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Recent reads (1.20.26)

Recent reads (1.20.26)

Last updated on: January 20, 2026 at 3:36 pm by Fred Clark

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Recent reads (1.20.26) 2026-01-20T15:36:54-05:00 Fred Clark

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I’m still working my way through a bunch of year-end “best of” lists that various publications like to put out at the end of December. It’s a great way of finding stories I’d missed or overlooked in the daily deluge of the infinite scroll.

Here are a few of those lists, offering 200+ links:

“The Most-Read ProPublica Stories of 2025.”
ProPublica’s list of “25 Investigations You May Have Missed This Year“
The Electric Typewriter curates “150 Great Articles and Essays from 2025“

• The “cookie-cutter shark” is a real thing. Even after reading this, I clicked around some more to make sure of that. “Scientists Solved the Mystery of the Shark That Bites Perfect Circles.”

(That headline is misleading — “Solved the Mystery” here just means “have learned a little bit more about.”)

• “Without salt,” Steve Sabicer writes, “our nerves wouldn’t fire, our muscles wouldn’t contract, and our bodies couldn’t regulate the water that makes up more than seventy percent of us.”

Our Christmas-in-the-hospital adventure confirms that. The ER nurse was initially frustrated by my wife’s description of her symptoms — “Everything just feels wrong.” But after the blood-test she came back and said that was an excellent description of what happens when your sodium level gets way too low. Without salt, everything is wrong. Without salt, we can’t do anything.

That recent experience is why I was especially fascinated by Sabicer’s wide-ranging essay “Salt: Not Just a Rock We Eat,“

(I do worry that this essay, in the wrong hands, may produce some strained sermon illustrations the next time Matthew 5:13 comes up in the lectionary, but that won’t be Steve Sabicer’s fault.)

• “The Two Faces of Lummie Jenkins,” by Alexandra Marvar (via).

Talk to anyone over the age of 70 in Camden, Alabama, and they can tell you a story about Lummie Jenkins, the sheriff of Wilcox County from 1939 to 1971. According to newspapers across the Deep South, Percy Columbus Jenkins—also known as Sheriff Lummie, Mr. Lummie, or just Lummie—was “a superb raconteur,” a “master psychologist,” and a “modern-day hero.” It was common lore that, unlike other sheriffs in the region, Lummie didn’t need to carry a gun …

Except, of course, he did carry a gun. And a nightstick. And a shotgun. And sometimes a rubber hose that he used to beat to death a Black woman in a wheelchair.

Lummie Jenkins was a beloved pillar of the community. And Lummie Jenkins was a monster. He was the sort of monster that used to reign like kings over places like Wilcox County, and the sort of monster the MAGA regime wants to enthrone all over America.

A sickening saga, but amazing writing by Marvar.

• “Americans by Name, Punished for Believing It,” Alex Burness writes for Bolts about the confusing limbo of American Samoans living in a small Alaska town. They are residents and neighbors and citizens, but also not citizens.

The setting here is Whittier, Alaska, which had a population of 272 in the most recent census. Nearly all of those residents live in one building, a 14-story condominium called Begich Towers. That building, and the town itself, were built in 1957 — so almost everybody there is from somewhere else, even if that somewhere else is closer to the imperial center than American Samoa.

Everything about this story and setting is fascinating. And also infuriating. It illustrates what happens whenever and wherever we create legal fictions to decree that some of our neighbors shouldn’t count as neighbors.

• Whittier is a “city under one roof” built by the U.S. military. So is the USS Gerald R. Ford, which is 11 stories taller than the Begich Towers and home to far more people — a crew of some 4,600.

The biggest difference between the two, though, is that Whittier, Alaska, has working toilets.

“A cruise ship has a very different mission from a nuclear-powered warship,” and so it maybe wasn’t a great idea to use a cruise-ship’s toilet system for an aircraft carrier. “A March 18, 2025 email from the engineering department sent out to all chiefs on the ship said there were 205 breakdowns in four days.”

That’s from this NPR piece, “Major plumbing headache haunts $13 billion U.S. carrier off the coast of Venezuela.” Steve Walsh started looking into this story after getting an email from a sailor’s family, and then he just kept digging.

This is a huge problem for the Navy and for everyone on board the Ford. But this doesn’t seem to be a scandalous story of bribery or kickbacks or shortcuts taken by unscrupulous contractors. It seems more like the Navy just tried out a new idea that it seemed might work and … well, it really, really did not work.

• Perhaps you remember the White Republican Mississippi Fraud scandal in which state officials redirected funds intended to assist poor families to build a volleyball facility for Brett Favre’s kids? Well, that story of White Republican plunder just got even weirder and wilder: “Welfare Scandal Mastermind Sought to Woo DiBiase Brothers as He Directed Millions to Wrestlers.”

John Davis, the former head of Mississippi’s welfare agency, once confessed that he “tried to buy all your love” to a pro-wrestler whose companies he sent millions in welfare funds to, text messages revealed in court Friday show.

Davis, who struck a plea deal with prosecutors in 2022, was testifying in the trial of WWE wrestler Ted DiBiase Jr., who faces charges in connection with the sprawling welfare scandal. Ted Jr., often referred to as “Teddy,” is the son of Ted DiBiase Sr., the famed former WWF wrestler popularly known as “The Million Dollar Man.” The State has sued the elder DiBiase over more than $700,000 that Davis directed to his Christian ministry, Heart of David Ministries, but prosecutors have not accused him of a crime.

• The TV show Landman just got a great review — one of the best reviews of a TV show I’ve read in recent memory.

Unfortunately for Taylor Sheridan Inc., what I mean is that Elizabeth Nelson’s “Everything You Learn About Landmen by Watching ‘Landman’“ is a TV review that is, itself, a terrific work of art discussing a TV show that is not.

This great review is not great — at least for the writers and creators of the soapy Dallas tribute. The cast of the show are treated more mercifully, as victims struggling to cope with melodramatic storylines that don’t seem to care whether or not they make sense.

But while this isn’t a “Thumbs Up” review, neither is it exactly a “Thumbs Down.” Nelson appreciates the allure of trashy TV that keeps you wanting to see what happens next not because of compelling characters or a gripping story, but because the show is so erratic and bonkers that anything might happen in the next episode. Some folks will read her review and think Landman sounds horrible. Others will read the same review and think “I can’t wait to watch this!” And still others will think both of those things at the same time.

Where do I fall in that? I’m hoping Landman gets cancelled so Billy Bob Thornton will be freed up for a new series based on “The Two Faces of Lummie Jenkins.”

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