u/newyorkerest

Talbot digs up a 1983 memo in which a 27-year-old Roberts argued for 15-year term limits on federal judges, so they would "not lose all touch with reality." He is now 71, 21 years into the job, and told an audience in Buffalo last year that he plans to go out "feet first." The number that frames the whole term: of 35 emergency applications from the second Trump administration, the Court has ruled in its favor in whole or in part 25 times, usually without explaining why.

My pick from this week's New Yorker: newyorkerest.com.

The injury list is the easy hook, but the real thread is why. Knoxville had asthma as a kid and ended up in the ER several times a year for adrenaline shots, which he describes as "sniffing an eight ball of cocaine all at once." Decades later he read about John Stapp, the Air Force researcher who strapped himself to a rocket sled, hit 600 mph, and slammed to a stop. Stapp came out of the hospital not relieved but hungry for more risk, and called it survival euphoria. Knoxville read that and thought, yeah, that's it.

(This was my pick from this week's New Yorker: https://newyorkerest.com)

Kirkpatrick got Biden's inner circle on the record with unusual candor.

Jake Sullivan admits that in the Oval Office "we repeatedly raised and discussed options for withholding weapons," but Biden always deferred, and Sullivan now says flatly that "we should have put more pressure on Israel to take a different approach."

And when Blinken finally snapped that he never wanted to hear the Israelis' refrain of "two more weeks" again, Ron Dermer joked he'd say "fortnight" instead.

(This was my pick from this week's New Yorker: newyorkerest.com)