My First "First Word" #1
Here's 10 articles with 💪strong starts💪 for you to read this week, courtesy of moi.
We probably consume over 100,000 words a day—most of them are pretty bad.
I spent the most past year writing and reading breaking news, churning out roughly four stories a day. While I’m so proud of the team I worked on, I fear that being exposed to the formula of political blogging may have broken my brain (and I think scrolling does a little of that to all of us little by little.)
As a small effort to counteract the sludge, I’ll be feeding you 10 leading lines that I enjoyed every week. Most will be from long reads, some from books, maybe some from subway ads. This project is HEAVILY inspired by Ingrid Burrington, a total genius who writes the newsletter “Perfect Sentences” and just put out her 100th batch (please subscribe to her!). As a point of difference, I’ll be limiting myself to drawing from the first line or paragraph of piece, which from a year of looking at editorial analytics I can confidently say is all a media consumer reads anyway!
You might say the story starts with a television broadcast.
Nixonland // Rick Perlstein
Immediately breaking the format by beginning with a book but you need to have a strong start to keep people hooked for 900+ pages. We read this monster with my bookclub (which you should join!) and got to speak with Rick who had plenty of post-election insights for our finale.
My mother lost both of her legs on the way to the Barbican Art Gallery.
The Painted Protest // Dean Kissick // Harpers Magazine
Submission from a friend that not everyone loved… tbh the intro is all I can say I deeply enjoy about this piece. The rest is basically art is bad because of woke.
“We think democracy is better,” said the jet-fuel salesperson. “But is it? In terms of outcomes?”
Shell Is Looking Forward // Malcolm Harris // NYMag
Also a bookclub fav. This anecdote begins not only Harris’s Intelligencer piece but also kicks off his new book “What’s Left” which will be out in April.
The Virginia opossum, according to John Smith—that explorer of all things Virginia—“hath a head like a Swine, & a taile like a Rat, and is of the Bignes of a Cat.” Had Smith looked closer, he might have discovered that it also has opposable thumbs, fifty teeth (more than any other land mammal except the equally improbable giant armadillo), and, if female, thirteen nipples, which are arranged like a clockface, with twelve in a circle and one in the middle.
What Do Animals Understand About Death? // Kathryn Schulz // The New Yorker
Submission from Charlie who says he’s “sorry to be so New Yorker-pilled.” I love image of a nipple clock.
The last American soldier to leave Afghanistan was green.
Everything Visible and Invisible About the War on Terror // Grayson Scott // The Nation
Submission from Lucy.
Twenty-seven degrees in a Port-A-Jon, the seat freezing my ass. I’m in the dark with a little flashlight. Chemically treated feces and urine splash up onto my anus. The wind howls, shaking the plastic structure. My hands go numb.
My Life As A Homeless Man In America // Patrick Fealey // Esquire
Throughout the night of November 8th, my sleep was pierced by the smell of a burning forest.
The Northeast Is Becoming Fire Country // M. R. O’Connor // The New Yorker
Submission from Jael, who fact-checked this piece and says that despite the headline it’s “actually a very non alarmist piece.”
~~~~~and here’s an obligatory election-related subsection ~~~~~
The week following the 2024 election, President-elect Donald Trump traveled to the White House to meet with President Joe Biden, who offered a simple, cordial greeting: “Welcome back.”
Out of the Ashes // Miles Kampf-Lassin // In These Times
They’d cut their teeth protesting the Iraq War and at Occupy. Even when the left rallied behind an unpopular centrist and lost because of it, they saw a path forward. They had hope, and they marched.
That must have been nice.
No Expectations // Martin Dolan // The Point
The most important image of the 2024 election, to my eye, was generated one evening of the Democratic National Convention, when delegates had to file past protesters chanting the names and ages of dead Palestinian children.
Exit Right // Gabriel Winant // Dissent
The election takes are still flowing as freely as the Dom Pérignon at one of Kamala Harris’s Silicon Valley fundraisers.
Liberals Are Giving Up on America // Liza Featherstone // Jacobin
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Feel free send me choice ledes and I’ll be sure to credit you in the next newsletter and stay cozy.
-Paige