hope you’re enjoying the weekend. Sunday is often a good time to catch up on interesting pieces of journalism you didn’t have time to read throughout the week — but there are so many articles and videos coming from so many directions, that you might not know where to start.
That’s why every Sunday, I help paid subscribers navigate through all the week’s best content, and recommend my favorite pieces of journalism for you to peruse before next week kicks off. Let’s dive in!
Of all the pieces written about the anniversary of the January 6th attack, I highly recommend this deeply reported Politico piece on Howard Liebengood, a Capitol Police officer who died by suicide on January 9, 2021, three days after defending the Capitol from the rioters.
Liebengood’s father worked in Congress when he was growing up; he loved the Capitol as an institution, but grew increasingly dispirited by political dysfunction and by the “extreme exhaustion” of working 12-hour shifts every day after the riot, without time to process the attack. Later, his death helped inspire bipartisan legislation to count law enforcement deaths by suicide as deaths in the line of duty.
The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson is one of the sharpest observer of trends roiling American society, and I read everything he writes. His latest, “The Anti-Social Century” (gift link) is a rich treatment of the loneliness crisis spreading across America and rewiring our “civic and psychic identity.” It will make you think.
A stat that stuck with me, via Ezra Klein: “The A.R.C.-A.G.I. test…was designed to compare the fluid intelligence of humans and A.I. systems, and proved hard for A.I. systems to mimic. By the middle of 2024, the highest score any A.I. model had posted was 5 percent. By the end of the year, the most powerful form of [open AI’s newest model] o3 scored 88 percent.”