• I’m not usually a “true crime” fan, but Undine’s account of the horrifying Snedegar family — “Murders, Disappearances, and Mystery: A Family Affair“ — is fascinating.
• “Charlie’s Place.”
This is a podcast from Atlas Obscura, but it’s a “recent read” for me because I started reading the transcripts and got hooked that way and wound up reading the whole thing.
Beloved. Notorious. Defiant. Folk hero. These are just a few ways to describe Charlie Fitzgerald, the entrepreneur who owned an integrated nightclub during the Jim Crow era in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
Charlie broke down racial barriers through the power of music and dance, hosting some of the greatest musicians of our time: Little Richard, Count Basie, Ray Charles, Duke Ellington, and many more.
But who was Charlie? How did he rise to power? And what price did he pay for achieving the impossible? This is a story of joy and passion that erupted into violence and changed a community forever.
“Erupted into violence” here refers to the terrorist attack by Klansmen and dirty cops that closed Charlie’s Place.
If you want to understand America in 2025, a place where whole communities are terrorized by heavily armed masked men — lawless beserkers who are somehow acting as “the law” — then you need to understand how it rhymes with the history of stories like this.
And if some prestige TV producer wants to turn this podcast into an HBO miniseries I’ll watch the whole thing.
• Evan Mandery for Mother Jones on “How America’s Elite Colleges Breed High-Status Careers — and Misery.”
I didn’t think I was interested in this subject because I have never been a part of the high society of “America’s Elite Colleges” or the even more exclusive realm of “high status careers.” But then I started reading and Mandery introduced us to Justin Portela and I kept reading because I very much wanted to know what happened to this young man.
• Here’s a wild story from Jason Colavito for the New Republic, “The Super-Weird Origins of the Right’s Hatred of the Smithsonian.”
Just for starters, anyone nursing a “hatred of the Smithsonian” is weird. It’s a museum and library and archive and cultural treasure trove and national attic. That doesn’t have to be your cup of tea, and lots of normal people may not find the place exciting. But to hate it? To oppose it? That’s weirdo behavior to begin with.
What makes this “super-weird” is that this story has to do with the Nephilim — the “biblical giants” described in a short, odd passage in the sixth chapter of Genesis. There are other “biblical giants” too — the “sons of Anak” in the book of Joshua and the Philistine “giant” Goliath who was slain by David and/or Elhanan.
The Nephilim would seem like a topic that young-earth creationist would do best to avoid. After all, if you’re insisting on an illiterately “literal” reading of the story of Noah’s flood, then the survival of “biblical giants” descended from antediluvian giants who were wiped out in that flood is an awkward anachronism. But for some 19th-century creationists, searching for proof of such “biblical giants” was one way to search for proof of “literal” creationism and a young earth.
The failure of that search led to the embrace of conspiracy theories — we know the proof exists, so “they” must be covering it up.
Who is this nefarious cabal of “they”? Well, it’s a group that includes the Smithsonian — and every other library and museum and academy that refuses to accept the obvious truth that the world is 7,000 years old and littered with the skeletons of Aryan giants.
Wait … how did the giants become Aryan? Well, “they” always winds up as, you know, “the Jews.” This is the antisemitic trajectory of all conspiracy theories in Christendom, including the conspiracy theory of young-earth creationism.
Anyway, read Colavito’s story. It’s got everything: lizard people, ancient astronauts, the book of Enoch, you name it.
And if you want to dive further down the rabbit hole, Colavito has a link to NephCon2025, a cornucopia of nuttery that invites us to play Six Degrees of Separation with “an array of fascinating topics related to Nephilim, UFOs, transhumanism, alternative history, and Bible prophecy” and the ways all of these link back to antisemitism (usually in way less than six steps).
• Jonathan Wolf was a big money lawyer who switched gears and went to work for a museum. His first-hand account, “America’s Assault On Real History Comes For The Staff Of The Charles Lindbergh House And Museum,” is elegaic and thoughtful about some of the many, many things we have lost over the past nine months and will need to rebuild.
• I often link to long, investigative pieces from The Assembly, but a lot of what they’re doing just involves the kind of basic, local reporting that the death of newspapers left behind. Here’s a terrific example of that from Gale Melcher that has a near-perfect local news headline: “Greensboro Says City Water Is Safe. But Why Is It Brown?“
“Why is the water brown?” is exactly the kind of question that local news needs to ask and answer. It is also exactly the kind of question that national news needs to ask and answer, but rarely does, because cable TV and big tech internet news and national newspapers are only interested in asking “Will the brown water help or hurt the electoral fortunes of Candidate X?”
• “As Willow Creek turns 50, the onetime ‘church of the future’ redefines success.”
Bob Smietana has been a religion reporter long enough that he remembers covering (and witnessing, and living through) all the hype and hysteria that accompanied the rise of Willow Creek as it created/invented the archetypal suburban megachurch. In the 1990s, everybody was studying and trying to imitate Willow Creek’s success. (And not just in church world, this church was studied by corporate America — my Fortune 50 employer still uses some Willow Creek jargon in its training materials.) That memory informs Smietana’s reporting on the present-day struggles of this “church of the future,” helping us to question what it was we all learned or were trying to learn from its example.
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