#398: An interview with Sarah Zhang, author of “How Much Would You Pay to Save Your Cat’s Life?”

Let’s talk about it together on Sunday, June 25, 2:00 – 3:30 pm PT

Dear Loyal Readers,

Thank you for being here! I have three things for you this week, so let’s get right to it.

1️⃣ Article Club

This month we’ve been focusing on “How Much Would You Pay to Save Your Cat’s Life?” by Sarah Zhang. Originally published in The Atlantic last December, it’s a piece I highly urge that you read. Here’s why:

• It explores the rising trend of cat kidney transplants (expensive! controversial!)

• Ms. Zhang asks a provocative question and examines it from all sides

• Even though the article is about pets, it’s really about human relationships

Where’s the line between being a caring pet owner and doing too much? If you consider your pet a part of the family — or if you judge people who consider their pet part of the family — you’ll love this article.

Sign up for the discussion!

I hope you’ll sign up to discuss the piece on Sunday, June 25, 2:00 - 3:30 pm PT on Zoom. Article Clubbers are kind and thoughtful and welcoming. Our conversations are always in small, intimate, facilitated groups. Reach out if you have questions or if you want to participate in the conversation but are secretly shy or nervous.

2️⃣ My interview with Sarah Zhang

One of the best parts of Article Club (in addition to our monthly discussions) is the generosity of journalists and how they share their insights on the outstanding articles they write. Ms. Zhang (who has two cats herself!) was kind and thoughtful, and it was a delight to chat with her. We talked about a number of topics, including:

• why this topic — how much we are willing to spend on our pets — is fraught with judgment (what’s too much? too little?)

• how cat kidney transplants raise major ethical questions (namely: the kidney comes from another cat, who can’t consent)

• how pets serve an “in-between” role in our lives — how they’re not exactly our children, but they’re not exactly our property (and how that’s confusing)

I hope you take a listen! (You can click here or subscribe to The Highlighter Article Club on your favorite podcast player.)

Delia, who belongs to loyal reader Allison, enjoys sitting in boxes and looking adorable. Want your pet to appear here? hltr.co/pets

3️⃣ Issue #400 is coming! What do you think about all this?

We’re coming up on eight years and 400 issues of this newsletter, which is a mild marvel, and to celebrate the occasion, I’d love to hear from you. What has been your experience of reading The Highlighter Article Club or participating in the discussions? Do you have any kind words, or words or wisdom, or requests for the next eight years? Feel free to leave a comment or reply privately. Thank you!

Leave a comment

Thank you for reading this week’s issue. Hope you liked it. 😀

To our new subscriber Susan – I hope you find the newsletter a solid addition to your email inbox. To our long-time subscribers (July! Julio! Julia!), you’re pretty great, too. Loyal reader Brett, thank you for sharing the newsletter and getting the word out.

If you like The Highlighter Article Club, please help it grow. I really appreciate your support. Here are two ways you can help out:

📬 Invite your friends to subscribe. Know someone who’s kind, thoughtful, and loves to read? I’d love it if you encouraged them to subscribe. Word of mouth is by far the best way to strengthen our reading community. Thank you for spreading the word.

Share The Highlighter Article Club

❤️ Become a paid subscriber, like Susan, Courtney, and Sara (thank you!). You’ll join an esteemed group of readers who value the mission of The Highlighter Article Club. Plus you’ll receive surprise perks and prizes. It’s $5 a month or $36 a year.

On the other hand, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, please feel free to unsubscribe. See you next Thursday at 9:10 am PT.

#397: The Clarence Thomas Issue

Great articles and podcast episodes about a complex Supreme Court justice

Thank you for being here, Loyal Readers. If you’ve been a subscriber for a while, you know that I like to follow topics over time. In doing so — by reading tons of articles and then sharing them with you — I find that my knowledge deepens, or my thinking changes, or my empathy grows. Such is the case with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the focus of this week’s issue.

I used to know little about Justice Thomas. He was the justice who replaced the revered Thurgood Marshall on the Court and who called his confirmation hearings a “high-tech lynching.” He was the justice who never asked questions from the bench. For me there was nothing much to know, except that he was one of the most conservative justices on the Supreme Court.

But then came the allegations of corruption. And the allegations that his wife believed the last election was stolen and urged the former president not to concede. And the pressure for him to resign, or be impeached. These developments spurred me to read more articles and listen to more podcasts about Justice Thomas.

A weird thing happened when I did. It brought context and nuance. No, it didn’t lead me to condone his sexual harassment or appreciate his jurisprudence. But it did get me to understand a little bit more where he comes from and what makes him tick.

I hope you’ll do some reading and listening, too, and share this issue with friends.

Share

💬 ARTICLE CLUB: You’re invited to our discussion of “How Much Would You Pay to Save Your Cat’s Life?” on Sunday, June 25, 2:00 - 3:30 pm PT on Zoom. You don’t need to be a cat owner to participate! Author Sarah Zhang explores several illuminating and controversial issues in her piece, and even though the article is about animals, I think we’ll find that it’s also about the depths and limits of humanity. It’d be great to have you join Article Club this month. Please sign up below.

Sign up for the discussion

1️⃣ America’s Blackest Child

Most profiles of Clarence Thomas involve the reporter visiting Pin Point, the small town in Georgia where the Justice was born. Inevitably, no one wants to talk to the reporter, partly to protect the man, partly to shoo the outsider away. In this outstanding episode of Slow Burn, writer Joel Anderson at first gets the same treatment. Except there’s a difference: Justice Thomas’s mother Leola grants him an interview. What follows is an intimate recounting of the Justice’s childhood, his journey from Pin Point to Savannah to Kansas City, from wanting to become a priest to protesting the Vietnam War to memorizing the speeches of Malcolm X. For many people, Justice Thomas’s political transformation from his radical youth to reactionary adulthood makes no sense. But Mr. Anderson connects the dots and suggests that notions of self-reliance and Black nationalism may explain the Justice’s journey.

