| 1. As Pandemic Upends Teaching, Fewer Students Want to Pursue It “For some young people, doubts about entering the teaching work force amid the pandemic are straightforward: They fear that the job now entails increased risk.” 2. Why Readers Loved Beverly Cleary “Cleary didn’t start writing until she was in her early 30s. She’d talked about it for years and, in My Own Two Feet, describes an epiphany she had while working at Sather Gate Book Shop in Berkeley: ‘One morning during a lull, I picked up an easy-reading book and read, “Bow-wow. I like the green grass, said the puppy.” How ridiculous, I thought. No puppy I had known talked like that.’” 3. What Does Home Mean to Us? Not the Same Thing It Did Before the Pandemic “Our homes have been a refuge and a prison, often filled with too many people (and their newly adopted shelter dogs) doing things the spaces were never meant for, like school, work and physical activity. (The 19th-century rural model — the home as the site of leisure and production — has been reprised, although the activity may be happening in a cramped apartment instead of an airy farmhouse.)” 4. The Boom And Bust Of Artists On TikTok “When a minute-long video can attract fame and fortune, is it any surprise that young artists are bypassing art schools and student loans, quitting their survival jobs and pursuing careers as full-time artists on TikTok? But the app’s insatiable demand for content is also bending their aesthetics in unexpected ways. What happens when viewership plummets, copycats encroach and fans start dictating an artist’s taste? Fortunes can suddenly fizzle.” 5. Is a Long-Dismissed Forgery Actually the Oldest Known Biblical Manuscript? “Proving something is authentic is harder than proving it is fake.” 6. We Want Our Friends Back! (But Which Ones?) “Wall Street types often talk about a ‘flight to quality,’ the tendency of investors to abandon riskier, less established stocks for blue chips during a crisis. The same might be said about friendships during the pandemic, as we winnowed our portfolio of friends down to known quantities.” 7. Nicknames for These Trying Times “Levity is frequently used as a way to minimize the weight of events that feel too heavy to hold.” 8. Hooked “Multinational food companies, in gastro-Orwellian fashion, hook us by expertly tapping into our memories, introducing endless new varieties, and combining sensations and ingredients rarely seen together in nature like sugar and fat, brittle and soft, sweet and salty. None of us are immune.” 9. How to Collect Firewood “You need to know your way around a chain saw.” 10. Justice for the Negro Leagues Will Mean More Than Just Stats “At the height of the Negro leagues, despite the constant challenge of keeping them in operation, the quality of play was extraordinary. That Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, a young Satchel Paige and so many others were barred from playing official major-league games against major-league talent — and also barred from equal wages, barred from full public recognition, barred from earning a pension from Major League Baseball — is a great tragedy for the sport itself.” 11. The Beauty of 78.5 Million Followers “People with clout, from celebrities to social media stars to lifestyle influencers, are changing the way the sell works, exploiting the intimate relationships they have with their fans in a way that wasn’t possible before in the industry. And while most of their profits aren’t close to comparable to established brands, at the moment, beauty is big business.” 12. The Black Nerds Redefining the Culture “The tension is this: Black nerds unsettle the myth of a monolithic Blackness. In an American imagination that has historically stereotyped Black people as alternately ignorant and emotional or sexualized and cool, the nerd — smart and cerebral, unsexy and decidedly uncool — creates cognitive dissonance.” 13. The Language of Now “All of us, living under circumstances so inhospitable to genuine human connection, have adopted new modes of engagement; from that, there’s emerged a recognition that language need not be the exclusive provenance of sound or even text but of signs, too.”
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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