What We're Reading

Hello Material Supporters,

Here is what we’re reading this week:

Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes is reading “Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America” by David Wise.

Executive Editor Natalie Orpett read this deeply troubling article by Ed Caesar about a supertanker stuck off the coast of Yemen, which will almost certainly kill people already living through one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.

She also read with great pride news coverage about the landmark sentencing proceedings of her former client, Majid Khan, who became the first Guantanamo detainee to speak publicly in court about his torture.  (You can read his entire statement here.) In particular, she was heartened by this article about the jury's decision to recommend clemency for Mr. Khan.

Publisher and Chief Operating Officer David Priess is deeply into “To End a Plague,” by Emily Bass. This book compellingly relates the creation and execution of one of the most successful public health initiatives in world history: the United States' PEPFAR program, which slashed HIV cases across sub-Saharan Africa in the George W. Bush administration and saved millions of lives.

Managing Editor Jacob Schulz highly recommends a moving piece from Thomas Gibbons-Neff about the Taliban coming to inspect the New York Times's abandoned Kabul bureau. He's also reading a fascinating Rest of the World story about how the streaming TV boom has created a shortage of translators for subtitles and dubbing.

Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic is reading "The Attack," the Washington Post's new three-part series on the Jan. 6 insurrection. It's a detailed, damning account of just how much warning law enforcement had before the riot and how agencies from the FBI to the Capitol Police failed, catastrophically, to see the violence coming. The embedded audio of threatening voicemail messages left for election officials around the country is particularly chilling.

Associate Editor Bryce Klehm is reading a New York Times article titled, “To Steer China’s Future, Xi Is Rewriting Its Past,” which describes a new official document that summarizes the Chinese Communist Party’s history.

Intern Emily Dai recommends Michael Paul Williams' article on the outsized role of critical race theory in electing Virginia's next governor, Glenn Youngkin.

Lawfare’s Quote of the Week: From “What Do—and Will—the Criminal Prosecutions of the Jan. 6 Capitol Rioters Tell Us?” by Roger Parloff: “The big, unanswerable question—at least so far—is whether any squeezed defendant, persuaded to cooperate, might one day implicate white-collar types—like funders or organizers—across the air gap, so to speak, from those who did the dirty work in the Capitol that day.”

From the Lawfare Vault: Nov. 11, 2020, “How Hard Is It to Overturn an American Election?” by Benjamin Wittes

Thank you!