Reading archive 2023-07-16

50 years later, group asks: What if other urban highways had been built?

Opinion  Men are lost. Here’s a map out of the wilderness. - "Galloway leaned into the screen. 'My view is that, for masculinity, a decent place to start is garnering the skills and strength that you can advocate for and protect others with. If you’re really strong and smart, you will garner enough power, influence, kindness to begin protecting others. That is it. Full stop. Real men protect other people.' ...

"Reeves, in our earlier conversation, had put it somewhat more subtly. 'I try to raise my boys' — he has three — 'to have the confidence to ask a girl out, if that’s their inclination; the grace to accept no for an answer; and the responsibility to make sure that, either way, she gets home safely.' His recipe for masculine success echoed Galloway’s: proactiveness, agency, risk-taking and courage, but with a pro-social cast."

Opinion  For proof of the U.S. immigration system’s dysfunction, look to Canada

An 11-year-old needed friends ‘really bad.’ 3,100 strangers stepped up.: A TikTok video of Shayden Walker asking a neighbor for friends has racked up nearly 70 million views

Opinion  We fixed I-95 in 12 days. Here are our lessons for U.S. infrastructure.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggests covid was designed to spare Jews, Chinese people

Inside the college newspaper investigation that got a football coach fired: When student journalists at the Daily Northwestern saw that revered coach Pat Fitzgerald had been suspended, they suspected there was more to the story. They uncovered years of hazing allegations.

How a Saudi firm tapped a gusher of water in drought-stricken Arizona" Lax rules let the foreign-owned company pump water from state land to grow alfalfa for the kingdom’s cattle. After almost a decade, the deal is in jeopardy. - "Soon after the company, Fondomonte Arizona, arrived in the Butler Valley in 2015, state planners suggested asking the company to install meters and report its water use, according to a memo reviewed by The Washington Post. That way, the memo argued, the state could 'at least obtain accurate information' on water drained from the valley — water that could otherwise serve as backup for booming urban areas. 

"But the proposal 'hit a stone wall,' John Schneeman, one of the planners, told The Post. It was spurned, he said, by officials in the administration of then-Gov. Doug Ducey (R) who were 'cautious of tangling with a powerful company.' The proposal also ran headlong into a view, deeply held in the rural West, that water is private property that comes with access to land, rather than a public resource."