The Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina died on Saturday, after what reports have called a "brief and sudden illness" following an official visit to Ukraine. He was 71. In 2003 Graham succeeded ancient dread Confederate mummy Strom Thurmond in the Senate, and was an actively malevolent force in American society for all the remaining 23 years of his life, at a scale larger than he'd been an actively malevolent force in American society for the preceding 48.

Graham's hatreds and bigotries were bog standard for his party, and they were legion. He hated gay and queer people; he hated black and brown people; he hated Muslims; he hated liberals; he hated efforts to make the nation more just, the environment cleaner, the future better. He hated free speech and the free press and privacy for anyone else. He hated the idea that the United States ought ever to be constrained by anything other than its own self-interest, as defined exclusively by guys like him. He hated the expectation that the United States would ever project its might with anything less than maximal imperial violence and bloodlust. He hated all of these with blithe good-ol'-boy cheer and the sneer of the frontrunner. He went on The Daily Show a bunch, so that both sides could playact a kind of broadminded comity that the suckers they both held in contempt just lap right up. Guh hyuk hyuk hyuk, isn't it charming how I want all of y'awl dead.

For a little while in the aughts and again at intervals Graham played at a kind of shriekingly insincere, cornpone Bible College John McCain act, pretending to part with his party on judicial nominees, on immigration reform, on gun control, on vaccines, when that fake disunity could be performed safely at the "sponsoring a doomed, dead-on-arrival bill" or "going on Meet the Press" stage and abandoned long before anybody had to cast a vote. Like many in his party he pretended to care about decorum and civility when he thought Donald Trump was just a freak novelty act the establishment would eventually crush; like everyone in his party he ditched that pretense as soon as the prediction turned out to be wrong. He spent the last decade of his life letting Donald Trump wear him as a glove and telling himself it was the other way around. It bought him the war with Iran he'd worked for decades to make happen, and he fucked off the mortal coil before he could be made to reckon with it being a failure.

If you haven't heard about the Prairieland defendants, these are 9 protestors convicted for protesting at an ICE detention center in Texas. You can read about their protest, the grisly sentencing, and one protestor's conviction over being in a book club. These folks are in prison for protesting the injustices they see in their community.

If you are able, their supporters ask us to send letters of support to these brave folks. Click here to find contact information for each person. Please also review the guidelines for what's acceptable to send. There are also links to send money to their commissary accounts.

The sun is finally shining here in Seattle. Temperatures are hovering in my favorite range: chilly in the morning, warm (but not too hot) during the day, and cool at night. I'm taking a short break while I recharge my writing battery. I'm hoping the charger is solar powered.

Stop Asking People to Think Like Planners, by Charles Marohn

Community engagement can be hard to get right for exactly the reasons in this essay. We often ask for ideas from people who may not think that way. I've waited an hour for a bus, but I don't know enough about the bus system to know how to fix my grumbling. Are more buses the right answer when budgets are tight? Do I know about the intersection several miles away that buses take forever to get through? Gather people's problems, come up with solutions, then work through them together. That will produce real and effective results.

It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.

That statement is often misunderstood as an argument against listening to customers. It isn't. Apple listened obsessively to customers. What [Steve] Jobs understood was that customers experience frustrations, desires, and obstacles. They do not necessarily experience solutions.

Lost Recipes, by Abe Beame

This article writes about american culture told through the pages of hip-hop magazines. These magazines covered musicians and issues that mainstream media never touched. Archivists and historians are working to preserve these stories now at risk of being lost forever.

“Oftentimes, when we're thinking about American journalism, we're thinking about Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, or Gay Talese, and they’re important. But we also need to think about Mimi Valdés and Bönz Malone and Bobbito Garcia,” Gates told me. “Hip-hop journalism was responsible for talking about American culture in a way that no one else was at the time. In a Source magazine in ’92, you could read about Palestine, you could read about Nelson Mandela being freed, you could read about a new demo tape on the way from a guy named Biggie Smalls. It showed a people's history of alternative culture that you're not getting from the mainstream publications.”

Calvin and Hobbes and the Price of Integrity, by Matthew Morgan

Ever wonder why there were no Hobbes dolls to keep the stuffed Garfields of the world company? It turns out that Bill Watterson made sure it would never happen. His righteous crusade, defending art against cheap commercialization, seemed quaint three decades ago. But in a world where art is both disposable content and IP, maybe he was onto something.

"For Watterson, craft has never been a side dish to the main course. It’s inextricable from the truths he wants to express and the meaning he hopes his work might have for its readers. It’s his belief that half a century ago, the best comics were more than amusing to look at; they were beautiful and undoubtedly counted as capital-A Art. Here in the mid-nineties, he 'can’t think of a single strip today that comes close to that standard of craftsmanship'."

All Hail the Cheese Enchilada, by Amy McCarthy

Is there any dish more perfect than the cheese enchilada? You can dress up an enchilada with all kinds of fillings and it will be delicious. But nothing beats a real Tex-Mex cheese enchilada: a melted river of cheese wrapped in a corn tortilla drenched in chili sauce, topped with raw onion and baked. This is still the only way I like eating raw onion. My mouth watered while reading this deep dive into one of my favorite dishes.

"When I have been away from Texas for more than about 48 hours, I start to crave a cheese enchilada. It’s not that they don’t exist in other places — of course they do, incredible Mexican food exists all over the country — it’s just that there’s no need for me to go in search of a great cheese enchilada when I am anywhere else, no reason to search for sand when I live in a vast desert dotted with more Tex-Mex temples than I can count. As a (mostly) lifelong Texan, that’s always what I come back home to, whether or not I’ve actually left the Lone Star State."

Fiona Apple hasn't been too absent recently. The elusive singer-songwriter co-wrote a track on Cara Delevingne's upcoming debut album, and she released a new song for the Anya Taylor-Joy miniseries Lucky. Now, she shared an update on her music, saying she's struggling to write about the world's "endless barrage of horrors."

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