TGIF!

Hope you enjoy today's selection of stories. We've got a former Washington Post reporter on the paper's dismantling, a writer revisiting the ghost she saw at 25, a social scientist arguing we're not naturally cooperative, and a photographer discovering Chief Standing Bear's landmark civil rights case at a Nebraska river confluence.

Have a great weekend!

Brett

Ashley Parker chronicles the dismantling of The Washington Post under Jeff Bezos and publisher Will Lewis. This morning, the paper closed its Sports department and Books section, gutted International and Metro desks, and ended its signature podcast without leadership appearing in person to announce the cuts. Parker traces how the Post evolved from hometown paper to national institution, powered by collaborative journalism that broke Watergate and covered everything from 9/11 to January 6. The newsroom's strength came from collegial culture where beat reporters became Pulitzer winners, where colleagues covered shifts for school plays and rallied around sick coworkers. Now Bezos and Lewis offer corporate jargon about reaching 200 million users while hemorrhaging existing subscribers, apparently aiming to transform the Post into a Politico clone. The executives fail to grasp that authoritative Washington coverage requires foreign correspondents risking their lives, Metro reporters covering unplowed snow, and Sports writers tracking the Nationals. Parker left for The Atlantic in 2024 but still thinks of the Post as "we."

Read here, free for LBR Readers.

Kathleen Donohoe recounts seeing her grandfather's ghost in 1998 when she was 25, stuck writing her second novel in her parents' Long Island home. Her grandfather, an Irish immigrant who worked as a sandhog building the Lincoln Tunnel, appeared behind her desk one afternoon, opaque but fading at the knees, wearing his customary white shirt and dark pants. Her dog Mindy stared at the same spot, confirming the sighting. Donohoe wasn't frightened; her Catholic upbringing had primed her for paranormal possibilities. Now 52, she revisits that memory differently, wondering what haunting requires and what her grandfather understood having all answers. She reflects on midlife mathematics: at 52, she's 29 years younger than her grandfather when he died, an odd threshold where life ending now would be cut short but not tragically so. The landscape never forgets, she learned photographing watersheds across America. She wonders who she might appear to someday when she knows what it is both to live and to haunt.

Read here.

Jonathan Goodman argues humans evolved not to cooperate or compete, but with capacity for both, and intelligence to hide competition when advantageous. While recent anthropology celebrates human cooperation as our evolutionary advantage, classic evolutionary biology emphasizes self-interest. Economic experiments like the ultimatum game supposedly prove humans are inequity-averse, rejecting unfair offers even at personal cost. But when anthropologist Polly Wiessner assured participants their choices were truly anonymous with zero consequences, they grabbed more coins for themselves, asking repeatedly if she was really not deceiving them. Goodman's computer models show cooperation persists even when most agents prefer defecting, because you cannot punish defectors you cannot identify. Moral credentialing research demonstrates people justify unethical behavior after professing moral principles, like businesses signing cooperation pledges then violating environmental and labor laws more frequently. The egalitarianism in small societies likely reflects lack of opportunity for exploitation rather than evolved fairness. Large societies create vastly more opportunities for invisible free-riding. Rather than assuming cooperation, we must design local norms and institutions making fairness rewarded and exploitation costly.

Read here.

Photographer Ansley West Rivers traveled to Niobrara State Park in Nebraska in spring 2017 to photograph where the Niobrara and Missouri Rivers meet, ancestral homeland of the Ponca Tribe. A historical plaque revealed the story of Chief Standing Bear, whose son Bear Shield died in 1879 after the U.S. government forcibly relocated the Ponca to Oklahoma, where a third of the tribe perished. Standing Bear promised to bury his son at the Niobrara's mouth but was arrested for leaving the reservation. His case, Standing Bear v. Crook, became a landmark: he successfully argued Native Americans are persons under law with habeas corpus rights. During closing remarks, he raised his hand and declared that though different in color, his blood flows red like anyone's, proving God made him a man. West Rivers, reading this while holding her daughter's hand, understood Standing Bear as a parent fighting grave injustice. After photographing American watersheds for a decade, she has learned landscapes never forget tragedies on their soil, preserving memories in fog and rolling rivers even when humans stop telling stories.

Read here.