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Culled from CJR’s frequently updated “Must-reads from around the Web,” our staff recommendations for the best pieces of journalism (and other miscellany) on the Internet, here are your can’t-miss must-reads of the past week:
A drone war is still a war — “Why is it not only OK but praiseworthy for the U.S. government to aim at Anwar al-Awlaki and kill him because he is an al-Qaeda ‘operative’ who may not actually have killed anyone directly … while Adam Lanza, who shot and killed 20 schoolchildren and seven adults, including his mother, before killing himself, could have had a trial that lasted weeks and cost millions of taxpayer dollars?”
Here is what happens when you cast Lindsay Lohan in your movie — “A month later, Schrader would be standing naked in a Malibu bedroom, missing his dogs and trying to coax Lohan out of her robe”
It’s not OK to be shitty — Guy Fieri, BuzzFeed, and the tyranny of stupid popular things
Meet the hero of the marriage equality movement — Edith Windsor never meant to be the face of a decades-long political, legal and civil-rights battle
How does BuzzFeed intend to crack a $1B valuation? — By embracing journalism’s past
Why isn’t Bob Woodward on trial next to Bradley Manning? — “The fact that Woodward’s far more sensitive leaks have never been the subject of any investigation underscores the clear and obvious point: protection of government secrets is the pretext for these prosecutions. The actual purpose is to intimidate everyone from exposing secret government wrongdoing and to severely punish those who do”
The improbable is the new normal — “Every minute a new impossible thing is uploaded to the internet and that improbable event becomes just one of hundreds of extraordinary events that we’ll see or hear about today”
What do you think of Ted Williams now? — Richard Ben Cramer’s profile of baseball icon Ted Williams, regarded as perhaps the finest piece of sportswriting on record
There are 181,000 social media ‘gurus,’ ‘ninjas,’ ‘masters,’ and ‘mavens’ on Twitter — That’s up from just 16,000 in 2009
‘Be wrong as fast as you can’ — The editor of the New York Times Magazine on the dangers of a promiscuous imagination
The George Saunders Experiment — Spending some time with “the writer for our time”
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