Jess Zimmerman is editor-in-chief of Electric Literature. Her new book is Women and Other Monsters.

“My goals are to be exactly as vulnerable as I feel is necessary. And not that’s necessary to me—that's necessary to the observer, to the reader. If [my story] is out there, it's out there because in order to make the larger point that I wanted to make … I had to give this level of access. It does kind of feel more strategic than cathartic.”

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American Battlefield: 72 Hours in Kenosha

Last summer, in a small Wisconsin city, the country’s fiercest differences collided in the streets—and a teenager named Kyle Rittenhouse opened fire, shooting three people. In the aftermath, a disquieting question loomed: Were these among the first shots in a new kind of civil war?

Tejal Rao is the California restaurant critic for The New York Times and a columnist for The New York Times Magazine.

“I've been thinking a lot about what makes a restaurant good. Can a restaurant be good if it doesn't have wheelchair access? Can a restaurant be good if the farmers picking the tomatoes are getting sick? How much do we consider when we talk about if a restaurant is good or not? … If people are being exploited at every single point possible along the way, how good is the restaurant, really? … I worry that the pandemic has illuminated all of these issues and things are just going to keep going the way that they were. ... That's what I worry about. That nothing will change.”

Thanks to Mailchimp for sponsoring this week's episode.

Evacuation from China, Quarantine in the UK: A Covid-19 Dispatch

We stopped at a service station where there were old truck drivers, their vehicles festooned with red banners: “All-out war against the virus, weather hard times together.” The drivers wore their masks down around their chins as they smoked. I asked for water at the only open shop, and the assistant pulled his jacket up to cover his mouth before saying “over there.”