Bari’s Picks of the Week: A New Look

There are some weeks where this Friday roundup basically writes itself. Those are the weeks when there’s really just one big story and I want to share how we covered it. But this week we had a lot of great stories on a whole host of subjects that I want to share with you.

We’ll get right to it. But first, I want to talk about our new podcast, Spiral. It’s the story of Samantha Woll, a beloved Jewish community leader in Detroit who was murdered two years ago this week. It’s a shocking story about a remarkable woman, and I’m very proud of all the work reporter Frannie Block and producer Poppy Damon put into it. If you’re a Free Press subscriber, you can listen to all five episodes here with reduced ads. Trust me when I say that this show is worth your time.

Also, you might notice that my picks look a little different this week. It’s a new format we’re playing with. Subscribers, leave your reviews in the comments! In the meantime, let’s get to some of my favorite stories of the week.

A Word to the Right

“By insisting on ‘no enemies to the right,’ the right is repeating the left’s biggest mistake,” writes Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon. (Mark Makela via Getty Images)

“Bad ideas are like cancer. If you don’t deal with them quickly and decisively, they spread.”

Those are the words of Seth Dillon, the CEO of The Babylon Bee, the conservative satire publication. The Bee spends a lot of time making fun of progressive ideas. But Dillon is increasingly worried that the right is becoming so obnoxious that it will start alienating Americans just as the far left did over the last decade.

“What the radical right is demanding of conservatives like myself is that we unify with our extremists to ‘win,’ ” he writes. “But in what sense are we winning if we’re giving up our principles and tolerating evil in our own ranks? How does that advance our cause? How could it do anything but hurt our cause?” It’s a fantastic piece. Read the whole thing.

While you’re at it, check out Eli Lake’s story on how Nick Fuentes—a young, antisemitic internet figure—has increasingly become mainstream thanks to the help of people who should know better.

“There are a few reasons why Fuentes did not fall into obscurity like Richard Spencer, who was the leading MAGA racist of 2017,” Eli writes in this really must-read piece.

“To start, Fuentes has incandescent talent as a broadcaster. He can be legitimately funny. And like earlier generations of AM talk radio hosts, he knows how and when to switch trolling and rage on and off. But Fuentes can also be menacing. His diatribes against Jewish conservatives like Mark Levin and Josh Hammer pulse with venom. He yells into the camera and says: ‘You’re the filth. You are traitors. You are scum. You do not belong here. You are not American. You’re not home.’ ”

Read it to understand not just the rise of one far-right racist, but to understand how internet media works today.

What Palantir Does and Does Not Do

Maya Sulkin reports on a simple question with a not-so-simple answer: What does Palantir actually do? (Illustration by The Free Press. Image via Getty.)

Is there any company more mysterious than Palantir Technologies, the data firm co-founded by Peter Thiel and led by Alex Karp? The company has many critics who warn that it’s sucking up all our information and using it for nefarious ends. Or that it has some sinister relationship with the CIA or ICE or the Army.

But both critics and fans alike often have some trouble articulating what Palantir does. So we sent Maya Sulkin to find out. She started out by asking individual employees what they did for a living.

Is this a case where, to paraphrase one Palantir employee, people just fear something that they don’t understand? Or is there really something to worry about here? Or, perhaps, it’s maybe a little bit of both? Read Maya’s whole piece to find out.

The New Drug War

Once a federal inmate for trafficking weed, Vince Sanders is now the man behind the legal opioid-like compound 7-OH. (Earl Richardson for The Free Press)

Is President Donald Trump’s new habit of blowing up suspected dope boats in the Caribbean Sea legal? Jed Rubenfeld, our resident Yale constitutional law professor, thought the answer was simple: no. But as he looked into the issue further, he discovered that it was a bit more complicated than that. Read his piece on the legality of Trump’s aggressive new drug war.

But while we’re on the subject of things that get Americans high, you must read River Page’s dispatch from the Wild West of the recreational drug industry. It involves the competition between the makers of two drugs that have had some success staying legal: kratom, a plant that has been used in Southeast Asia for centuries, and 7-OH, which is a distilled version of kratom’s psychoactive ingredient. Both can get users extremely intoxicated. And both, needless to say, can be very dangerous.

So should both be banned? Or maybe just one and not the other?

Now, I wasn’t familiar with either of these things when River gave me his pitch. But this is a big story, and there’s nobody better to tell it than him. Check it out here.

These newfangled drugs might be alien to me. But I went to college. I know what marijuana is. But what I didn’t know, until Josh Code told me, is that its widespread legalization has led to emergency rooms filled with patients suffering from a very unpleasant ailment called cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome (CHS). Josh got all the data on CHS and talked to the people who suffered from it until they chose the only cure: quitting weed for good. It’s a great piece. Read it here.

That’s it for me. Check out The Free Press Weekend tomorrow and Sunday for some truly awesome stuff from Suzy Weiss, Kat Rosenfield, and Nellie Bowles, among others. I’ll see you next week.