My last personal slump was brought on by a succession of blows: a job change, bad luck and bad judgment in love, and a daunting milestone birthday. Less, Andrew Sean Greer’s hilarious and brilliant Pulitzer-winning novel, took the edge off; reading about a middling writer’s middle-life-panic-induced trip on the eve of his 50th birthday made me think my own midlife crises of confidence might be survivable. That occasion wasn’t the first time a book turned my life around. When I got stuck in the muck on my dissertation, other academics discussing their methods freed me—Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel’s The Popular Arts was a life raft. And after I had a health setback, John Bingham’s The Courage to Start put me on a path to the Miami Half Marathon.

Which genre works best for this kind of inspiration depends on the reader. Some will need a book that will break them down before lifting them back up. Others will find solace in a title that blends laughter and pathos. And not every issue can be jump-started by literature; sometimes there’s nothing else for it but professional help. But bibliotherapy, or healing through reading, has been shown to alleviate depression symptoms; even undertaken informally, it may lead to mood shifts.

If you’re in search of a boost or a push to change your life, the seven books below may help. Their stories of stress and triumph make the hard times feel less lonely, provide catharsis, and, in some cases, serve as a model for navigating the ebb and flow of our lives.

Viking

Oh My Mother! A Memoir in Nine Adventures, by Connie Wang

In some ways, this propelling memoir about a mother-daughter duo traveling around the world reads like a mash-up of Eat, Pray, Love and The Amazing Race, but the differences are delightful. In each essay, the journalist and memoirist Connie Wang explores her complicated connection with her charismatic mother, Qing Li, and what she terms the many “oh my mother” moments that arise during their adventures—roughly akin to oh my God, the phrase is a “polite expletive,” a way to mark a tiny moment of revelation. The author also dives into her family’s history: When Wang’s parents came to the United States in the late 1980s, they were something like, to paraphrase Wang, “accidental immigrants”—a move meant basically to be a “four-year vacation” became permanent when her academic father’s public solidarity with his peers in Tiananmen Square made China no longer a safe option. There’s also a deeper story here about the growth that comes from getting outside one’s comfort zone. Wang finds her relationship with her mom to be equal parts endearing and infuriating, as only familial ties can be. Their journey may motivate readers to see their own complicated-but-loving bonds in a new light.

[Read: The problem with mothers and daughters]

Akashic Books

Mr. Loverman, by Bernardine Evaristo

In this earlier triumph by the Booker-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other, a well-off 74-year-old man with a surfeit of charisma and swagger finds the courage to live his truth. “The whole point of a midlife crisis is to start living the life you want instead of tolerating the life you have,” Barry Walker thinks in 1990. And yet, between fear, social stigma, and familial obligations, it takes him another 20 years to make a move. By then, he’s raised two daughters and found financial success in England, but what he still lacks haunts him. He’s been in love with his best friend, Morris, since they were teens in Antigua, and for almost all of that time, he’s also been hiding behind his marriage to Carmel, a righteously religious woman who thinks her husband’s great sin is being a womanizer. The journey to the life he’s dreamed about is filled with wit, revelations, and an intriguing cast of secondary characters. Still, Barry’s grand plans for self-actualization don’t take Carmel’s feelings into account, and the chapters that center her distinctive, idiomatic voice balance the novel. The story, about facing and telling the truth, is brilliant for anyone who’s ever had a dream they were afraid to pursue—or who felt they needed to hide parts of themselves for survival or acceptance.

Counterpoint

The Chinese Groove, by Kathryn Ma

The struggles between belonging and liminality, and between delusion and hope, are the beating heart of Ma’s softly satirical new novel. In China’s Yunnan province, Zheng Xue Li, also known as Shelley, is nominally part of a family, but he’s descended from a widely loathed branch and is effectively an outcast. His mother is gone, his only loving relation is with his grief-stricken father, and his relatives hate him. So when his father sends him to San Francisco in January 2015 to study and live with his supposedly rich uncle Ted (in reality a second cousin once removed), Shelley is hoping that this is where he’ll finally belong. Shelley also pins his hopes on the “Chinese groove”—his term for a communal bond with his Chinese-born “countrymen”—from which he’s sure goodwill and support will flow. Reality is more messy and interesting. California presents fresh challenges: Shelley’s situation is precarious, and San Francisco is no progressive Eden. But through the hardships and hustle, Shelley gets to know his adopted city while discovering the inner resources he needs to fight for himself and others—and to finally find his people. His optimism and savvy are contagious.

