By Ginger Thompson

ProPublica's massive five-part investigation traces how Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital transformed from a community nonprofit into southwest Georgia's economic colossus while the health of Albany's residents deteriorated. Founded in 1911 to serve all patients regardless of race or ability to pay, Phoebe wielded its taxpayer-backed status to eliminate competition, balloon debt, and hike insurance premiums to rival Colorado resort towns. Throughout the series, reporter Ginger Thompson documents surgical mistakes, rejected patient transfers, and suppressed cost analyses. The hospital became Albany's largest employer yet paid most workers under $15 hourly, replacing vanished manufacturing jobs with low-wage service positions. As Phoebe expanded into wealthier suburbs using public bonds, Albany itself recorded abysmal health outcomes and sky-high mortality rates for treatable conditions.

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By Geoff Edgers

Rosie O'Donnell fled to Ireland after Trump's reelection because she's constitutionally incapable of looking away—the same impulse that made her rescue stranded boaters and send $1.5 million to a woman who conned her now compels her to refresh Trump's social media at Dublin pubs. Her 12-year-old nonbinary autistic child thrives in Dublin's school system while O'Donnell develops a show about her mother's death and promises her therapist she'll stop posting about Trump for three days (she lasts hours). What distinguishes this from celebrity gossip is how their 20-year feud reveals Trump's pathology: no slight too ancient, no target too distant, no power differential steep enough to make him stop. In July he called for her citizenship revocation; she responded by posting his photo with Epstein. Friends describe her as having a "porous membrane" between herself and the world's suffering, a vulnerability rooted in losing her mother at 10 that manifests as both compulsive caregiving and an inability to filter out political horror. She's 3,000 miles away, finally watching Clay flourish without worrying about special education cuts, walking Dublin streets without security gates, and still she can't disconnect.

By Elliott Woods

Sixty-four people crammed into a sealed tractor trailer on June 27, 2022, expecting a three-hour ride from Laredo to San Antonio. The refrigeration unit had been broken for months. Inside temperatures likely soared past 140 degrees. Fifty-three passengers died in what became the deadliest immigration-related catastrophe in American history. Elliott Woods reconstructed this disaster through interviews with sixteen victims' families across Mexico and Guatemala, plus trial testimony from survivors and smugglers. The piece traces brothers Begaí and Mariano Santiago Hipólito from their Oaxacan village through multiple failed border crossings to that fatal journey. Only Begaí survived, waking from a coma with scrambled memory and devastating news. Woods exposes the brutal economics undergirding this tragedy: a $400 billion border enforcement apparatus that enriches defense contractors while pushing desperate migrants into smugglers' hands, where a malfunctioning trailer becomes a death chamber. The smugglers earned middle-class incomes moving over a thousand people through checkpoints; their sloppiness finally caught up at Quintana Road. Meanwhile Begaí remains trapped in American purgatory, working a food truck, legally ambiguous, unable to embrace his brother's orphaned children.

By Megan McCrea

This NYT visual timeline tracks the motel's century-long journey from 1925 roadside novelty to cultural touchstone to corporate commodity and back to boutique obsession. The Milestone Mo-Tel opened in San Luis Obispo when dust-covered motorists had few options beyond autocamps and unwelcoming hotels, promising hot showers, private garages, and orange trees outside every door.

Really hope you enjoyed the selection of stories today. I am always interested in hearing from you. If you have thoughts on how I can make this email even better, do not hesitate to reach out.

Brett

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