Memorial Day Power Reads - Thank You for Power Corridor's Nearly 17,000 Subscribers !

It's been a busy few months, with the banking crisis, the first-ever indictment of a U.S. president and a turbulent week ahead as the nation edges toward a massive default. Who's ready for a holiday?

Dear readers,

This week marks the tenth week since the launch of Power Corridor, which is closing in on 17,000 subscribers. (Help us break 20,000 by subscribing here.)

These past few months have brought a litany of fascinating, as well as harrowing, events, from the banking crisis, which nearly unraveled our nation’s economy (again), to the indictment of a former U.S. president, to the deeds, good and bad, of prominent CEOs, politicians, bankers and members of the media (one who remains in prison in Russia for reporting the truth, another ousted from Fox News on the heels of a record defamation settlement).  

Looking toward next week, the U.S. economy will be challenged beyond what is conceivable by the frantic congressional battle over the debt ceiling, spending and whether the nation should pay, or default on, the debts it already owes. (That is, money it has agreed to pay, as opposed to any new spending.)

This fight may be one of the toughest and dumbest yet, and I will be continuing to write about it as we go, even when I don’t really want to see what happens next (admittedly, a minor hazard of the job). In addition, I will be interested in hearing from you, our readers – our comments section is ON.

Even before we launched our first issue, many of you took a chance on a new publication and subscribed. I have very much enjoyed hearing from you, both on here as well as on social media (you can find me and Power Corridor on social, just check out the bottom of this newsletter and click over).

Writing is often a solitary practice, so getting your feedback has been a welcome highlight to the week. Thank you.

While we are facing what is shaping up to be a roller-coaster week — dare I hope it might not be? — the long holiday weekend still lies ahead. For those of you with service members in your lives, we’re sending the very best wishes to you and yours. And for people like me and millions of others who have service members in their families or households, as well as some departed, I hope you will find time to honor them, think of them and remember them.

With this Memorial Day slated to be one of the busiest in years — the long-delayed travel resurgence has finally come, hopefully in time to stave off another recession — we at Power Corridor are wishing you a happy, healthy and safe holiday.

See you next week!

Leah McGrath Goodman, Editor, Power Corridor

Power Reads

A selection of fab reads, for your weekend memorification.

It turns out finding a poignant Memorial Day read is not so easy. I spent some time trying to find one that was not too violent-sounding or in the weeds. Here, Kiley Bense writes in Longreads about the loss of a great uncle, how his remains took six years to find their way home after World War II and examines why Americans tend to honor their dead in highly stylized ways. “We want to imagine that soldiers and sailors die in glorious charges—that they greeted death because they chose to,” Bense says. “We picture the cavalry in a medieval tapestry: knights weighed down with bright armor, swords that glister in falling sunlight, screams and drums and flapping pennants. This impulse to romanticize has only become stronger in the wake of our 21st-century ‘forever’ wars, where open-ended conflicts rage on for murky reasons.” (Btw, I did not know “glister” was a word, but indeed it is.) A very good read for the weekend.

While it’s no secret the U.S. and China aren’t getting along right now (check out Power Corridor’s coverage of the TikTok fracas), the two nations are cemented together, with two-way trade between them setting a record at $690 billion last year. China also has a history that greatly informs what can sometimes seem like its oddly adversarial behavior toward America, from “century of humiliation” to it current focus on being less dependent on the rest of the world while making the rest of the world more dependent on it. This week, Patrick Trousdale, who leads The Daily Upside, our parent company, took a closer look at what makes China tick in this thought-provoking deep dive.

In the early aughts, author Alice Sebold dropped a small book that made a big impact. “The Lovely Bones,” a best-selling novel about a young woman who is raped and murdered, was at one point characterized, according to The New Yorker’s Rachel Aviv, as the “most commercially successful début novel since ‘Gone with the Wind.’” But the book has a much deeper history — one based on true events that directly involved the author herself. This story, which has made many writers rethink their own work, is one worth telling and sharing.

Thanks everyone for reading — and have a wonderful and safe weekend!