[Read: The California dream is dying]

Dutton

Time’s Undoing, by Cheryl A. Head

A mystery that revolves around a brutal act of racial violence may sound like an unusual choice for someone seeking a boost, but one of the most uplifting things you can experience through fiction is the vicarious rush of seeing justice served. Head excels in this great pleasure of a crime novel. She infuses her challenging subject with a finely calibrated balance of vulnerability, care, and empowerment; the effect is galvanizing. Meghan McKenzie, a Detroit-based investigative journalist covering the Black Lives Matter movement, goes south to Alabama to confront the nearly century-old murder of her own great-grandfather. In addition to gaining resolution for that open wound, she finds a connection to her ancestral roots and new love, while uncovering secrets with present-day implications. Getting long-deferred truth and closure is no small matter, and Meghan’s advocacy gives hope that progress and growth are possible when we reckon forthrightly with the past. Few books feel more timely or needed than this one.

Grand Central Publishing

All the Lonely People, by Mike Gayle

This is a charming, sentimental book about loneliness that makes you feel less alone. Hubert Bird, a reclusive Jamaican widower and an accidental fabulist, has been lying to his beloved daughter, Rose, for five years. After a disturbing incident, he turned his back on the world, and has been hiding away in his South London apartment ever since. Apart from taking care of his cat, Hubert’s prime activity is making weekly calls to Rose, where he constructs a rich life out of whole cloth so that she won’t worry. (The lies get so elaborate that he needs a notebook to keep track.) All goes according to plan—until Rose announces that she’s finally coming back to England for a visit, and Hubert is forced to try to make some real friends to keep up the ruse. This leads to a surprising acquaintance with Ashleigh, a single mom who’s new in the neighborhood, and life opens up from there. In a fractured, pandemic-scarred age, many of us can easily relate to Hubert’s predicament; Gayle’s novel reminds readers about the perils of isolation and the possibilities of reconnection, and that sweetness and generosity are worth seeking. It’s like gentle aversion therapy for the lonely.

[Read: Life is worse for older people now]

Random House

Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted, by Suleika Jaouad

Watching someone fall ill just as they’re finding their way can feel confusing and unjust. But in Jaouad’s elegant mash-up of memoir and travel writing, the coming-of-age and survivor’s tales merge into something truly special. This deeply candid account documents the young journalist’s experience with a life-threatening cancer, her treatment, and the 15,000-mile journey of spiritual healing she took once the acute physical danger subsided. In the months before she got sick, the author graduated from Princeton, moved to Paris, fell grandly in love, and was on the cusp of securing her dream job. At the same time, there were persistent signs that something was gravely wrong. Her diagnosis was devastating, but it was also a turning point toward recovery. She chronicles all of it: falling ill in her prime, starting a blog, falling out of love, and visiting with virtual strangers across the United States, who had followed along with her posts and kept her company through years of treatment. This sensitive meditation on those years explores how illness splits a person’s life in two. (The book’s title comes from a related Susan Sontag quote about that bifurcation.) What makes it inspiring is the propulsive energy and beauty of the story, and the fact that readers know she’s moving toward a vibrant future.

Random House

How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water, by Angie Cruz

In 12 near-therapeutic sessions, Cara Romero, a Dominican immigrant in New York, tells her life story to a counselor at a government job-retraining program for older people. Estranged from much of her family and unemployed since the factory she’d worked at for more than 25 years shipped her job overseas, she’s baring her soul to the city employee to secure a fresh start. But the 56-year-old is also reflective and blunt as she reveals all that she’s navigated over the decades. To begin, Cara announces, “I came to this country because my husband wanted to kill me.” Departing her home with a baby and almost no money was hard; her son leaving their home (and her) for good at 18 years old was even harder. The care of a friend, letting loose and crying “until you don’t need to cry no more,” helped save her. Witnessing Cara’s story is like a secondhand catharsis. Though the novel delivers more pathos than laughs, the protagonist is unforgettable, learning and changing in her 50s, making the most of her tiny victories. For anyone facing their own dark days, it’s a profoundly encouraging experience.

