I thought I was making a little progress on my recent brain futz until I managed to lock both me and my kid out of the house in the rain for several hours the other night. Thank goodness it was before the latest set of El Nino storms came in. Anyway, I’ve put an order in for a complete dadotomy next week. Hopefully they’ll replace my cerebral cortex with that from another, less forgetful father.

In the meantime, here are the stories we picked out from the last week.

1. The Story Behind the ‘Spotlight’ Movie

(Various, The Boston Globe, 2016)

I haven’t actually seen the Oscar-winning film which depicts the dedicated campaign of the Globe’s investigation into child abuse in the Catholic church. This alone probably gets me thrown out of Journalist Club. But I have spent a lot of time trawling around the Globe’s rather spiffy collection of stories about the investigation. It’s worth it.

2. How America Made Donald Trump Unstoppable

(Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, 2016)

Some days I’m really sad that Taibbi’s freewheeling and anarchic political magazine, Racket, fell foul of Pierre Omidyar and didn’t ever see the light of day. Other days, when he puts out a zinger of a piece like this and you realize that one of the great beauties of his work in Rolling Stone—as opposed to his previous writing—is total dedication and discipline, and I wonder if Racket would have never lived up to whatever I’d invested in it. Today’s one of the days when I’m not sure either is right, but that at least I can be certain that among the current class of spleneticists, he’s peerless.

3. The Plot To Take Down a Fox News Analyst

(Alex French, The New York Times Magazine, 2016)

Who doesn’t love a good hoaxer? And Wayne Simmons, it seems, was a good hoaxer—at least, good enough to fool Fox News and several branches of American government. But in the end he couldn’t fool a few retired CIA types, which is where the story picks up. Although it never quite feels like it gets hold of the motive (which often happens with open cases) it’s a pretty riveting procedural. I’m still unclear why they gave it such a sad headline, though.

4. First Audio Recordings From the Bottom of the Mariana Trench Are Nightmare Fuel

(Madeleine Stone, Gizmodo, 2016)

You might listen to the soundbites in this story and think nothing of them. After all, they’re just a few seconds of claustrophobic, ear-pressing white noise with the odd electrowibble or groan. But these are the sounds from the very bottom of the deepest part of the ocean, people! These are the sounds of the strangest place on Earth! These are the sounds of a place so dark and so difficult to reach that only three people have ever made it to the bottom! These sounds should fascinate, enthral and possibly terrify you.

5. Angry People in Local Newspapers

My first brush with a career in media was as a work experience oick at the Haverhill Echo in 1995. It was a brilliantly small town newspaper; obsessively local interest, entire stories about an item that went missing from somebody’s shed, councillors treated like big time political celebrities, that kind of thing. I got fired at the end of my first week, which has always been something of a badge of honor (who gets fired from work experience?) especially as I turned up again the next Monday morning and just carried on as if nothing had ever happened.

Anyway, it’s not often that I link to an entire blog rather than a specific story, but this effort does its job brilliantly—those banal stories of local life, illustrated by odd photos of people miming their anguish—and deserves some rooting around. A personal fave: the B&B owner who discovered a man in a high-visibility jacket who was not only taking a poop in his front garden… but had brought his own toilet paper. Because of course you’d illustrate that story with photos like this: