The World Mourning Lincoln

150 years ago, America lost its President, but the whole world grieved the death of Abraham Lincoln. Matt Ford chronicles the range of responses in this stellar article for The Atlantic, including correspondence and newspaper reactions to the assassination from around the globe. It’s a fascinating way of thinking about his life and legacy, and a wonderful remembrance of one of the country’s greatest presidents.

 

On the night of April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head. Lincoln—president of the United States, preserver of the Union, and liberator of four million slaves—died the next morning. He would be the last casualty of a war that cost some 750,000 American lives—more than all other American wars combined, and among the deadliest wars of its century.

Read on at The Atlantic. 

Is Hillary any good at running for President?

It’s official: Hillary Clinton has entered the running to become the next President of the United States. But does she even have a shot? Jason Zengerle examines her past political campaigns in this piece for New York Magazine that came out this week in the lead-up to Clinton’s announcement. He provides numerous examples of how she’s campaigned in the past, how her style has changed, and what that all might mean for this upcoming race. And in a rather fascinating twist, rather than focus solely on Clinton the entire time, he also gets into some interesting territory in the middle, looking at how much predictive analysis has become part of the drama of elections over the past several decades. That all leads to a surprising conclusion: whether Hillary’s any good at campaigning or not, it might not really matter at all.

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In 2011, when checking her email became a viral meme. Photo: Kevin Lamarque//Pool via The New York Times/Redux

A lot can happen between now and then, but barring something truly unprecedented and totally unforeseen — a meteorite, a Benghazi revelation, a health scare, or a Martin O’Malley groundswell — on July 28, 2016, Hillary Clinton will step onto a stage in Philadelphia. There, surrounded by red-white-and-blue bunting and balloons — as well as Bill, Chelsea, baby granddaughter Charlotte, and tens of thousands of screaming Democrats — she will officially become her party’s presidential nominee.

Read the full story at New York Magazine.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Brilliant New Idea

Tech companies like Google have gotten plenty of press over the years for radically re-thinking the structure of their work environments. Now Facebook, the multi-billion dollar brainchild of Mark Zuckerberg, has a brilliant new plan for making the office feel more like home for its employees: actually making the office their home. Tim Dechant wrote this little piece in Wired about Facebook’s venture into employee housing–they’re not quite inviting employees to sleep under their desks, but the company is planning to build employees-only housing on its campus in Menlo Park, a suburb of San Francisco. But as Dechant points out, this model isn’t really that new at all, and has been tried before. In the 1800s. By railroad robber barons.

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In this photo taken Tuesday Feb. 3, 2015, a man rides through his bicycle through the campus at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)

WELCOME TO FACEBOOKVILLE, California. Population: 38,207. Elevation: 72 feet. Largely home to employees of the social networking giant. The quaint town traces its roots to Menlo Park, which at one point was one of the most affluent cities in Northern California. But when the company started building housing for its well-heeled employees back in the early 2010s, well, the writing was on the wall.

Read on at Wired.

The Long Fall of One-Eleven Heavy

Before the crash of Germanwings 9525 or the disappearance of MH370, there was SwissAir Flight 111. In some ways, the story is tragically predictable: a plane gone down in the ocean, hundreds of lives lost, hundreds more altered forever. But Michael Paterniti’s story for Esquire tells so much more. He takes the reader inside the plane, as it fell out of the sky and careened toward the water, then into the aftermath, tracing the ways that one event rippled out and changed the lives of so many people. Not only does Paterniti offer a powerful meditation on life, love, and death, but the depth of reporting and strength of his writing make this piece one of the best literary journalism stories composed in the last 20 years.

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Getty Images.

It was summer; it was winter. The village disappeared behind skeins of fog. Fishermen came and went in boats named Reverence, Granite Prince, Souwester. The ocean, which was green and wild, carried the boats out past Jackrock Bank toward Pearl Island and the open sea. In the village, on the last shelf of rock, stood a lighthouse, whitewashed and octagonal with a red turret. Its green light beamed over the green sea, and sometimes, in the thickest fog or heaviest storm, that was all the fishermen had of land, this green eye dimly flashing in the night, all they had of home and how to get there — that was the question. There were nights when that was the only question.

This northerly village, this place here of sixty people, the houses and fences and clotheslines, was set among solid rocks breaching from the earth. Late summer, a man and woman were making love in the eaves of a garishly painted house that looked out on the lighthouse — green light revolving, revolving — when a feeling suddenly passed into them.

Yes, something terrible was moving this way.

Read more at Esquire.