The Carolina Panthers select former Alabama quarterback Bryce Young with the first pick of the 2023 NFL draft.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has spent two decades taking some very fancy vacations with the immensely rich conservative donor Harlan Crow, who also allows Thomas’s mother to live rent-free on property he bought for a very generous price from Thomas almost a decade ago. Those revelations arrived in reports from ProPublica, Slate, and CNN over the past two weeks. Other outlets had previously reported that Crow had given a great deal of cash to the political-advocacy organization run by Thomas’s wife, Virginia, who was last seen urging Republicans to overthrow the 2020 presidential election to keep Donald Trump in power.

There is no proof Thomas ever acted at Crow’s direction. The justice has publicly stated that the failure to comply with the law by disclosing his financial entanglements with Crow was an unintended error, but if so, it was a mistake that is remarkably consistent with his ideological position that people who use their money and influence to steer the American political system ought to be able to do so in complete secrecy. This error was curiously convenient, in that it just happened to conceal a deep financial relationship with a very politically active right-wing donor who has bankrolled organizations that have a winning record before the Court. Perhaps more significant, Thomas’s idiosyncratic views about speech, democracy, and accountability have become more popular among the justices themselves as Republican appointments have moved the Court to the right. As Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern write at Slate, Thomas has argued over decades that laws compelling such disclosure are unconstitutional.

[From the September 2019 issue: Deconstructing Clarence Thomas]

In the 2010 Citizens United decision striking down limits on corporate electioneering, Thomas was the only justice to argue that the Court “should invalidate mandatory disclosure and reporting requirements,” because donors to the California anti-marriage-equality referendum Proposition 8 had been subject to threats, harassment, and verbal criticism. The first two are potentially illegal acts, and the last is a form of constitutionally protected speech. The conflation foreshadows the current right-wing discourse on free speech, the core of which is that conservatives have a right to prevent others from disassociating from them because they find their views noxious.

The 2010 case Doe v. Reed laid bare a key distinction between Thomas and the late Justice Antonin Scalia, in whose shadow Thomas was often unfairly accused of laboring. The columnist Helen Thomas once described him as being in Scalia’s “hip pocket,” a claim that woefully misunderstood their ideological relationship. In fact, Thomas frequently staked out much more extreme positions. In Doe v. Reed, Thomas argued that citizens participating in a ballot referendum had a right to conceal their identities, because “a long, unbroken line of this Court’s precedents holds that privacy of association is protected under the First Amendment.” Scalia, by contrast, asserted the importance of transparency in a democracy with a passage that struck Court watchers at the time as notable.

There are laws against threats and intimidation; and harsh criticism, short of unlawful action, is a price our people have traditionally been willing to pay for self-governance. Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed. For my part, I do not look forward to a society which, thanks to the Supreme Court, campaigns anonymously and even exercises the direct democracy of initiative and referendum hidden from public scrutiny and protected from the accountability of criticism. This does not resemble the Home of the Brave.

Once, when asked to compare his approach with Thomas’s, Scalia reportedly quipped, “I’m an originalist, but I’m not a nut.”

The Court would get nuttier in Scalia’s absence—though it’s worth noting that he was prone to altering his jurisprudence to match trends in conservative politics. In the 2021 case Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta, the Supreme Court held that California’s donor-disclosure laws were unconstitutional, relying in part on a 1958 case, NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson, which held that the civil-rights organization did not have to disclose its donors to a white-supremacist state government with a history of engaging in terrorism against its Black residents. A post on the website for the Federalist Society, the influential right-wing legal organization, hailed the recent decision as a victory against “cancel culture.”

[Read: The Clarence Thomas effect]

Put simply, the conservative position had moved from heeding Scalia’s reminder in Doe v. Reed of the importance of transparency and civic bravery in a democracy, to embracing Thomas’s 2010 Citizens United opinion, which conflates threats, violence, and harassment with people thinking you’re a jerk.

