| 1. The Season of the Snitch “Throughout the past year, American society responded to political upheaval and biological peril by turning to an age-old tactic for keeping rule breakers in check: tattling.” 2. How Negro History Week Became Black History Month and Why It Matters Now “If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.” 3. A Long Year’s Unequal Toll “The pandemic can devastate one household and leave neighboring ones unscathed.” 4. The Campaign to Cancel Wokeness “The commitment to free speech seems to dissipate when the people who are being gagged are folks who are demanding racial justice.” 5. Heart and Soul of the Philly Sound “During the ’70s, 40 songs written by Gamble and Huff reached the R&B Top 10, including 14 No. 1s” 6. How to Get Your Family Through an Extreme Weather Event “As climate change accelerates, more electric grids may be crippled by unexpected weather events, putting people at risk of losing power.” 7. Paleo-Confederate “Calhoun believed that by maintaining a docile class of dependent laborers, slavery solved the chronic problem of conflict between workers and employers. In the wage-labor system of the North, exploited whites — ‘galled,’ as his disciple James Henry Hammond later put it, ‘by their degradation’ — would inevitably become a force of contention and raise the risk of revolution. (The historian Richard Hofstadter called Calhoun ‘the Marx of the Master Class.’) But in the South, the dignity and tranquillity of white people, rich and poor, were secured by the degradation of Black people. Especially as he grew older, Calhoun rationalized these shameless arguments with pseudoscientific claims that Blacks were the natural inferiors of whites.” 8. Kazuo Ishiguro Sees What the Future Is Doing to Us “One of the assumptions we have in liberal democracies is that human beings are intrinsically of value, that they have a value that is not conditional on what they can contribute to the larger society or to the economy or to some sort of common project.… If it starts to look like we can be reduced to the point where we’re just a bunch of algorithms, I think that seriously erodes the idea that each person is unique and therefore worthy of respect and care regardless of what they can or can’t contribute to our joint enterprise.”
Every week I, Matt Thomas, read the Sunday New York Times so you don’t have to, bringing the articles everyone’s talking about as well as hidden gems from America’s “paper of record” to your inbox. Reached your limit for free articles? Subscribe to the New York Times or see if you can access it through your school or local library. This newsletter is free, but if you’d like to support its production, you can buy me a coffee.  | 
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