➡️ Listen to the podcast | Slow Burn | 56 minutes | Apple Podcasts | Transcript

2️⃣ Clarence X

“I was a bit of a radical, but that’s what happened back then,” Justice Thomas says in this episode of More Perfect, which includes archive clips of the Justice’s past speeches and interviews. “You were Black, things were changing, and we were very, very upset. I was tired of being in the minority, and I was tired of turning the other cheek.” Yes, Justice Thomas believed in the tenets of Malcolm X, but by no means did that make him a left-wing radical. In fact, the opposite was true. This podcast episode explores how Justice Thomas’s worldview is best explained as a response to racism by white liberals. He agreed with Malcolm X that white liberals are more dangerous than white conservatives. Black people are not a monolith, he argues, and should not be treated as such by the white establishment. As a result, Justice Thomas does not want to be lectured about voting rights or affirmative action. He says, “Any effort, policy or program that has, as a prerequisite, the acceptance of the notion that Blacks are inferior is a non-starter with me.”

➡️ Listen to the podcast | More Perfect | 60 minutes | Apple Podcasts | Transcript

Lucy, who belongs to VIP Erin, enjoys boxes. Want your pet to appear here? It’s easy: hltr.co/pets

3️⃣ Looking For Clarence Thomas

“You want to understand Clarence Thomas?” Pulitzer Prize winner Mitchell S. Jackson asks us this question in his extraordinary piece. His answer? Self-hatred. He continues, “Hatred directed not outward but inward, where it does the oppressor’s work for him. The man’s a human being, so his self-hatred couldn’t have been a conscious choice. But be that as it may, my concern for a single suffering human ain’t the purpose of this writing. My purpose is to try to understand Clarence Thomas not because of what the world did to him but because of what he’s doing to us.”

In other words, Mr. Jackson is not striving for empathy. Although he does the work to understand Justice Thomas more deeply, Mr. Jackson is not interested in making his subject more palatable. Instead, he addresses Justice Thomas head-on. “My god, dude, what the hell happened to you?” he asks.

➡️ Read the article | Esquire | 32 minutes | Paywall-free version

4️⃣ “The Risk Is That You Humanize Him”

Last October, Article Clubber Sarai and I got to interview Mitchell S. Jackson about “Looking for Clarence Thomas.” It was one of my favorite interviews we’ve done. Mr. Jackson was kind and gracious from the start. He laughed that I insisted on calling him Mr. Jackson. And right from the first question, everything felt natural, like we were talking to a friend rather than to a famous writer whose prose is changing the canon (Sarai’s words, and I agree!) of longform nonfiction.

We talked about a number of topics, including:

• how he didn’t want to write about Clarence Thomas at first

• how his trip to Pin Point inspired the piece’s opening

• how James Baldwin’s writing helped him understand Mr. Thomas, and

• how Mr. Thomas is a man of deep contradictions, whose time on the Supreme Court has caused “dramatically malevolent things to wide swaths of Americans”

Most of all, though, Mr. Jackson talked about the craft of writing, how if he’s going to spend months on a feature story, he wants to push himself, he wants to break convention, he wants to do something new with form.

I’m very much concerned with the sentence. I’m almost concerned with the sentence over the story. And so the benefit of writing nonfiction is that, You don’t have to invent the scenes, but the kind of ethos of wanting to make beautiful sentences, that’s really what I want to do.

➡️ Listen to the podcast | Article Club | Apple Podcasts | 29 minutes

Thank you for reading this week’s issue. Hope you liked it. 😀

To our 7 new subscribers – including Sherese, Vinci, Megan, Emily, Ale, Suzanne, and Bonnie — I hope you find the newsletter a solid addition to your email inbox. To our long-time subscribers (Irene! Ira! Ivan!), you’re pretty great, too. Loyal reader Angelica, thank you for sharing the newsletter and getting the word out.

If you like The Highlighter Article Club, please help it grow. I really appreciate your support. Here are two ways you can help out:

📬 Invite your friends to subscribe. Know someone who’s kind, thoughtful, and loves to read? I’d love it if you encouraged them to subscribe. Word of mouth is by far the best way to strengthen our reading community. Thank you for spreading the word.

Share The Highlighter Article Club

❤️ Become a paid subscriber, like Mike (thank you!). You’ll join an esteemed group of readers who value the mission of The Highlighter Article Club. Plus you’ll receive surprise perks and prizes. It’s $5 a month or $36 a year.

On the other hand, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, please feel free to unsubscribe. See you next Thursday at 9:10 am PT.

#396: Cat Kidney Transplants

Sign up to discuss Sarah Zhang’s “How Much Would You Pay to Save Your Cat’s Life?”

Happy June, loyal readers. I’m happy to announce that this month, we’ll be reading and discussing “How Much Would You Pay to Save Your Cat’s Life?” by Sarah Zhang. It was published in The Atlantic last December. I hope you’ll join us.

I’m personally more a dog person, but I know many cat people (not necessarily “Cat People”), and one benefit of being a cat person is that you can prolong your cat’s life with a $15,000 kidney transplant. But should you?

That’s the question Ms. Zhang answers in this funny-yet-serious article on the American trend of loving our pets (and investing in them) like our human children — especially among those of us who don’t have human children, an ever-growing group. Where’s the line between being a caring cat owner and doing too much? Is it maybe when you force another cat to give up their kidney without their consent?

Read the article

Here’s a paywall-safe version, just in case.

Our reading community has been resoundingly pro-pet since its inception, but this will be the first time we focus on a pet-related article. And a controversial one, at that. So let’s bring it on, shall we?

I’d love it if you read the article and joined our discussion on June 25. If you’re interested, this is how things will go:

• This week, we’ll read the article

• Next week, we’ll annotate the article as a group

• The following week, we’ll hear from Ms. Zhang in a podcast interview

• On Sunday, June 25, 2:00 - 3:30 pm PT, we’ll discuss the article on Zoom.

Sign up for the discussion on June 25

If this will be your first time participating in Article Club, I’m 100% sure you’ll find that you’ll feel welcome. We’re a kind, thoughtful reading community. Feel free to reach out with all of your questions.

If you’re agnostic or perhaps even antipathetic about pets, you might need a little encouragement to dive into this 29-minute piece. Never fear, fellow Article Clubber Melinda and I are here to pump up the article and introduce you to all the ethical issues it raises. (There are many.) Here’s our mini-podcast episode, with plenty of banter interspersed with serious talk — hope you take a listen. Warning: There are minor spoilers.

1.5×

0:00

-18:57

Also exciting, as with all Article Club monthly selections, the author will be participating in the festivities, recording a podcast episode for your listening pleasure. Ms. Zhang is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers health and science. Before joining the magazine in 2016, she was a staff writer at WIRED, and her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Nature, and Discover, among other publications. Ms. Zhang is the recipient of an American Association for the Advancement of Science Kavli Science Journalism Award and was a finalist for the Livingston Awards. She studied neurobiology at Harvard University.

So what do you think? Interested in reading the article and joining our discussion this month? If you’re still a maybe, here are a few questions for you. If you’re a yes to one or more of them, you‘re a great candidate.

• Do you find yourself showing pictures of your pet to your coworkers?

• Do you judge your coworkers when they show you pictures of their pet?

• Do you consider your pet part of your family?

• Does it bother you when your friend considers their pet part of their family?

• Would you find joy meeting Fizzy (below) at our discussion on June 25?

Sign up for the discussion on June 25

Fizzy, who belongs to VIP Melinda, is a seven-year old fluff ball whose passions include napping in kitchen cabinets, stealing bathrobe belts to claim as new toys, and birdwatching (so much so this activity has been deemed her personal Netflix). Want your cat to appear this month in the newsletter? hltr.co/pets

Thank you for reading this week’s issue. Hope you liked it. 😀

To our 7 new subscribers – including Veronica, Lorena, Jenna, Melissa, and Mark — I hope you find the newsletter a solid addition to your email inbox. To our long-time subscribers (Harry! Henry! Hanya!), you’re pretty great, too. Loyal reader Michelle, thank you for sharing the newsletter and getting the word out.

If you like The Highlighter Article Club, please help it grow. I really appreciate your support. Here are two ways you can help out:

📬 Invite your friends to subscribe. Know someone who’s kind, thoughtful, and loves to read? I’d love it if you encouraged them to subscribe. Word of mouth is by far the best way to strengthen our reading community. Thank you for spreading the word.

Share The Highlighter Article Club

❤️ Become a paid subscriber, like Lorena (thank you!). You’ll join an esteemed group of readers who value the mission of The Highlighter Article Club. Plus you’ll receive surprise perks and prizes. It’s $5 a month or $36 a year.

On the other hand, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, please feel free to unsubscribe. See you next Thursday at 9:10 am PT (and see you tonight at HHH)!

#395: Scared of School

Articles on school avoidance, LGBTQ+ discrimination, and cow milk

Happy Thursday, Loyal Readers. Thank you for being here.

This week’s issue features three articles about education. Which got me thinking: Many of you are educators, and so am I, and when this newsletter launched nearly eight years ago, the majority of articles I highlighted were education-related. Now the reverse is true: I’m focusing much more on race and culture, rather than education. I could get into a big explanation as to why this is, but I’m much more interested in what you have to say about this subject. What do you think?

And now, on to this week’s selections. The lead article explores the causes and impact of school avoidance, which has skyrocketed since the pandemic. The second piece reports on the increase of anti-LGBTQ verbal harassment, challenging the assumption that progressive states are providing a safer environment than “Don’t Say Gay” states. Rounding out this week’s newsletter is a story about a young woman who is battling her school administration’s policy on cow milk and fighting for her right to free speech. Even though all three articles discuss tough topics, they’re not all doom and gloom. You’ll find glimmers of hope and good people striving to make a difference. Hope you like the articles — let me know if you do!

💬 HIGHLIGHTER HAPPY HOUR: You’re invited to HHH #20 at Room 389 in Oakland next Thursday, June 1, beginning at 5:30 pm. There are two free tickets left. HHH is a joyous informal gathering of kind, thoughtful members of our reading community. You’re one of them, so it’d be great to see you there. Don’t worry: There isn’t a quiz about whether you’ve read all the articles. Plus there are prizes galore.

Get your ticket to HHH!

1️⃣ The Rise of School Avoidance

Jayne Demsky didn’t know what was going on with her son. No matter what she did, he didn’t want to go to school. The anxiety was too much. At first it was one day here and there. But then the days became more frequent. Pretty soon it was weeks, then months. “I would describe it as hell,” she said.

If you’re an educator, you know what I’m talking about. Ever since the pandemic, more and more students are experiencing school avoidance. “It’s scary because it’s not voluntary at all. It’s just kind of happening to you,” one student said. I’ll sit in the car and tell myself to go in, but my body won’t carry me inside.”

Journalist Adrianna Rodriguez does a good job highlighting the complexities of school avoidance. For instance, it’s not easily diagnosed, it’s not the same thing as anxiety, each kid’s experience is different, and schools are still learning to deal with it. I appreciated learning that anxiety may not necessarily be the cause but rather the effect of school avoidance, and the most important time to intervene is right at the beginning, before the problem festers and deepens.

➡️ Read the article | USA Today | 11 minutes

Susu, who belongs to VIP Camille, loves to sneak up on her brother Zenny and take naps in sunny places. She also believes all boxes are worth exploring. Want your pet to appear in the newsletter? hltr.co/pets

2️⃣ Scared of School

It’s easy to blame Ron DeSantis for making things hard for LGBTQ kids in schools. But the problem is nationwide, according to this detailed report by GLSEN and The Trevor Project, which shows that anti-gay and anti-trans harassment and bullying are not limited to the “Don’t Say Gay” states. “There is no state in the nation,” survey data concluded, “where fewer than 93% of LGBTQ students reported hearing homophobic and transphobic slurs in school.” The greatest increase in slurs come from adults: for example, up 400% in California and 600% in Massachusetts from 2019 to 2021. Why is this happening? The hundreds of state bills stripping protections from LGBTQ youth certainly do not help. But the authors also suggest that while American adults are becoming more accepting of queerness in general, they want to make sure their kids stay pure and straight.