The financial relationship between Crow and Thomas raises obvious questions about the influence the Texas-based donor has over the justice; Crow-funded organizations have done remarkably well before the Roberts Court. Conservative outlets have asserted that the reporting by ProPublica, Slate, and CNN is a “smear,” but none of those outlets forced Thomas to not disclose his financial entanglements with a man spending fortunes to advance his political interests. If Thomas had made the disclosures, he still would have come under criticism, but public suspicion is much greater because he did not. And although that lack of disclosure is damaging in and of itself, it does not confirm that Thomas has ever used his power on Crow’s behalf.

After the Thomas stories broke, a number of conservative commentators piped up to defend Crow, testifying to his moral fortitude and personal integrity. But their rebuttals did more to illustrate the problems with Crow’s patronage than to defend it. Many of those who spoke up have personal or financial relationships with Crow. One such defender was Senator Mike Lee of Utah, a former clerk to Justice Samuel Alito—who echoes Scalia’s resentments, preoccupations, and contemptuous tone far more than Thomas does, but without the late justice’s relative erudition—and a recipient of political donations from Crow. Lee asserted that the reporting on the financial relationship between the two men was defamatory.

“Make no mistake: this is defamation,” Lee wrote on Twitter. “The media gets away with it only because Justice Thomas is a public figure, and under a Supreme Court ruling from 1964, public figures have essentially no recourse when they’re defamed by the media.”

Lee was referring to Thomas’s crusade against the landmark case Times v. Sullivan, which established the standard of “actual malice” for defamation, under which public figures need to prove that a speaker knew something was false or had a reckless disregard for the truth when they made the statement. The precedent enables Americans to have a robust public discourse without being sued into silence by wealthy and powerful people. Even so, as Fox News and the right-wing commentator Alex Jones recently discovered, it is not an ironclad protection for liars with large platforms.

Indeed, Lee’s statement about the reporting on Thomas, implying that it’s false even though the justice himself has acknowledged some of his own errors, comes closer to defamation than anything those outlets have published. Fortunately for Lee, free-speech precedents like the one he wants to repeal protect his right to engage in baseless hyperbole on subjects of public interest when he feels like farming clout on social media.

Put together, Thomas’s hostility to disclosure laws and to free-speech precedents paints a vivid picture of American democracy as he believes it should exist: a system small enough to be bought by a tight circle of anonymous oligarchs, and big enough to silence anyone who might criticize them. Only then, when the rich men who own the place and the rich men who run the place can take their Indonesian cruises on superyachts together in private, will speech and association be truly free.

During Gavin Newsom’s campaign to win another term as governor of California last year, I complained that rather than focusing on how to solve the Golden State’s many significant problems, the Democratic incumbent devoted much of his time and attention to heaping scorn on far-flung Republican counterparts, such as Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. He went so far as to rent billboards and buy televised political advertisements in other states.

Voters rewarded Newsom: He won just over 2 million more votes than his GOP opponent, the state legislator Brian Dahle, who had no hope of victory given his lack of name recognition and an electorate where there are twice as many Democrats as Republicans. And now Newsom is governing like he campaigned. Though he remains the most powerful elected official in America’s most populous state, he often acts as if he’s an influencer with no better tool for effecting change than callouts.

He recently raised $10 million to spend not on the poor, or the sick, or the young and full of potential, but rather on the governing elite’s answer to slacktivism: a political action committee.

[Conor Friedersdorf: The California dream is dying]

On March 30, Newsom announced the new PAC, the Campaign for Democracy, in a video posted to his Twitter feed, where he argues that America’s ills are downstream of officials in states that the GOP controls. “The problem in our country right now: authoritarian leaders who are so hell-bent on gaining power and keeping it by whatever means necessary that they’re directly attacking our freedoms in state after state,” he declared. “That’s why I’m launching the Campaign for Democracy. We’re going on the road to take the fight to states where freedom is most under attack.”

Taking “the fight to” authoritarians turns out to mean staging PR events in their jurisdictions. So far this month, Newsom has traveled to Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Florida, criticizing Republicans at every stop. In many instances, his criticisms align with positions I hold or have taken, and I could fill his calendar with visits to other red states that have policies I regard as wrongheaded. But why? Newsom has no political power in those states. He is so sufficiently unpopular among their voters that his presence there is as likely to help as hurt GOP governors. And, most important, his travels are a dereliction of the job he sought and won, because governors have a responsibility to focus on the problems that afflict their own state.

