Bigfoot, white debt, and pep talks for sociopaths

The best reads of the week

The Sunday

Published in

The Sunday

3 min readDec 6, 2015

Scanning electron micrograph of conidiophores of Penicillium chrysogenum

Every week The Sunday features a carefully curated selection of the most thought-provoking, interesting writing from around the web. Today’s pick of the week is a story of politics and talk radio in the Philippines, a place where at least 168 journalists have been killed since 1986, and where what you say on the airwaves can get you killed.

Dead Air

When Elgin Damasco's radio talk show was over, his bodyguards would hustle him out of his fortified studio and into his…

Saul Elbein | The California Sunday Magazine

On Tour with Rick Dyer and his Bigfoot through Texas

Things got weird, as they so often do, in a Walmart parking lot. Amarillo has three such behemoths, and on a bright…

Jeff Winkler | Texas Monthly

The Man on the Operating Table

KUNDUZ, Afghanistan - In the first operating room, the surgical bed was empty except for a thin layer of concrete dust…

Andrew Quilty | Foreign Policy

White whale in the big smoke

In the autumn of 1849, a young American wearing a new green coat - of which he was inordinately proud - arrived in…

Philip Hoare | New Statesman

Who Owns This Car? The Strange Battle Over U.S. Claims in Cuba.

Back in April, at the Nasdaq marketplace in Times Square, a few hundred interested parties gathered for a daylong…

Seth Stevenson | Slate

Access Denied

Earlier this year a young employee at a celebrity magazine explained to me a problem. The magazine was doing reasonably…

John Herrman | The Awl

Footnotes to a Murder

Beginning in the 1950s, Gold Medal published a series of books based on classic murder trials, complete with pulp-y…

Naben Ruthnum | Hazlitt

The Big Short

"Can we get a shot of the napkin?" Adam McKay asked his director of photography, pointing toward the table where an…

Jessica Pressler | Vulture

The County: the story of America's deadliest police

Seventy-five years after Kern County's leaders banned The Grapes of Wrath from their schools and libraries, complaining…

Jon Swaine and Oliver Laughland | The Guardian

A radically simple idea may open the door to a new world of antibiotics

Scientists are using radically simple techniques to uncover antibiotics that are fundamentally different than the ones…

Carl Zimmer | STAT

The Smoker

Raphael Cohen climbed into the ring, through the gap between the taut ropes, one leg first, before snaking his torso…

Aram Roston | BuzzFeed

The CEO Paying Everyone $70,000 Salaries Has Something to Hide

From It seemed too good to be true. On April 13, with reporters from the New York Times and NBC News hovering nearby…

Karen Weise | Bloomberg Businessweek

Use It and Abuse It

Futile wars may inspire worthy books, after the fact. Unfortunately the "global war on terror" is both futile and…

Corey Pein | The Baffler

Polly-Glot a Cracker in Many Tongues

KANO, Nigeria-Hundreds of languages are spoken in this country: So which one do you teach a parrot? It is a decision…

Drew Hinshaw | The Wall Street Journal

What It Feels Like to Cover Gun Violence in America

Since this story appeared in Vogue 's December issue, there have been 15 mass shootings in America, including the…

Jennifer Mascia | Vogue

Loyalty, power and the plan to replace a Prime Minister

As Abbott shut out colleagues who were critical of him, Turnbull hatched a secret scheme. Tony…

Peter Hartcher | The Sydney Morning Herald

White Debt

The word for debt in German also means guilt. A friend who used to live in Munich mentioned this to me recently. I took…

Eula Biss | The New York Times Magazine

The Race to Create Elon Musk's Hyperloop Heats Up

THERE'S A FUTURE we've seen in science fiction for so long it almost seems like the past: people whisked from one place…

Alexander Chee | The Wall Street Journal

If you enjoyed this week’s selection please give us a recommend and follow! Medium folks featured here are Saul Elbein, John Herrman, Jessica Pressler, carlzimmer and Jennifer Mascia.