➡️ Read the article | The 74 | 9 minutes

3️⃣ Milk Shake-Up

Marielle Williamson goes to high school in Los Angeles and thinks cow milk is gross. She and her friends prefer plant-based milk. So does Generation Z as a whole; they drink 20 percent less liquid milk than the national average. So do more Americans in general; 42 percent of households bought plant-based milk in 2021. Two powerful groups, though, are not getting the memo: Big Dairy and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Schools must offer cow milk in cafeterias to get federal funding, so when Marianne asked to distribute literature to promote the health benefits of plant-based milk, school administrators said sure, but only if she also shared pro-dairy messages. Marianne said no way, and now she’s suing. (I think she’s going to win.)

➡️ Read the article | Washington Post | 10 minutes

+ The Highlighter has been following controversial beverages for years. We declared that juice is bad for you in 2017. Same thing with smoothies, sorry, in 2016.

Thank you for reading this week’s issue. Hope you liked it. 😀

To our 5 new subscribers – including Charlotte, Elainea, and Gerald — I hope you find the newsletter a solid addition to your email inbox. To our long-time subscribers (Gary! Gene! Gena!), you’re pretty great, too. Loyal reader Lorraine, thank you for sharing the newsletter and getting the word out.

If you like The Highlighter Article Club, please help it grow. I really appreciate your support. Here are two ways you can help out:

📬 Invite your friends to subscribe. Know someone who’s kind, thoughtful, and loves to read? I’d love it if you encouraged them to subscribe. Word of mouth is by far the best way to strengthen our reading community. Thank you for spreading the word.

Share The Highlighter Article Club

❤️ Become a paid subscriber, like Jake (thank you!). You’ll join an esteemed group of readers who value the mission of The Highlighter Article Club. Plus you’ll receive surprise perks and prizes. It’s $5 a month or $36 a year.

On the other hand, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, please feel free to unsubscribe. See you next Thursday at 9:10 am PT!

#394: Amor Eterno

Also: Come join us at Highlighter Happy Hour in Oakland on June 1

I still remember the school shooting in 1989 at an elementary school in Stockton. It is because my Aunt Bernice was a teacher there. She survived, but five of her students did not. It was one of the first school shootings in our country.

I also remember the Columbine shooting in 1999. I was in my second year of teaching. My students wanted to talk about it, to make sense of the horror. I don’t remember saying anything too helpful. But I do remember thinking the tragedy was an anomaly.

Now there are so many mass shootings happening so often, one after another, that we have to rely on Internet databases to keep track of them. Certainly we don’t have the brain or heart space to process them all. It’s easier to avoid them and go about our day. It’s easier to stay numb and desensitized. This certainly has happened to me.

But every once in a while, there’s an article about gun violence that sticks out and demands my attention. “Amor Eterno,” which leads this week’s issue, is one such article. It’s about Kimberly Mata-Rubio, who lost her 10-year-old daughter Lexi last year in Uvalde. It won’t be easy to read. It won’t be easy to finish. But I hope you’ll read it. If you’re moved, I hope you’ll share it.

💬 HIGHLIGHTER HAPPY HOUR: You’re invited to HHH #20 at Room 389 in Oakland on Thursday, June 1, beginning at 5:30 pm. There are five free tickets left. HHH is a joyous informal gathering of kind, thoughtful members of our reading community. You’re one of them, so it’d be great to see you there. Don’t worry: There isn’t a quiz about whether you’ve read all the articles. Plus there are prizes galore.

Get your ticket to HHH!

1️⃣ Amor Eterno

Before her daughter Lexi was killed last year in Uvalde, Kimberly Mata-Rubio was a shy, soft-spoken woman who took history classes at the local university and worked part-time at the local newspaper. She preferred staying in the background.

No more. Not after the massacre. Not after Texas lawmakers offered thoughts and prayers, but no laws. Not after Senator Ted Cruz said guns weren’t the issue. No, Ms. Mata-Rubio will not rest until there is a ban on all assault rifles and high-capacity magazines. “I’ll fight until I have nothing left to give,” she says.

This is not an easy story to read. And I’m sure it wasn’t an easy story to write. But in the hands of award-winning feature writer Skip Hollandsworth, not a stranger to writing about tragedy, it’s a story that breaks through our wish to stay distant.

“When 19 children and 2 teachers are killed in a town of 15,000,” he writes, “the math works like this: You either loved one of the victims or you know someone who loved one of the victims — you know an aunt, a cousin, a close family friend. You know someone who tucked them into bed the night before, who argued with them about brushing their teeth, who told them to keep it down, who read them a story or maybe a poem and said goodnight, and then good morning, and then goodbye.”

➡️ Read the article | Texas Monthly | 29 minutes

Zenny, who is one-eyed and beautiful, belongs to VIP Camille and loves to eat, nap, receive warm cuddles, and wake up early. Want your pet to appear here? hltr.co/pets

2️⃣ American Terror: Remembering Tulsa

Did you learn about the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 in school? I certainly didn’t — not in my AP U.S. History class when I was a junior in high school, and not even at UC Berkeley, where I majored in history. The first time I heard about it, in 2004, I was preparing to teach American history to my students in San Francisco. It’s unconscionable, but it’s also no surprise. In this well-written account, Tim Madigan clearly and unflinchingly recounts what happened the morning of June 1, 1921, when white terrorists destroyed the the Greenwood district of Tulsa, known then as the “Negro Wall Street of America.” The white mob killed 300 Black people and left another 10,000 Black people homeless. It burned 1,100 homes and flattened 35 square blocks of restaurants, drugstores, grocery stores, churches, the hospital, the public library, and the school. Especially powerful are Mr. Madigan’s interviews with survivors of the massacre, like Eldoris McCondichie, who was 9 years old.

➡️ Read the article | Smithsonian Magazine | 31 minutes

3️⃣ Not All Native Americans Are Leftist Political Activists

Author of the best-selling novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie is now trying to reconstruct his career after apologizing for sexually harassing women in 2018. Now his work is diminished, but his writing is still provocative to read. In this essay, Mr. Alexie takes issue with the term BIPOC, arguing that progressives (who likely aren’t Native Americans) have unwittingly homogenized the diversity of American Indians in an effort to combat white supremacy.