That used to go without saying. Now, however, leaders of organizations as varied as state governments, corporations, universities, museums, and theater companies have convinced themselves that good leadership entails issuing virtuous pronouncements on matters outside their realm of authority, often to denounce ills that have little to do with their job and its actual challenges.  

In deep-blue California, zero Republicans hold statewide office, and Democrats enjoy a supermajority in the state legislature and control over almost all of the major cities. Right-wing authoritarians hold almost no power, nor would their defeat in the Deep South solve any of the state’s problems.

And what problems!

As Newsom produces slick videos on location, the Golden State finds itself in a perilous position. The mixed blessing of winter storms that ended drought conditions in much of the state brought so much snow that this spring’s melt ensures flooding (while billions of dollars are needed for repairs and damages already done) and threatens catastrophe––an ill-timed storm or heat wave could melt the snow so fast, water could overwhelm parts of the Central Valley, threatening poor communities of vulnerable farmworkers and millions of dollars of crops. A governor working full-time on that matter alone couldn’t adequately prepare for what may come.

The state’s fiscal outlook is bleak, having quickly swung from a $100 billion surplus to a $22.5 billion deficit. In the longer term, the state is likely to get less much-needed water from the Colorado River.

As if that recent bad news isn’t enough, all of California’s long-standing problems are still around: housing, homelessness, struggling public schools. To be fair, they are thorny problems, and Newsom hasn’t been totally derelict in trying to solve them. In fact, he sometimes even improves on his predecessors with the approach that he supports.

[Read: The Democrats’ new spokesman in the culture wars]

Regardless, however, he hasn’t made nearly enough actual progress on any of them to take his eye off the ball. On housing, for example, the watchdog CalMatters has observed, “It’s difficult for housing advocates to criticize Gov. Gavin Newsom because he’s done more to boost production than any other governor in recent memory—but that’s mostly because the bar is so low.” Under Newsom, the acute statewide housing crisis continues. Homelessness continues to grow, despite years of costly interventions by elected officials. The dysfunctional bullet-train project staggers on. Confidence in public schools is falling statewide, with especially bleak numbers in Los Angeles, where “about 1 in 3 voters give D or F marks to public schools,” the Los Angeles Times reports. The Metro system in Los Angeles is shedding riders amid rampant drug use, soaring robberies, rapes, and aggravated assaults. Oakland has recorded more than 100 homicides for three years running. And as I detailed at length in 2021, California still has a miserly approach to opportunity.

These severe problems demand the governor’s full focus and a strategy that unfolds with the understanding that the forces stymieing positive change tend to be left-aligned in California, not right-aligned, for the simple reason that Democrats here wield so much more power than Republicans. Governing well means working against and upsetting at least some factions of Democrats.

The claim that “the problem in our country” is authoritarian Republicans in red states may be a good line if you’re a California Democrat seeking applause from a friendly audience or donations from your political base. But it elides all of the problems that afflict deep-blue jurisdictions.

California urgently needs a governor who focuses on its many problems, not the problems of the Deep South. And nothing any California governor says will tilt the country toward embracing their model of governance more than demonstrating that, rather than rising rents, rising homelessness, rising crime and disorder, and failing schools, their approach improves a state. If Newsom can’t improve on his current performance, he doesn’t deserve a future in politics.

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In footage from Moscow released this week, the detained Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich looked defiant. “He knows he hasn’t done anything wrong,” Jason Rezaian, a journalist who was arrested in Iran in 2014, told me. Gershkovich must also know that his detention is part of a bigger story.

First, here are four new articles from The Atlantic:

The new pro-life movement has a plan to end abortion. California isn’t special. Long COVID is being erased—again. The Fox News lawsuit was never going to save America. A Look of Defiance

This week we caught the first glimpse of the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich since he was arrested three weeks ago on charges of espionage. The brief clip was surreal: an American journalist standing inside a glass cage in a Moscow courtroom. Local Russian reporters shouted words of support; security guards rebuked them. But the thing that stood out most to me was the expression on Gershkovich’s face—not quite a smile, but a smirk.

