10 Sunday Reads – The Big Picture

• Inside the Collapse at the NIH: Administration officials pressured the NIH to avoid clear advice from the agency’s own lawyers to restart grant funding now. (The Atlantic)

• Why Gen Z Will Never Leave Home: Thanks to soaring housing costs, a generation of twentysomethings are still in their childhood bedrooms. A portrait of family life with no empty nest. (Maclean’s)

• What’s the deal with all these airplane crashes? It certainly feels like the global aviation system is coming apart at the seams. Every video I watch of the recent crashes makes my brain lurch with primal fear. It’s not normal to see a 20-ton regional jet upside down on an active runway, like a child’s toy thrown aside out of boredom. It’s not normal to watch a medevac airplane plummet nose-first into the ground. It’s not normal to get a text from someone you know who says that the crash at Reagan National was so close that the impact could be heard from their backyard. I’d certainly understand if you decided that, next time you needed to take a trip across the country, you’d pull up the Amtrak website first. (The Verge)

• Germany’s Deepening Dilemma: The country is riven by ideological divisions on two dimensions, plus deep demographic cleavages. The underlying problem is the collapse in the pro-system parties of the center and the simultaneous rise of anti-system parties of the far right and far left. It’s possible that one of those extreme parties will manage to prevail outright in a future vote. But the more likely outcome, if present trends continue, is a party system so fractured that forming a coherent and stable government becomes nearly impossible. From out of the resulting chaos, it could become impossible to prevent one of the radical anti-system parties, including the AfD, from joining a governing coalition. (Notes From the Middle Ground) see also Die Linke is back: The consequences of the left’s surprise success for defence and security. Most international observers have, beyond the question of who will form the government, focused on the other obvious winner of these elections: the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) which secured a whopping 20.8% of the votes, coming in second. It gained over 10 percentage points compared to three years ago, and in some constituencies in East Germany, got over 40% of the votes. (Comment is Freed)

• The Secret Society Raising Your Electricity Bills: A breakthrough report details how utility companies use bogus models to earn excess profits. (American Prospect)

• Google Ad-Tech Users Can Target National Security ‘Decision Makers’ and People With Chronic Diseases: Google enables marketers to target people with serious illnesses and crushing debt—against its policies—as well as the makers of classified defense technology, a WIRED investigation has found. (Wired)

• How Elon Musk Executed His Takeover of the Federal Bureaucracy: The operation was driven with a frenetic focus by the billionaire, who channeled his resentment of regulatory oversight into a drastic overhaul of government agencies. (New York Times)

• The U.S. Is Cutting Off Foreign Aid. My Youngest Patients Are Paying the Price: On the orders of the world’s richest man, USAID halted its operations seemingly overnight. It was the only supplier of ready-to-use therapeutic food in many countries like Burundi. In the wake of this startling termination, those of us working on the front lines are left with only what was already in our stores. Although feeding dying babies should surely qualify for the vague foreign aid waiver issued by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the salaries of the staff and the cost of the fuel to get the therapeutic food to hospitals like mine are not. Without USAID employees, nobody can open the warehouses where the life-saving packets from the American people are stored. Seeming indifference, from the American people. (Time)

• Dead Athletes. Empty Stands. Why Are We Paying Billions to Keep This Sport Alive? Back in the day, when horse racing was the only legal form of gambling in New York State, 20,000 or more people would jam the stands at Yonkers Raceway, cheering wildly as the standardbreds ran their mile-long harness race. But on this day, despite the beautiful July weather, just a few dozen spectators hang around, slumped into faded orange seats along a chain-link fence. Even with online betting, the racetrack takes in less than one-fortieth of what it would have at the sport’s peak. So the horses take their two laps, head back down the runway and exit the track to something near silence. (New York Times Magazine)

• How to Lose an Oscar in 10 Days: The star of the year’s most nominated film torpedoed her chance to win the trophy—in audacious fashion. (The Atlantic)