I understand that the “I” in BIPOC is meant to convey pride and solidarity. And I agree with that mission. That mission is essential. But I think that “indigenous,” as politically employed, has instead become a word that restricts the meaning of what it is to be an Indian. I think it has created a national and international illusion that that only proper way to be an Indian, or to be an Indian at all, is to be an Indian who is a leftist political activist.

➡️ Read the article | Sherman Alexie: A Literary Newsletter | 10 minutes

Thank you for reading this week’s issue. Hope you liked it. 😀

To our 6 new subscribers – Osa, Tim, Garik, Jacob, Isabelle, and Roland — I hope you find the newsletter a solid addition to your email inbox. To our long-time subscribers (Fern! Fred! Freida!), you’re pretty great, too. Loyal reader Kim, thank you for sharing the newsletter and getting the word out.

If you like The Highlighter Article Club, please help it grow. I really appreciate your support. Here are two ways you can help out:

📬 Invite your friends to subscribe. Know someone who’s kind, thoughtful, and loves to read? I’d love it if you encouraged them to subscribe. Word of mouth is by far the best way to strengthen our reading community. Thank you for spreading the word.

Share The Highlighter Article Club

❤️ Become a paid subscriber, like Leah (thank you!). You’ll join an esteemed group of readers who value the mission of The Highlighter Article Club. Plus you’ll receive surprise perks and prizes. It’s $5 a month or $36 a year.

On the other hand, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, please feel free to unsubscribe. See you next Thursday at 9:10 am PT!

#393: An interview with Emily Bazelon, author of “Why is Affirmative Action in Peril?”

Please join our discussion on Sunday, May 21, 2:00 - 3:30 pm PT

Dear Loyal Readers,

Thank you for being here! I have four things for you this week, so let’s get right to it.

1️⃣ Article Club

This month we’ve been focusing on “Why is Affirmative Action in Peril?” by Emily Bazelon. It’s a piece I highly recommend that you read. Here’s why:

• The Supreme Court will likely strike down affirmative action next month

• This article expertly explains why

• Ms. Bazelon — staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, senior research fellow at Yale Law School, and co-host of Slate’s Political Gabfest — knows how to write and knows what she’s talking about

Instead of focusing on the current politics of the Court, Ms. Bazelon takes us back in time, helping us understand the history of affirmative action through a close study of the Bakke decision and the legal strategy of attorney Archibald Cox — which won the case but ultimately left affirmative action vulnerable.

Sign up for the discussion!

I hope you’ll sign up to discuss the article on Sunday, May 21, 2:00 - 3:30 pm PT on Zoom. Article Clubbers are kind and thoughtful and welcoming. Our conversations are always in small, intimate, facilitated groups. Reach out if you have questions or if you want to participate in the conversation but are secretly shy or nervous.

2️⃣ My interview with Ms. Bazelon

I can’t stop thinking about how much fun it was to chat with Ms. Bazelon. She was a total pro: generous, thoughtful, and deeply knowledgeable. (My friends have told me to stop gushing.) We talked about a number of topics, including:

• how Mr. Cox cobbled together a victory by wooing a segregationist justice

• how the justices have wildly different interpretations of the 14th Amendment

• how white people have a very short amount of patience for thinking about the harms of race discrimination

There is a fundamental American tension between prizing individual achievement and promoting the collective spirit of the nation’s egalitarian promise, between the call to be colorblind and the call not to be blind to racism.

I hope you take a listen! (You can click the player at the top or subscribe to The Highlighter Article Club on your favorite podcast player.)

3️⃣ Article Club author Eli Saslow wins another Pulitzer Prize

When I spoke with Eli Saslow last November about “An American Education,” I asked him how it felt to win a Pulitzer Prize. He shared his complex feelings: both that he was “hugely gratified” for the acknowledgment but also “a little conflicted” given that he writes about people’s worst moments and our country’s deepest problems.

I appreciated the thoughtfulness of that answer, and I have continued recommending Mr. Saslow’s work to my colleagues. For those reasons and more, I was delighted to hear that he won yet another Pulitzer Prize this week. Here’s a clip:

Congratulations, Mr. Saslow! You are further evidence proving my bold claim — that writers who participate in Article Club go on to win Pulitzers. My other evidence? Mitchell S. Jackson. (Sadly, I can’t take credit for Kathryn Schulz or Stephanie McCrummen; they won their Pulitzers beforehand.)

Read "An American Education"

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4️⃣ Meet other thoughtful readers at HHH on June 1

Highlighter Happy Hour has been one of the most joyful ways for us to gather, connect, and celebrate our reading community. We’re heading into the 20th HHH! Can you believe it?

We’ll be meeting up at Room 389 in Oakland on June 1 beginning at 5:30.

If you live or work not too far from Oakland, it’d be great to see you there. If you get a free ticket, you’ll get a prize at the door. And just in case you’re nervous: Yes, we do chat about the articles — but only sometimes, and usually just tangentially.

Get your free ticket

Thank you for reading this week’s issue and for listening to the interview. Hope you liked it. 😀

If you like The Highlighter Article Club, please help it grow. I really appreciate your support. Here are two ways you can help out:

📬 Invite your friends to subscribe. Know someone who’s kind, thoughtful, and loves to read? I’d love it if you encouraged them to subscribe. Word of mouth is by far the best way to strengthen our reading community. Thank you for spreading the word.

Share The Highlighter Article Club

❤️ Become a paid subscriber, like Brad (thank you!). You’ll join an esteemed group of readers who value the mission of The Highlighter Article Club. Plus you’ll receive surprise perks and prizes. It’s $5 a month or $36 a year.

On the other hand, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, please feel free to unsubscribe. See you next Thursday at 9:10 am PT!

#392: We Are What We Read

A message of gratitude, an invitation, plus great articles on reading

Dear Loyal Readers,

This week we reached 1,000 subscribers. Thank you for supporting me, this newsletter, and our reading community. You may be like Ben, who subscribed long ago. Or you may be like Tim, who subscribed this week. Or you may be somewhere in between. No matter how long you’ve been here, I’m grateful. Thank you for trusting me to send you articles every Thursday on race, education, and culture.

