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Hope your week is off to a great start. Here are four great stories for your lunch break:
Bob Odenkirk says parenthood was the best chapter of his life, sketch comedy is the most profound art form ever made, and he has no unified field theory of himself.
A Catholic Marshall Scholar opened a trade college in a hollowed-out Ohio steel town to save young men from the internet and themselves.
Christine Dawood gave her Titan seat to her son, then spent four days on the ship waiting for news OceanGate was hiding from her.
A Rice University art historian argues that a 13th-century Venetian mosaic and a modern facial recognition algorithm are running the same logic.
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The New York Times
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David Marchese
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Bob Odenkirk, 63, is promoting his new film Normal and reflecting on a career that defied every expected trajectory. Four years after a near-fatal heart attack on the set of Better Call Saul, he found the words for what recovery felt like not in therapy but in a novel about time. He talks about sketch comedy as the most profound art form humans have produced, his belief that parenthood was the best chapter of his life, why manosphere comedy is a dead end, and why comedians who claim to speak honestly from the stage are performing whether they admit it or not.
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The New Yorker
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Emma Green
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In Steubenville, Ohio, a Marshall Scholar named Jacob Imam opened a college that hands students a chop saw and a copy of Aristotle. The College of St. Joseph the Worker pairs a Catholic liberal-arts curriculum with full trade apprenticeships in carpentry, HVAC, electrical, and plumbing, aiming to graduate men debt-free and capable of building a house. The school targets young men adrift online and off, and has become part of a broader effort to revive a Rust Belt city that lost half its population since 1940. Sixty-two students are currently enrolled.
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The Guardian
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Pamela Gordon
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Christine Dawood gave her seat on the Titan submersible to her 19-year-old son Suleman so he could dive to the Titanic with his father. She watched from the Polar Prince as the search stretched across four days, kept in the dark by an OceanGate crew determined to project calm. When the debris field was found, her first thought was relief: they would not have known what happened. She speaks here for the first time in detail about the wait at sea, the two shoeboxes of remains, and the slow work of building a life around an absence.
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In a 13th-century mosaic at St. Mark's Basilica in Venice, the martyrdom of Saint Mark assigns roles with precise intention: the saint is serene, Muslim captors restrain but stop short of killing, and a Black executioner raises the decisive blow. Art historian Denva Gallant traces how this distribution of violence across bodies became a repeating convention across medieval Europe, hardening through accumulation until assigned roles began to read as natural attributes. The essay draws a direct line from those gilded images to modern facial recognition systems and predictive policing algorithms trained on data those same habits of seeing produced.
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