Hi you,

It’s official. I’ll be making a second season of my PBS series, America Outdoors with Baratunde Thurston! Network president Paula Kerger announced it at the Television Critics Association last week, and we aren’t wasting any time. Starting next month, I’ll be heading out intermittently to experience more of our connection to nature and bring those stories to you. I’ll try to plan my newsletters so as not to miss this lovely schedule we’ve been on, but if I abandon all these screens for the life of an ice fisherman, I hope you’ll be the first to understand. 

Meanwhile, I had planned to write this week with an update on post-Elon Twitter and what it means for social media and Gen Z in particular, but I’ll save that for a future edition. One related nugget I will share now comes from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Massey Lectures, delivered on CBC Radio, in 1967. In one lecture he warned that a “distortion of the technological revolution is that instead of strengthening democracy… it has helped to eviscerate it” by, in part, increasing feelings of alienation rather than deepening trust and connection. If anything, his analysis of the threat of technology is even more relevant today, and proves the continued connection of the past to the present and future. 

Just don’t tell that to Florida governor Ron DeSantis, or he’ll block access to even more of the real M.L.K. in his absolutely batshit effort to fuel his political rise by stoking the flames of a culture war that prioritizes ignorance over knowledge. In the latest move, his administration rejected a pilot version of the College Board’s Advanced Placement course on African American Studies. That course, according to the Florida Department of Education, “lacks educational value” and violates state law, presumably the...

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Harry & Meghan in History

Despite my best efforts to not care about the British royal family, I’ve found myself entranced by the Sussexes’ journey of racial awakening, moved by their historical traumas, and transformed by their exile.

BARATUNDE THURSTON

For most of my life, I’m proud to say, I successfully avoided caring about the British royal family, but Harry and Meghan have ruined all that. Now I see their experience, their story, our exhaustion with their story, all of it, as an opportunity to usefully blur the line between past and present; to discover uncomfortable connections between various historical dots, and to redraw those connections in new, healthier ways. I know that’s a lot to say about people many of us are tired of hearing about, and who often seem so self-absorbed. And yet I’m still a bit surprised at how much I’ve been drawn in. 

Let me start at the beginning for me. In the late summer of 1997, I was in mourning, and I was in debt. I was heading into my junior year at Harvard. The mourning began earlier that summer when...

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Bezos’s Field Trip

Reading between the lines of Bezos’s visit to The Washington Post offices.

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Secrets of Stanford

How the hell are the Bankman-Frieds paying their astronomical legal bills?

WILLIAM D. COHAN