Gershkovich’s arrest has provoked global outrage, and for good reason. He’s the first foreign journalist to be charged with espionage in Russia since the Cold War. The White House has called the charges against him “ridiculous” and demanded his release. The Journal has similarly denied the accusation of spying, and described his arrest as “a vicious affront to a free press.” There is no existing evidence that Gershkovich was a spy, and many experts believe his detention is meant to intimidate the foreign correspondents who remain in the country. (Gershkovich pleaded not guilty; he was denied bail, and he’ll remain in the Lefortovo Prison pending trial.)

As a journalist who covers the nexus of politics and the media, I’ve written about many of the issues raised by Gershkovich’s case: Russian information warfare, press freedom, authoritarian crackdowns on journalism. But after I watched those moments in the Moscow courtroom, the smirk is what stayed with me. What is Gershkovich going through right now? What is he thinking?

To try and understand, I called Jason Rezaian. As a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, Rezaian was arrested in Iran in 2014 on bogus spying charges. He was held captive for 544 days in Tehran, where he endured a sham trial not entirely unlike the one Gershkovich is likely to face.

Rezaian told me that the first weeks of imprisonment at the hands of an autocratic regime are disorienting. “You’re asking, Why am I here? What’s going on? This is all a big mistake.” Pretty soon, his initial hopes that the whole ordeal would get straightened out gave way to fear. Although the precise conditions of Gershkovich’s imprisonment are unknown, experts and former inmates at Lefortovo Prison believe he spent the first weeks of captivity in solitary confinement (as did Rezaian). “The experience of solitary confinement is pretty universal,” Rezaian told me. “It’s designed to break you down to a small, scared, malleable animal.” During Rezaian’s imprisonment, he said, he was routinely told by his captors that he would likely face execution.

That’s why Rezaian told me he, too, was impressed by Gershkovich’s smirk. “The thing that stuck out to me was the defiance,” Rezaian said. “He knows he hasn’t done anything wrong.”

Gershkovich must also know that his detention is part of a broader story. Vladimir Putin’s regime has been cracking down on independent Russian news outlets for years, and has gotten only more aggressive since its invasion of Ukraine. Some Russian-language outlets have been forced to relocate to other countries; others have shut down. That means that much of the credible reporting on Russia has come from foreign outlets. Now that could change. “This is a dramatic escalation,” Jodie Ginsberg, the president of the Committee to Protect Journalists, told me. “They have all but snuffed out Russian journalism. Foreign correspondents have somewhat been able to operate—this essentially sends a message that if they continue to do so, they potentially face jail.”

Russia isn’t the only country that’s becoming more hostile to journalists. In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has stepped up censorship of coverage critical of his government, and thrown scores of reporters in jail. In India, one of the last remaining news channels known for independent reporting was recently acquired by a billionaire ally of the country’s Hindu-nationalist prime minister. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 363 reporters were in prison around the world as of December 2022—more than at any point in the past 30 years.

Ginsberg attributes this grim statistic to the “decline of democracy and democratic norms worldwide.” Governments’ use of the court system against reporters, she said, is “a way of muddying the waters, equating journalism with criminal activity in the eyes of the public.”

Here in the U.S., we reporters have it pretty good by comparison. The First Amendment remains the envy of the world, and with rare exceptions, we are able to do our jobs safely without threat of imprisonment or violence. I’ll admit that I sometimes cringe when I see my fellow American political reporters self-righteously grandstand on cable news about the hardships we face, as though we’re persecuted heroes deserving of public sympathy and reverence. In truth, we’re just people doing our jobs—and not always perfectly.

But even in America, we’re not immune to rising anti-press sentiment. The former president—and current front-runner for the Republican nomination—has dubbed the news media “the enemy of the people,” and campaigned on making it easier to sue journalists. His supporters frequently target individual reporters for online harassment. And as I reported in a cover story for The Atlantic in 2021, local newspapers across the country are being systematically gutted by a hedge fund founded by a wealthy donor to that same former president.

All of which is to say, now is not a good time for civic-minded Americans to look away from genuine authoritarian assaults on the press. When I talked to Rezaian and Ginsberg, I asked them both what ordinary people could do to support Gershkovich. Rezaian said the thing he craved most in captivity was outside contact: “Whatever connection you have to the free world, it’s like oxygen.” To that end, friends of Gershkovich have set up an email address to which you can send supportive notes; they’ll translate the notes into Russian—ensuring that they pass through the prison’s screening system—and send them to his cell. The email is freegershkovich@gmail.com.

