As usual, there’s a lot going on, but I love gathering my favorite reads and pieces to share here. As always, I’m excited about this week’s collection of posts and articles that cut through the noise, provide valuable information, diverse perspectives and thoughtful insight on current events. Here are reads worth your time this weekend.

Before diving into this week’s Weekend Reads, I have a confession: this was a hard week. For the first time since the inauguration, the flow of bad news via legislature felt overwhelming. While the federal government may no longer be passing or implementing extremely troubling policy, states around the country are actively passing dangerous gun legislation, harming trans youth and attacking the right to vote. It’s a lot.

I have started – and abandoned – a number of issue-specific posts to provide a resource and plan of action for us to push back and protect our democracy and our people. I promise to actually finish and publish more soon.

Things worth reading this weekend

What Does It Take to Get a White Man Fired From CNN? by Wajahat Ali, a former opinion contributor on CNN, for The Daily Beast.

Commentators of color, whether at CNN or MSNBC, often commiserate behind the scenes, in WhatsApp groups, and in the green room. We share tips, strategies, gossip, absurd stories about how we’re often mistaken for other commentators of color, and otherwise helpful advice to stay sane and survive in an often hostile media landscape run mostly by white men and women. We know we often won’t get the benefit of the doubt, we won’t get many second chances (and that most of us won’t get first ones), and we don’t have many allies or mentors from our communities in positions of power who’ll look out for us. We know we live in a country where our “anxiety,” which is real, will remain hijacked by the “economic anxiety” of the “real Americans” who “birthed” this country with the help of our labor.

Do You Live in a Political Bubble? from the New York Times. Enter your address and this tool will tell you the political party of the thousand voters closest to you. Kind of creepy, totally interesting.

Inside a smuggling operation moving migrants across the US-Mexico border. Definitely watch the accompanying video report included on the story. Related, I shared this New Yorker piece on Instagram and it’s just so important to read: A Mother, Separated From Her Children at the Border, Comes Home.

How Kamala Harris spent her first 100 days because I can never get enough VP Harris.

COVID-19 news out of India is emotionally overwhelming. I found this collection of BBC articles on India helpful.

Gun Safety is the Best Issue to Bust the Filibuster from Dan Pfeiffer’s The Message Box. Seriously, you need to subscribe if you haven’t yet.

The fight over the filibuster is coming; the only question is when and how. If the filibuster is going down — which is a VERY open question at this point — it is only going to happen over an issue with immediate urgency that fires up Democratic activists but also has bipartisan support, a long record of Republican obstruction, and will be something Joe Manchin supports (ugh).

You don’t need to be a big National Women’s Soccer League fan to appreciate the evolution of an NWSL team – and the analysis of women’s pro sports – in this piece. The Transformation of a Soccer Club, and the Ways We Value Women’s Sports by Louisa Thomas for The New Yorker.

This short Embedded article What we write when we write about tweets is an eye-opening look the demands placed on digital media writers.

Sylvia of Tono Latino wrote a really helpful newsletter to explain what is happening in Colombia.

Fact-Check Your Crazy Uncle

Thanks to Tucker Carlson, there’s a widespread claim that thousands of people are dying from the COVID vaccine according to VAERS, U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. This Twitter thread from Voices for Vaccines is really helpful at dispelling this false claim. Reuters also fact-checks VAERS death by vaccine claim. PolitiFact reports that that VAERS is a tool for researchers but breeding ground for misinformation. Bottom line, VAERS reports are not fact-checked and include people died after being vaccinated but not as a result or in connection to the vaccine.

We Found the Textbooks of Senators Who Oppose The 1619 Project and Suddenly Everything Makes Sense, by Michael Harriott on The Root, adds important context to the current conservative attack on Critical Race Theory.

This week brought disappointing new jobs numbers. Despite Republican talking points, unemployment benefits are not creating a worker shortage.

Books I’m Reading

• I am still listening to We Are All the Same in the Dark. I think I am going to start listening on 1.2 speed because I really just want to know how it ends! The suspense of seeing how decades worth of a story weave together is killing me.
• This week I’m reading A Good Marriage by Kimberly McCreight. So far it’s a very entertaining mix of a murder mystery, and rich parents in Park Slope who aren’t what they appeared. It’s currently part of the Buy Two, Get one 50% off on Amazon.