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01 • 55 Minute Read

Mississippi Today

Hannah McAlilly

A Mississippi death penalty jury was seated. With one Black juror.

Illustration for Mississippi Today's report on death penalty jury selection

In 2006, a Mississippi prosecutor struck four Black jurors in a row from Terry Pitchford’s capital murder trial, leaving a single Black person on the panel. The judge accepted the prosecutor’s explanations without letting the defense respond, and because the defense never got to rebut, the state Supreme Court later ruled the objection had been waived. That one procedural moment has blocked every appeal since. Pitchford has been on death row for 20 years. Mississippi Today found that over the past decade, the state’s high court has not granted relief in a single case of this kind, while accepting reasons like a juror’s red hair or a bad feeling.

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02 • 25 Minute Read

The New York Times Magazine

Mark Chiusano

The Absurd, Unending Quest to Floodproof the New York City Subway

Hurricane Ida dumped 7 to 9 inches of rain on New York in 2021, and the 116th Street station drowned. Water poured from sidewalk vents onto the platform. Mark Chiusano visited five stations over two months and found a system with 47,000 openings, pump rooms untouched since the Reagan era, and $223 million allocated for concrete steps and rubber mats. A separate storm sewer capable of handling an Ida would cost $250 billion and take a century. Five years after Ida, most flood-prone stations remain unprotected, and one former city adviser thinks letting the water in might be the answer.

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03 • 29 Minute Read

Noema Magazine

Mike Mariani

Your Perception Of Time Is, In Fact, Warped

The great Mike Mariani (recommend his book What Doesn’t Kill Us Makes Us if you love narrative reporting) argues in Noema that time really does feel faster, and science explains why. There’s no internal clock; the brain estimates duration by counting sensory changes, then judges the past by how many memories formed. Phones max out the first and starve the second, so an hour of scrolling flies by and leaves nothing behind. The pandemic did the same through sameness. A European research project, TIMED, found heavy device users lose time and feel guilty about it. The fix is boredom, which is when memory actually forms.

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04 • 14 Minute Read

The Atlantic

Sebastian Smee

Misunderstanding Norman Rockwell

Illustration accompanying The Atlantic's essay on Norman Rockwell

For four decades Norman Rockwell painted an America of smiling families and benign small towns. Sebastian Smee argues that vision, however brilliantly executed, became a burden the country could never live up to, which is why artists like David Lynch kept cracking it open. Lynch’s Mulholland Drive turns Rockwellian warmth predatory in seconds, and the same uncanniness lurks in Freedom From Want if you stare long enough.

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