Almost eight years ago, I launched this newsletter with a bold belief that I still hold today: If we read more of the best stuff, and if we connect with people about what we’re reading, then we might gain the knowledge and empathy to make ourselves a better world.

Some may say this was (and is) a naïve belief. Some may go further, calling it absurd. If you have ever felt this way, you’re not alone. I’ve felt this way, too.

After all, it seems like lately, no matter which way I turn, I’m hearing grim news: that nobody reads anymore, that our children don’t know how to read, that we’re growing more lonely and isolated, and there’s little we can do to turn things around.

But we can do things. And we are doing things. We’re building a kind, thoughtful reading community. Together we’re reading, annotating, and discussing the highest quality articles from a variety of publications. People from across the country who otherwise do not know each other are coming together to have moving conversations about the critical issues of our time. It’s happening, thanks to all of you.

✏️ Could we (re)introduce ourselves? I’d like that. Who are you and why do you read? What have you gotten out of The Highlighter Article Club (or what do you hope to get out of it)?

Leave a comment

Emily Bazelon

This Month at Article Club

This month, I warmly invite you to read, annotate, and discuss “Why Is Affirmative Action in Peril?” as part of Article Club. Written by Emily Bazelon and published in The New York Times Magazine, the piece explores why the Supreme Court will most likely strike down affirmative action next month. Instead of focusing on the current cases before the Court, however, Ms. Bazelon instead explains the history of affirmative action and analyzes the legal precedent set in Regents v. Bakke, the 1978 decision that banned racial quotas but stated that colleges may use race as a factor in admissions to advance the goal of diversity. Nearly 50 years later, Ms. Bazelon writes, today’s much more conservative court may find that affirmative action’s diversity rationale may be similar to abortion’s privacy rationale — way too flimsy to survive.

Are you interested? If so, sign up for our discussion on Sunday, May 21, 2:00 - 3:30 pm PT. If this will be your first time participating in Article Club, I’m 100% sure you’ll find that you’ll feel welcome. We’re a kind, thoughtful reading community. Feel free to hit reply and ask me all your questions.

Sign up for the discussion

Judy, who belongs to loyal readers Christsna and Joel, likes sitting in the sun, snuggling, and running with her buddy Johnny Cash. Want your pet to appear in The Highlighter? hltr.co/pets

This Week’s Articles

This week’s articles center on the theme of reading — the role of reading in our lives, why it’s important, how we’re shaped by reading, and whether we’re teaching our young people how to read wrong. Here they are, hope you enjoy them.

A Pilgrimage for Book People • by Charlie Becker • Castles in the Sky • 20 min
Charlie Becker grew up in Houston with a dad who was a book person. What this meant was that every summer, his dad would load the kids in the van and drive 18 miles to Chicago in order to participate in the annual Brandeis Book Sale. This article is not only a poignant and nostalgic memoir of Mr. Becker’s childhood. It’s also a love letter to reading and an ode to the power of books.

What separates book people from others is that they regard a book as more than the sum of its parts. Once the words are down and the book is printed, something special happens, and the book ascends to a new dimension of meaning. It would be a mistake to think of book people simply as enthusiasts, the way you would other collectors or hobbyists. Particularly with the type of book person who showed up to Brandeis, there are better words to describe them: acolytes, adherents, devotees, fanatics.

You Are What You Read • by Maryanne Wolf • Tufts Magazine • 15 min
Reading is an amazing, fantastical thing, Prof. Wolf writes in this outstanding essay. Not only does reading let us “leave our own consciousness,” it also allows us to “try on, identify with, and even enter for a brief time the wholly different perspective of someone else.” But how does this all happen? Remember, humans were never meant to read. Reading isn’t an innate human skill, like speaking. You gotta give credit to our brains for their plastic ability to build neural networks, Prof. Wolf argues, as she takes us through the science of it all.

Words on the Brain • by Bartholomew Pawlik • Lateral • 20 min
Read nonfiction if you want to learn about the world and build knowledge of systems so that you can act to change them. But if you want to grow your empathy, this article explains, novels are the way to go. Fiction helps us construct a “theory of mind,” or the ability to understand others and infer their beliefs and desires. Cognitive pyschologist Keith Oatley says that reading fiction is like using a flight simulator for life. We can try on new situations, take on perspectives, and rehearse different approaches without also suffering the potentially negative consequences of the real world.

Teaching the Biliterate Brain • by Holly Korbey • MIT Tech Review • 15 min
Step inside an English classroom today and more likely than not you’ll observe students staring at a Chromebook screen rather burying their noses in books. This trend, which accelerated during the pandemic, has not abated. Journalist Holly Korbey investigates research demonstrating that reading on screens leads to worse comprehension than reading in print. But instead of telling teachers to shun computers altogether, she takes a measured approach, relying on nuanced suggestions by cognitive scientists (like Prof. Wolf).

Thank you for reading this week’s issue.

If you like The Highlighter Article Club, please help it grow. I really appreciate your support. Here are two ways you can help out:

📬 Invite your friends to subscribe. Know someone who’s kind, thoughtful, and loves to read? I’d love it if you encouraged them to subscribe. Word of mouth is by far the best way to strengthen our reading community. Thank you for spreading the word.

Share The Highlighter Article Club

❤️ Become a paid subscriber, like Jenn (thank you!). You’ll join an esteemed group of readers who value the mission of The Highlighter Article Club. Plus you’ll receive surprise perks and prizes. It’s $5 a month or $36 a year.

On the other hand, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, please feel free to unsubscribe. See you next Thursday at 9:10 am PT!

#391: It’s almost May! This month, let’s read and discuss “Why Is Affirmative Action In Peril?”

#391: It’s almost May! This month, let’s read and discuss “Why Is Affirmative Action In Peril?”

Happy Thursday and happy almost-May, loyal readers. I’m very happy to announce that this upcoming month, we’ll be reading and discussing “Why Is Affirmative Action In Peril?” by Emily Bazelon.

