This week, we’re sharing stories from Alec MacGillis, Melissa Brown, Brendan I. Koerner, Christopher Mathias, and Yiyun Li.
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1. ‘I Will Never Let Boeing Forget Her’
Alec MacGillis | ProPublica | November 11, 2019 | 31 minutes (7,838 words)
In designing the 737 MAX, Boeing altered the plane’s automatic response in the event of a faulty angle-of-attack sensor, failed to include the change in the airplane’s operating manual, and then promptly blamed foreign pilots when two separate crashes involving the model took 347 lives.
2. ‘American Horror Story’: The Prison Voices you Don’t Hear from Have the Most to Tell Us
Melissa Brown | Montgomery Advertiser | November 13, 2019 | 30 minutes (7,590 words)
The Montgomery Advertiser interviewed more than two dozen inmates in the Alabama correction system, all of whom report extreme routine violence and “unhinged” drug-induced behavior among some inmates — often against elderly and vulnerable members of the prison population. Rehabilitation is impossible, they say with little access to programs, while guards remain indifferent at best, refusing to enforce prison rules, or at worst, helping to perpetrate heinous acts.
3. The Strange Life and Mysterious Death of a Virtuoso Coder
Brendan I. Koerner | Wired | November 14, 2019 | 30 minutes (7,500 words)
Jerrold Haas was on the brink of blockchain riches. Then his body was found in the woods of southern Ohio.
4. Go Back To Your Country, They Said
Christopher Mathias | HuffPost | November 4, 2019 | 15 minutes (3,900 words)
A new HuffPost database explores the moral emergency of hate in the Trump era.
5. On a Finnish Archipelago, Moving Through Sorrow
Yiyun Li | T: The New York Times Style Magazine | November 12, 2019 | 14 minutes (3,700 words)
The beauty and calm of the Aland Islands are deceptive. Isolation encourages contemplation — but can it, as one grieving mother wonders, offer respite as well?