Raymond Flynn figured out that the Social Register—an exclusive directory of America's richest families, complete with addresses and phone numbers—was the perfect shopping catalog for a burglar. Over three decades, he and his crew hit close to 500 homes of robber baron descendants and Mayflower society members, calling residences 50 times to make sure no one was home, cutting phone lines to trigger false alarms, then stealing Tiffany lamps, 280-diamond bracelets, and obscure 18th-century paintings small enough to fit in a briefcase. They knew exactly which art to take because one of Flynn's two fences gave him a list of marketable artists and told him: nothing larger than a suitcase, nothing worth more than $50,000. This Atavist Magazine investigation reconstructs the career of possibly America's hardest-working art thief, who spent less than a year in prison despite confessing to 103 burglaries, burned 200 paintings he couldn't sell, and when asked why he did it said: "I needed fast money. I went to Las Vegas a lot."

Julie Moore is a retired endangered species specialist who drives a red Mercedes, has a note in her medical chart that she bites when coming out of anesthesia, and has made it her mission to save Venus flytraps, carnivorous plants that exist in the wild only in an 80-mile strip of eastern Carolina, mostly concentrated around Boiling Spring Lakes, North Carolina. This Orion Magazine profile follows Moore as she recruits an entire town to her cause: convincing the board of commissioners to designate the flytrap as the town plant, getting DOT to stop mowing them down, and mobilizing volunteers to dig up thousands of plants before bulldozers arrive for new development. The piece captures both the horror of watching a carpenter ant snap a trigger hair and seal its fate in 20 seconds, and the collective power of a grassroots rescue mission led by a woman who looks sweet and demure but describes herself as "the Nightmare on Elm Street."

At a Boston writing conference, Rachel Kolb answered questions verbally for a while, her deaf accent causing strangers to wonder if she's from Australia, then abruptly stopped speaking and began using ASL instead. The transition had an electric impact: Kolb's voice had switched genders, her deaf accent gave way to a hearing one, raising the question of which was more "authentically" hers. This Baffler review of Kolb's memoir Articulate and Sara Nović's novel True Biz explores the contemporary deaf subject caught between split worlds: the culturally Deaf (capital D) who see themselves as a linguistic minority, and the audiologically deaf (lowercase d) who feel excluded. The piece traces how mainstreaming after the ADA collapsed residential deaf schools, leaving deaf students with only 60 percent comprehension in public schools, and how cochlear implants have become a symbol of the d/Deaf binary that defies easy resolution.

2019: Maclean’s: The heroes of the Thai cave rescue

2016: The New Republic: The Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens

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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