You may know that the Supreme Court will be ruling on two affirmative action cases in June. It’s a big deal, given the current composition of the Court. Unless one of the conservative justices changes their mind, affirmative action might be dead.

I deeply appreciated Ms. Bazelon’s article because she offers context for the upcoming decisions. Instead of discussing the current cases in detail, Ms. Bazelon explains the history of affirmative action and tells the story of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the 1978 landmark decision that still serves as legal precedent.

Today’s issue is a three-parter. You get:

• an introduction to this month’s article

• a podcast episode with me and fellow Article Clubber Melinda, where we share why we liked the article so much

• an invitation to join this month’s discussion on May 21

Before that, though — a little bit about the author: Ms. Bazelon is a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine and is the Truman Capote Fellow for Creative Writing and Law at Yale Law School. She is also the author of Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the current-interest category, and of the national best-seller Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy. She is a co-host of Slate’s Political Gabfest, a weekly podcast. Ms. Bazelon has generously agreed to record a podcast interview.

I hope you’ll read the article and join our discussion on Sunday, May 21, at 2 pm PT. You can find out more information about the article and discussion below.

Why Is Affirmative Action In Peril?

The Supreme Court most likely will strike down affirmative action in June. This article explains why. According to journalist and law lecturer Emily Bazelon, it all comes down to understanding Regents v. Bakke, the 1978 decision that banned racial quotas but preserved affirmative action. In order to lure enough justices, lawyer Archibald Cox devised a strategy that centered the benefits of diversity, rather than the responsibility of reparations, as the reason affirmative action should continue. In other words: Let’s forget that the 14th Amendment’s purpose was to give equal rights to Black Americans. In the short term, the tactic worked. The Court sided with Mr. Cox 5-4, and affirmative action has endured despite many challenges, including in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) and Fisher v. Texas (2016). But now with a much more conservative court, Ms. Bazelon suggests that affirmative action’s “diversity” rationale may be similar to abortion’s “privacy” rationale — way too flimsy to survive. (35 min)

Read the article

This month, I warmly invite you to read, annotate, and discuss “Why Is Affirmative Action in Peril?” as part of Article Club.

If you’re interested, this how things will go:

• This week, we’ll read the article

• Next week, we’ll annotate the article as a group

• The following week, we’ll hear from Ms. Bazelon in a podcast interview

• On Sunday, May 21, 2:00 - 3:30 pm PT, we’ll discuss the article on Zoom.

Sign up for the discussion

If this will be your first time participating in Article Club, I’m 100% sure you’ll find that you’ll feel welcome. We’re a kind, thoughtful reading community. Feel free to reach out with all of your questions.

Thank you for reading this week’s issue. Hope you liked it. 😀

To our 6 new subscribers – including Montessa, Eric, Cory, Lisa, and Josette — I hope you find the newsletter a solid addition to your email inbox. To our long-time subscribers (Fern! Fred! Faith!), you’re pretty great, too. Loyal reader Kathy, thank you for sharing the newsletter and getting the word out.

If you like The Highlighter Article Club, please help it grow. I really appreciate your support. Here are two ways you can help out:

❤️ Become a paid subscriber, like Xavier (thank you!). You’ll join an esteemed group of readers who value the mission of The Highlighter Article Club. Plus you’ll receive surprise perks and prizes. It’s $5 a month or $36 a year.

📬 Invite your friends to subscribe. Know someone who’s kind, thoughtful, and loves to read? I’d love it if you encouraged them to subscribe. Word of mouth is by far the best way to strengthen our reading community. Thank you for spreading the word.

Share The Highlighter Article Club

☕️ Buy me a coffee. If subscriptions (or commitments in general) stress you out, you can share your gratitude by making a one-time donation. Coffee helps me find the best articles and supports my overall reading stamina.

Buy me a coffee

On the other hand, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, please feel free to unsubscribe. See you next Thursday at 9:10 am PT!

#390: We’re No Good Alone

3 excellent articles on the detriments of isolation and the benefits of community

We have a neighbor who likes to ring our doorbell from time to time. She wants to say hi, chat a bit, maybe hang out. My introverted self urges me to pretend I’m not home. But my sense of obligation gets me to the door — and more often that not, I appreciate our neighbor’s invitation to connect.

The other day at work, I asked my younger colleagues about this phenomenon. First they looked at me funny. Then they said two things:

• Really, this happens? I thought it happened only on old TV shows.

• No way would I want this to happen.

We’ve all read about the trends: We’re spending more time alone. We’re lost in our phones. We have fewer friends now. As we get older, we grow lonelier.

Today’s issue challenges us to shun what feels natural (i.e., seeking solitude, putting ourselves first, maintaining boundaries, practicing self care) and to find ways to participate in community. The lead article, “No Good Alone,” sets the stage, offering a thoughtful perspective as to why “isolation is easy” and “living is hard.” Then come two outstanding pieces — the first about a mother who loves her gay son, the second about a self-identified redneck who runs a mutual aid auto shop — who buck the trend, choosing to do the right thing over the easy thing.

Hope you enjoy. If an article moved you, please leave a comment.

Leave a comment

💬 ARTICLE CLUB: This month we’re discussing “The Sunset,” by Lisa Bubert. It’s about a young woman who works at a nursing home. We may love our grandparents, Ms. Bubert writes, but we as a society certainly do not love our old people. I invite you to join our conversation on Sunday, April 30, 2:00 - 3:30 pm PT. Ms. Bubert will be joining us! Here’s more information. Hope you sign up.

Sign up for the discussion

1️⃣ No Good Alone

You don’t owe anyone anything. Focus on yourself. Protect your peace. Set up a boundary. We’re hearing these messages everywhere — on our social media, from our friends and colleagues, and from our therapists. In this thoughtful essay, Rayne Fisher-Quann reflects on her own experience, acknowledging that she, too, ghosts friends and otherwise isolates herself. But she understands that this behavior is counterproductive. She writes:

The social standard this culture offers is one of controlled, placated solitude. Its narrative often insists that you’re surrounded by toxic people who are trying to hurt you, and the only way to ever become the person you’re meant to be is to cut them all off, retreat into a high-gloss cocoon of talk therapy and Notion templates, and emerge a non-emotive butterfly who will surely attract the relationships you’ve always deserved — relationships with other “healed” people, who don’t hurt you or depend on you or force you to feel difficult, taxing emotions.