Ginsberg, meanwhile, stressed the importance of keeping the international spotlight on Gershkovich’s case by posting on social media or calling congressional representatives. “This isn’t just about Evan,” she told me. “It’s about our ability to understand what’s going on in Russia and all over the world.”

Related:

Russia escalates its war on reporters. A secretive hedge fund is gutting newsrooms. Today’s News The Supreme Court extended a temporary stay on a lower-court ruling, upholding the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, which will preserve access to the drug through at least the end of the workweek. Two teenage boys were charged with murder in connection with the shooting at a 16th-birthday party in Alabama that injured 32 and left four dead over the weekend. Facebook parent company Meta began a new round of layoffs; the cuts are reportedly focused on workers in technical roles, including members of the user-experience and messaging teams. Dispatches The Weekly Planet: Collecting food scraps in your kitchen can invite insect invaders—but there are plenty of ways to outsmart them, Katherine J. Wu writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Getty

Nutrition Research Forgot About Dads

By Virginia Sole-Smith

When his 18-year-old daughter Francine first started losing weight, in the fall of 2018, Kenneth initially thought it was a good thing. Francine had always been artistic but never particularly athletic, which puzzled her father. Kenneth, now 47, is a runner with dozens of half-marathons and even one ultramarathon under his belt.

When Francine started to express an interest in exercising and joining Kenneth’s wife, Tracy, for workouts, Kenneth and Tracy thought it was a positive sign. When Francine announced that she was vegan, they rolled with it.

Then Francine’s hair started to fall out.

Read the full article.

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Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.

Two teenage boys charged with murder after shooting at 16th birthday party in Alabama that killed four and injured 32

Before Alexis Dowdell headed to her Sweet 16 party, she sat on her big brother's bed to tell him she was nervous for the event she had been planning for months -- only to have him make her laugh and assure her that he would make sure she had fun, she says.

Alexis Dowdell told the BBC her 18-year-old brother pushed her to the floor as gunfire erupted.

“What would it do to the American mythology of rock music to say that its pioneers were Black, queer people?” the ethnomusicologist Fredara Hadley asks in the new documentary Little Richard: I Am Everything, out Friday. It’s a valid question, and the film offers an exuberant answer. In order to tell the story of the pathbreaking piano-rocker whose work still pulses in roadside diners and on wedding dance floors, the director, Lisa Cortés, uses animated sparkles and montages of rainbow fringe and high heels. Along with Hall of Famers such as Mick Jagger, commentary comes from the ever-fabulous actor Billy Porter and a few Black scholars of gender, race, and the arts. They argue that “Tutti Frutti” was not just a hot song; it was a Molotov cocktail lobbed at the heteropatriarchy.  

All of this may sound like a provocation, but it’s mostly an assertion of fact. In addition to popularizing the combo of chugging-train drum beats and lusty wails, Little Richard personally tutored the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and directly inspired James Brown and David Bowie. A wearer of eyeliner who variously described himself as gay or omnisexual over the years, he built upon a preexisting queer lineage. When Richard’s father threw him out of his Macon, Georgia, home at an early age, Richard was taken in by the owners of a queer-leaning nightclub. He’d soon learn from drag queens, bawdy chanteuses, and a few Black singers now legendary for defying gender norms: the gospel guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who brought Little Richard onstage for the first time; the bouffant-wearing Esquerita, who taught him to play piano; and the “Prince of the Blues,” Billy Wright, who inspired his love of makeup.

Little of this history is unknown or hidden. Indeed, the energy coursing through this essayistic documentary comes in large part from Richard’s own self-mythologizing. He often touted his own importance as the “architect,” rightful “king,” and “quasar”—brightest star—of rock and roll. He spoke matter-of-factly about sex and sexuality (he was also, he said, the “queen” of rock and roll). As it retells his rise, Cortés’s film suggests how so flamboyant a figure became widely beloved in the face of racism and homophobia: To some white audiences, a feminized Black man was less threatening than any other kind. The movie also explores how cultural appropriation—or “obliteration,” as the writer and sociologist Zandria Robinson calls it—long kept Richard from getting his due (recent years have begun to see broader recognition of the debt that Elvis and other white rockers owed him).

