For Whom the Bell Scrolls

“Kelly Burke took a few labored steps to the witness stand and looked toward a large video screen in a rural Georgia courtroom. There, he saw the face of a man, beamed in from a nearby prison, whom he had sent away 25 years earlier for life without parole. Mr. Burke, a former district attorney, hadn’t seen the man, Jessie Askew Jr., since the sentencing in 1998. He had insisted at the time that Mr. Askew, then 24 years old, deserved to die in prison. On this spring morning in 2023, Mr. Burke planned to tell the court it was the biggest mistake of his career.” NYT (Gift Article): For Decades, He Has Regretted Sending a Man Away for Life. Can He Fix It? “Weakened by cancer and nagged by his conscience, a former Georgia prosecutor wants the courts to reverse the sentence he demanded for a man who didn’t physically harm anyone in his crimes.”

+ “President Biden announced on Friday that he is commuting the sentences of nearly 2,500 people convicted of non-violent drug crimes who are serving far longer sentences than they would receive today.”

“For people like me who don’t live near L.A., the destruction can start to read like a set of statistics—more than 12,000 structures damaged or destroyed; roughly 40,000 acres burned. But statistics have a strange way of obfuscating the magnitude and depth of the damage. On GoFundMe, the harm is shockingly visceral. As the catastrophe unfolds, the site is serving as a real-time record of the wildfires’ destruction.” The Atlantic (Gift Article): The GoFundMe Fires.

+ “When an extreme gust of wind sent the helicopter plunging around 100 feet, an emergency light on the dashboard flashed a warning that the transmission box was out of oil. It wasn’t — the aircraft plummeted so fast the oil had flown out of the pump to the top of the casing. In his 11,300 hours of flight time over 38 years, including countless combat missions for the Army, Mr. Sagely had never seen that happen.” NYT (Gift Article): The Terrifying Ride of Copter 17.

What to Doc: In The Grab, an investigative journalist from the excellent Center for Investigative Reporting uncovers the money, influence and alarming rationale behind covert efforts to control the most vital resource on the planet. This is the story about the story beneath all other stories. Great stuff. Streaming on Hulu. Available to rent elsewhere.

+ What to Book: “I love this book. It moves like a souped-up pickup truck.” So said Patti Smith of Betsy Lerner’s debut novel Shred Sisters, about family, mental illness, and a hard-won path between two sisters.

+What to Watch: For the next for years, I want to watch series that are a little too long, easy to consume, and take place in beautiful settings. Maestro in Blue on Netflix (and on a beautiful Ionian island in Greece) got me through a couple weeks.

Liberal Snowflakes: “President-elect Donald Trump will take the oath of office from inside the Capitol Rotunda on Monday due to forecasts of intense cold weather.” (“Pardon me, are you Aaron Brrr, sir?”)

+ New ERA? “President Biden on Friday declared that he considers the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution ‘the law of the land,’ a surprising declaration that does not have any formal force of effect, but that is being celebrated by its backers in a rally in front of the National Archives.” More from Laurence Tribe: The Equal Rights Amendment at Long Last. “Thanks to President Biden, the Constitution will finally guarantee equality for all.” (Great. But is that right?)

+ Hostages Inch Closer to Home: The Israeli security cabinet has approved the ceasefire and hostage deal as the release of some hostages inches closer to reality. Here’s the latest from CNN and BBC. Here are the 33 hostages set to be returned in phase one of the Gaza ceasefire. It’s not entirely clear if all of them are alive. I continue to believe that much of what happens in the weeks and months to come will be defined by the stories they tell about their captivity.

+ Internal Revenue Nervous: “Though the commissioner’s term wasn’t due to expire until 2027, Trump had previously announced plans to fire Werfel, who took office in 2023, and nominate Billy Long, a former Missouri congressman without any tax policy experience, to replace him.” WaPo: IRS commissioner to resign as Trump eyes replacement. (This is just one of many norm-busting replacements. Hold on tight, folks.)

+ Indefensible: “Russia handed prison sentences on Friday to three lawyers who had defended opposition leader Alexei Navalny until his death in a Russian prison last year, capping a protracted legal saga that has sent a chill through the shrinking community of lawyers defending Russian political prisoners and defendants.”

+ Screen of Death: “In a high-profile experiment, Walgreens sought to modernize its stores by replacing traditional refrigerator doors with digital screens. The attempt failed.”

+ Out of Office: “By the time [screenwriter Dan Erickson] and Ben Stiller began developing ‘Severance,’ he had quit the door-parts company and was doing Postmates deliveries on his scooter. The day he and Stiller pitched the show at Apple’s L.A. office, Erickson was broke enough that he took a Postmates order on his way home.” The New Yorker on The Hollywood Slog That Led Adam Scott to Severance.

“The Post interviewed a half-dozen people, who told their stories through sporadic coughs, and has reconstructed what happened after that first interaction in the parking lot: a five-day rescue mission that aligned an incredible cast of characters from across the country, paired them up with celebrities, all with the sole mission of rescuing a small spitfire of a dog that, for much of its life, nobody had wanted.” WaPo (Gift Article): The gripping story of how Oreo the dog was rescued from the LA fires. Also from WaPo: Watch man rescue woman and 4 dogs from Palisades Fire: ‘Just miraculous.’

+ ‘It was built for this’: how design helped spare some homes from the LA wildfires.

+ ‘Everyone thought it would cause gridlock’: the highway that Seoul turned into a stream.

+ Guitar Center launches initiative to replace instruments lost in Los Angeles wildfires.

+ Conan O’Brien to Receive 2025 Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. (Hopefully an uplifting moment for Conan who lost both of his parents within 3 days in December.)