Ms. Fisher-Quann is especially critical of therapy — not because she doesn’t believe in its benefits, but rather because of people’s tendency to consider therapy “as a kind of resume-builder for the self,” or a necessary requirement for personal wellness, and certainly as a prerequisite for dating and friendship. Sure, we don’t want to burden our friends with the emotional labor of our problems, she writes, but life is complex. We can either avoid life’s messiness all alone, or we can get out there and engage with actual real (flawed) people. She writes, “To grow beside a friend or lover, knowing that you will poke and prod at each other as you take shape but unafraid of the resulting scar tissue — this is the good stuff.”

➡️ Read the article | Internet Princess | 13 minutes

Kite, who belongs to VIP Daniel, enjoys smelling things, drinking from mud puddles, and rolling in mulch piles. Want your pet to appear here? hltr.co/pets

2️⃣ One Mother’s Love For Her Son

When her son came out to her in 1968, Jeanne Manford had never known anyone who was gay. At the time, same-sex attraction was a mental illness. Forty-nine states criminalized homosexuality. There were no openly gay politicians, actors, athletes, or musicians. Parents typically disowned their gay children or pretended their queerness didn’t exist. But not for a moment did Ms. Manford think anything was wrong with her son. Instead, she loved him and fought for him — at the Christopher Street Liberation Day March, and when he was arrested at a gay-rights rally, and when he found out he was HIV positive. Along the way, Ms. Manford also wanted other parents to accept their queer children, and so she founded PFLAG, now in its 50th year.

There was an undercurrent to this article that I appreciated. Here was a woman whose political power as a parent resulted from loving her son. She didn’t yell at school board meetings, hoping to ban other children’s books or censor other teacher’s lessons. She didn’t care what other parents thought of her. “She wouldn’t put up with this nonsense,” President Obama said. Simple as that.

➡️ Read the article | The New Yorker | 24 minutes

+ Another reason to read this article is that Kathryn Schulz wrote it. She’s the author of “When Things Go Missing,” one of my all-time favorites, plus “The Really Big One,” which won the Pulitzer Prize. Ms. Schulz generously participated in Article Club last year. Here’s her interview.

3️⃣ The Communist Auto Repair Shop In Alabama

Zac Henson lives in Alabama, wears a trucker hat, plays the banjo, and sports a long Rasputin beard. But even though he says he’s a redneck, he’s not your stereotypical Trump-loving type. Instead he got his Ph.D. in sociology at UC Berkeley and has spent his life developing cooperative businesses, community farming projects, and community land trusts in Birmingham and Montgomery. His latest project is the Automotive Free Clinic, a mutual aid auto repair shop — where the technicians read Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and you pay what you can.

“We’re living communism,” Mr. Henson says, emphasizing that he’s doing what he can to support his community, especially given that cars are essential in Alabama — and that the state (by design) has virtually no public transportation. “They gave us the bus seat,” one woman said, referring to the boycott long ago, “but they took the damn bus.” Mr. Henson sees his contribution as continuing the legacy of populism and communism in the South. In the year it’s been open, the AFC has fixed more than 100 cars. And though money doesn’t matter, they’re running a profit.

➡️ Read the article | Lux | 14 minutes

Thank you for reading this week’s issue. Hope you liked it. 😀

To our 3 new subscribers – Shannon, Tracy, and Jesse — I hope you find the newsletter a solid addition to your email inbox. To our long-time subscribers (Eric! Erica! Erika!), you’re pretty great, too. Loyal reader Janice, thank you for sharing the newsletter and getting the word out.

If you like The Highlighter Article Club, please help it grow. I really appreciate your support. Here are two ways you can help out:

❤️ Become a paid subscriber, like Wes and Wyatt (thank you!). You’ll join an esteemed group of readers who value the mission of The Highlighter Article Club. Plus you’ll receive surprise perks and prizes.

Spend less time scrolling through your phone. Let me find the best articles for you to read.

📬 Urge your friends to subscribe. Know someone who’s kind, thoughtful, and loves to read? I’d love it if you encouraged them to subscribe. Word of mouth is by far the best way to strengthen our reading community. Thank you for spreading the word.

Share The Highlighter Article Club

On the other hand, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, please feel free to unsubscribe. See you next Thursday at 9:10 am PT!

An interview with Article Clubber Melinda on “The Sunset,” this month’s selection

Coming to you on a Monday morning with a bonus episode and encouraging you to join this month’s discussion on April 30, 2:00 - 3:30 pm PT

Dear Loyal Readers,

I’m coming to you on a Monday with a bonus episode of the podcast. This is because many of you said “we want more!” after listening to a conversation I had with fellow Article Clubber Melinda last month.

So I asked Melinda, “Want to do it again?” And she generously said yes! ⭐️

Melinda’s an activist, lawyer, and cat mom living in Washington, D.C. A lover of many genres, from memoir to fantasy novels, she’s normally reading several things at once and hunting for her next read at her favorite local bookstore, Solid State Books.

This time, we’re talking about this month’s selection, “The Sunset,” by Lisa Bubert. It’s a personal essay about Ms. Bubert’s time working in a nursing home when she was a college student. If you haven’t read it yet, I recommend that you do.

Here are some topics we talked about:

• how Melinda experienced her first AC discussion last month

• how impressed we were with Ms. Bubert’s writing and structure

• what we got out of the essay and what we most valued

• what questions we want to ask Ms. Bubert at our discussion (she’s joining us!)

Hope you appreciate this conversation with me and Melinda. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Also, last thing: There’s still room if you want to join our discussion of “The Sunset” on April 30. We’re meeting up 2:00 - 3:30 pm PT via Zoom. All you need to do is sign up below, and once you do, I’ll send you more details. Have a great week, and see you this Thursday for Issue #390 of The Highlighter Article Club.

Join the discussion on April 30