The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson links United Airlines’s violent ejection of a passenger to failing American infrastructure. “Our ability to rely on getting from one place to the other,” she writes, “seems poised on a knife’s edge.” At Gizmodo, Adam Clark Estes calls for a boycott of the airline, citing their track record of poor customer service and public relations blunders. “Do you want to get beat up by a mercenary on your next flight? Of course you don’t,” Estes writes. “So stop flying United.” At Paste, Shane Ryan notes that United is just a manifestation of a larger problem. “They are a cruel agent, without a doubt, but they are not some lone wolf,” he writes. “They are a product of an indifferent system that increasingly devalues individual life, and that system is called America.” After running a highly-criticized (and later updated) article about the passenger’s decade-old criminal case, the Louisville Courier-Journal defended their decision to highlight Dao’s past. “His original case was pretty high profile. It’s a name that doesn’t come out of the blue,” said Executive editor Joel Christopher told the Columbia Journalism Review. “To not acknowledge that history and context would be unusual, frankly.”
Sarah Ryley, who won a Pulitzer Prize this week for her criminal justice reporting at the New York Daily News, has joined The Trace as a staff writer. Fusion editor at large Alexis Madrigal is heading toThe Atlantic, where he’ll cover Silicon Valley and the tech world.
The Daily Show’s Hasan Minhaj will host the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner later this month. CNN notes that “Minhaj is not as well-known as those comedians were when they performed, indicating that the correspondents’ association may have had trouble booking a huge star this year.”
In her debut book advice column for the New YorkTimes, Nicole Lamy suggests titles for a former bookworm who is now too distracted by kids and social media to read and a grandmother of well-traveled preteens who could use a book with a female protagonist once in awhile.
At Deadspin, Lindsey Adler examinesNew York Times public editor Liz Spayd’s column on the paper’s sports section, writing that Spayd “consistently manages to convey a totally warped perception of the Times’ (many) weaknesses to its readers.”
At Eater, Helen Rosner highlightsLucky Peach’s influence on the art and design of glossy food magazines. “Lucky Peach looked like nothing else out there,” she writes. “That is, until everything else out there started to look like Lucky Peach.” The magazine, which relied more on illustration and snapshots than highly-composed food photography, was praised by David Carr for looking like it was “conjured in a tattoo parlor.” Although Rosner notes that some of the images crossed the border between edgy and offensive, its work changed food media for the better. “It doesn’t really matter if other magazines were already starting down the same path, or if Lucky Peach just hit a sweet spot of doing their thing early, and doing it loud, and doing it right,” she concludes. “It made for a really, really cool magazine.”