[Read: Little Richard set the mold by breaking it]

Really the film wants to argue for an inextricable, even metaphysical, connection between Richard’s impact and his identity. “Queerness is not just about sexuality but about a presence in a space that is different from what we require or expect—different from the norm,” Robinson says at one point. According to this framework, Richard’s musical breakthroughs had revolutionary social effects, inviting segregated and repressed audiences to integrate and loosen up. His example liberated Paul McCartney to scream and Jagger to shimmy, and made it possible for Lil Nas X and Miley Cyrus to simultaneously scandalize and seduce audiences today.

This view of Richard is inspiring and convincing. But it squares awkwardly with the fact that Richard, at various times throughout his life, aligned with conservative Christianity and renounced his past work. The first epiphany happened in 1957, when Richard witnessed what he believed to be apocalyptic omens while on tour. He then enrolled at a Seventh-day Adventist college in Alabama, where he reportedly told students that he would buy back and destroy any records of his that they owned. He would return to, and escape from, the secular musical world a few times in the decades to come. The final years of his life were spent ensconced in church life. His public speaking emphasized the incompatibility of rock and roll—and his formerly gay lifestyle—with the teachings of Jesus.

What happened? A few reasons for his religiosity seem apparent. As a kid, Richard dreamed of becoming a minister like his father. As Jagger notes in the documentary, if you have the idea that secular music is the devil’s music drilled into you during childhood, you’re going to have a complicated adulthood as a secular musician. Watching the film, it also becomes apparent that many of Richard’s Christian awakenings coincided with moments when the excesses of his rock-star life were especially pronounced: a long-haul tour in the ’50s, a period of heavy drug use in the ’70s.

[Read: ‘Rock and roll ain’t what it used to be’]

What the documentary doesn’t note are the familiar, even poignant, dimensions of Richard’s seemingly shocking reversals. Many other iconoclastic musicians—Prince, Ye (formerly Kanye West), Bob Dylan—have, at various points, found God and begun reevaluating or neglecting their earlier work. The history of popular music is in part a history of bold people changing the world, being rewarded with riches, and then facing the question of how to survive burnout, addiction, and the waning of public affection. Endless rebellion is taxing and has, for many stars, proved fatal—is it that surprising for religion to beckon as a refuge? To a viewer of the film, Richard’s spiritual journey raises questions about him as a human, not a symbol. I wanted to understand his significance to the church communities he joined; I wanted to know whether those around him found him to be at peace in his later years.

The documentary, however, mostly treats Richard’s sanctified chapters as a disappointment, a counterrevolutionary subplot. Robinson notes the “harm” Richard caused when he started spouting homophobia. Sir Lady Java, a trans performer who was a good friend of Richard’s, says, “I feel he betrayed gay people ... But I do understand. You’re not strong enough to take it. I understand that.” “Harm” and “betrayed” aren’t overstating the case: As today’s legislative and cultural campaigns against queer rights show, what public figures say matters. Still, it’s hard not to also read a tinge of personal judgment in the movie’s appraisals. The scholar Jason King puts Richard’s trajectory this way: “He was very, very good at liberating other people through his example. He was not good at liberating himself.” The film sometimes takes an elegiac, near-tragic tone—which is a bit strange when you consider that Richard died at the ripe old age of 87, with his cultural renown secure and his energies having been devoted to personal salvation.

As the title I Am Everything hints, the film wants to do what Richard once did: make space for complex, unruly expression. But conflating personal identity with political projects, construing queerness so broadly that it becomes a synonym for subversive, sometimes flattens reality. Queer people can be revolutionaries, but they’re also negotiators, crowd-pleasers, survivors. How telling that the “Tutti Frutti” that changed the world was not the bawdy version that Richard originally wrote—“If it don’t fit, don’t force it”—but the one he allowed to be toned down by the songwriter Dorothy LaBostrie, who’s shown in full church-lady regalia in I Am Everything. Little Richard’s life was no tidy story of transcendence from his times and circumstances, because no one’s is. What he showed is that rock and roll, like queerness, is not a break from the past; it’s a dance with it.

Four were killed at a 16-year-old girl's birthday party on Saturday in the small town of Dadeville.