Long Reads That Caught Our Eye This Week

We love to read. . . Your weekly roundup of longreads that caught our eye. Be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray [View this email in your browser]( We love to read. Here are a few longreads from around the web that caught the attention of our editors this week. THE WHITE DARKNESS David Grann | The New Yorker A solitary journey across Antarctica. --------------------------------------------------------------- I. Mortal Danger The man felt like a speck in the frozen nothingness. Every direction he turned, he could see ice stretching to the edge of the Earth: white ice and blue ice, glacial-ice tongues and ice wedges. There were no living creatures in sight. Not a bear or even a bird. Nothing but him. It was hard to breathe, and each time he exhaled the moisture froze on his face: a chandelier of crystals hung from his beard; his eyebrows were encased like preserved specimens; his eyelashes cracked when he blinked. Get wet and you die, he often reminded himself. The temperature was nearly minus forty degrees Fahrenheit, and it felt far colder because of the wind, which sometimes whipped icy particles into a blinding cloud, making him so disoriented that he toppled over, his bones rattling against the ground. [Read More]( David Frum Is a Political Party of One Eve Peyser | Vice The famous Never Trump thinks conservatism is "obsolete," but will Republicans listen to him? --------------------------------------------------------------- David Frum thinks I should smoke less weed. “If you start it early, it will have an effect on your IQ, and it does seem to have strong effects on motivations and ambition,” he told me. We were sitting in a Georgetown Starbucks on an unseasonably beautiful Saturday morning in January, the federal government had been shut down mere hours ago, and Frum was happily chattering away about his favorite topic—the slow demise of the American republic. Though Frum spends his days decrying Donald Trump and working as an editor for the liberal Atlantic, he’s still a sort of stereotypical Bush-era Republican, a pundit who has penned multiple articles on the dangers on legalizing pot. So naturally, I thought it would be fun to split a joint with him to convince him weed wasn’t actually that bad. I’d tweeted at him a bunch of times about the prospect of getting high together, but he (sensibly) ignored my smug trolling. So when his book editor reached out to me about covering Trumpocracy: The Corruption of an American Republic, his latest polemic on the country’s slow collapse, I once again found myself begging Frum to get high with me. [Read More]( Hope Hicks Has Been Able To Spin Every White House Scandal Except Her Own Anne Helen Petersen | BuzzFeed News The communications director has survived the storms of the Trump White House by doing what PR gurus do best: never, ever making the story about you. Until now. Hope Hicks is not a spokesperson, or a strategist, or a speechwriter. She is not Anthony Scaramucci — whose briefly-held position as White House communications director she permanently took over in September. She is a trained PR professional, whose primary task is to orchestrate or soften the blow of press coverage, not appear in it. Hope Hicks does not tweet. Not even a little bit. She does not appear on television. She does not agree to interviews. Her Instagram is private. When Olivia Nuzzi tried to profile her for GQ, Hicks invited Nuzzi to talk to Trump about her — while she sat in the back of the room. To be truly skilled at this sort of PR doesn’t just mean constantly deferring to your client. It means disappearing. We don’t know what Hope Hicks’s voice sounds like. We don’t know her opinions, because she doesn’t have any that are public. Until very recently, most people outside of media and politics did not know she existed. [Read More]( Does aid do more harm than good? Harriet Sergeant | The Spectator The Oxfam abuse scandal has revealed a sinister side to international charities --------------------------------------------------------------- What a scandal for our times. Oxfam, that upholder of modern-day virtue, unassailable in its righteousness, buried for seven years that its aid workers exploited young girls. The men abused their power to have sex with desperate victims of the Haiti earthquake — the very people they were supposed to protect. Michelle Russell of the Charity Commission is clear about the deception. ‘We were categorically told by Oxfam; there were no allegations of abuse of beneficiaries. We are very angry and cross about this.’ [Read More]( Copyright © 2015 The Federalist, All rights reserved. You are receiving this e-mail because you opted in to receive e-mail updates from TheFederalist.com. 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