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The Guardian
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Harriet Grant
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Police arrived at Fiona's house at 7am with eight officers and a dog. Her husband Mark had been confessing in a chatroom to raping their daughter Emily for years. The man he thought he was talking to was an undercover officer. When investigators found Emily, she told them the same thing Fiona already believed: none of it had happened. The charges were changed, then dropped. The Crown Prosecution Service ruled that because Mark was speaking to a willing recipient, the messages were not legally obscene. He walked away with no criminal record and no place on the sex offender register. Harriet Grant follows Emily and Fiona as they take the case to parliament, and the question they keep running into.
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The New York Times Magazine
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Jia Lynn Yang
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Americans have been arguing over the founding since the founders died. The patriotic myths came first, manufactured quickly to paper over the trauma of revolution. The debunking followed just as fast: by the mid-1800s, alternate histories of the era were already circulating, and the contest has not stopped since. Jia Lynn Yang traces how each generation bent the origin story toward its own cause, from abolitionists invoking the Declaration to Cold War textbooks scrubbing the record clean. As the country marks 250 years, the left has largely ceded the founding to the right. Two historians suggest this may be the wrong move. The argument itself, one of them says, is proof the project is still alive.
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Noema Magazine
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Henry Wismayer
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The dream of a human colony on Mars rests on a handful of confident assumptions, and Henry Wismayer spent months testing them. The numbers look better than they did: SpaceX has driven launch costs from $54,000 per kilogram to roughly $1,500. The settlement blueprints are more detailed. But the human body was not designed for a planet where average radiation runs 50 times Earth's, the atmosphere is 95 percent carbon dioxide, and the temperature swings 100 degrees between day and night. Ecologist Kelly Weinersmith began her research as a space enthusiast and published the skeptic's case instead. She now fields comparisons to Mein Kampf from convention attendees.
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Route 66 turns 100 this year, and Esquire sent three writers to drive different stretches of it. Grant Achatz and his wife found time-capsule diners and an eerie silence between towns in rural Illinois. Ryan RedCorn, an Osage Nation filmmaker, drove through Oklahoma tribal lands and found the highway's roadside markers telling a version of history with a lot of granite left blank. Dave Holmes drove the last 20 miles into Santa Monica and got stuck in WeHo Pride traffic. All three came back with the same unresolved question: what exactly is this road a monument to, and who gets to say.
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