| In today’s newsletter, who to call when your stuff doesn’t spark joy. But, first, In the Dark’s reporting is cited in a demand for answers on the Haditha massacre. Plus: • Justin Chang’s favorite films of 2024
• Has celebrity cheating culture gone too far?
• Why you can’t pack a bag | | | |
| Parker Yesko
Reporter, In the Dark  Illustration by Emiliano Ponzi Nearly two decades after U.S. Marines killed twenty-five civilians, including women and children, in Haditha, Iraq, Congress is demanding answers. In a request sent this morning to the Department of Defense’s inspector general, which cites recent coverage in The New Yorker, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chris Van Hollen write that the department “repeatedly misled the public” about Haditha, and that inaccurate reporting by the Marine Corps and delayed investigation of the incident thwarted efforts to hold the shooters accountable. The senators ask the inspector general to find out if the department is complying with its own rules and recommendations for addressing alleged war crimes committed by American service members. This summer, The New Yorker podcast In the Dark published a years-long investigation into the November, 2005, incident and the prosecutions that followed. Four Marines were charged with murder in military court, but those charges were later dropped. Although President George W. Bush vowed that the public would see the full results of the Haditha investigation, he never made good on that promise. Years later, General Michael Hagee, who was the commandant of the Marine Corps at the time of the shootings, bragged to an oral historian that the press still hadn’t got hold of graphic photos of the killings’ aftermath. That changed after In the Dark sued the military and, with the permission of Iraqi survivors, published a selection of images that revealed the horrors of the day. Warren and Van Hollen’s letter, co-signed by Representative Sara Jacobs, whose district in San Diego includes a Marine Corps base, also points to an analysis by In the Dark of seven hundred and eighty-one possible war crimes committed by American service members. That reporting revealed that most of those cases had been dismissed by investigators, that recordkeeping was scant, and that perpetrators rarely faced meaningful accountability. “For years, the Department of Defense has glossed over alleged war crimes committed by the U.S. military and failed to maintain records of these atrocities—it’s horrific and erodes the trust of the American people,” Warren said in a statement to the In the Dark team. “We have a moral and strategic duty to protect civilians, and there must be real accountability when we fail.” | | | |
| Overwhelmed by too much stuff, we hire experts to help us sort things out. But what’s really behind all the clutter?  Illustration by Max Guther The subject of decluttering has inspired how-to books, Netflix series, and even Hallmark movies. Debates over detritus and the ways to get rid of it have spilled over from social media into academia—and professional organizers are making a killing helping us handle the heaps. “Both proponents and skeptics of the home-organization industry agree that consumerism is to blame for this morass,” Jennifer Wilson writes, in an exploration of the history and hysteria around clutter. But is all the capitalist waste—“products never used because their owners are too busy working so they can buy more”—less a problem of buying than of perpetual busyness? | | | |
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Reporting and commentary on what you need to know today.  Photograph by Kevin Mazur / MG24 / Getty The cheating celebrity is not a new story, but, Lauren Michele Jackson argues, the way we respond has intensified. When someone like the actor Barry Keoghan—allegedly—partakes of a dalliance, fans react with vitriol, shamelessly crossing boundaries in their efforts to shame. But these are one-sided efforts. “We are none of us exempt from parasociality,” Jackson writes, “because celebrity, the publicness of a figure, relies upon delusion masquerading as recognition.” Read the story » | | | |
| P.S. A TV adaptation of Theodor Seuss Geisel’s—a.k.a. Dr. Seuss’s—“How the Grinch Stole Christmas!” aired for the first time on this day in 1966. It has been a staple of the season ever since. Sixty-four years ago, E. J. Kahn profiled the man behind the books. “My animals look the way they do because I’ve never learned to draw,” Geisel told Kahn. “I tried to draw the sexiest-looking women I could, and they came out just ridiculous.” 💚 | | | |
Hannah Jocelyn contributed to this edition. | | | |
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