HELLO and welcome to the 341st installment of Things I Read That I Love, wherein I share with you some of the longer-form journalism/essays I’ve read recently so that you can know more about Windsor! This “column” is less queer focused than the rest of the site because when something is queer focused, I put it on the rest of the site. Here is where the other things are.
The title of this feature is inspired by the title of Emily Gould’s tumblr, Things I Ate That I Love.
Courtney Williams Is A Problem
courtney williams // the players tribune // september 2025
I loved this piece so much, with my whole self! You can hear it in her voice, you know? God I miss the WNBA.
Maybe it won’t surprise you, but being from a place like that comes with high highs and low lows. You establish your values. You learn how to do without. You absorb all the flyness, the cars, the sauce. That becomes a part of your essence. But you also take on the other stuff, too. The darker stuff. The anger, defensiveness, the uncompromising sense of right and wrong. The street codes.
You think when I got to the league, all of that just disappeared? Man, you trippin’.
Fear and Loathing in Canada’s Most American City
jason mcbride // macleans // june 2025
Growing up in Southeastern Michigan it has been consistently strange as an adult to meet other Americans who’ve never been to Canada, for I cannot imagine a life in which one did not often travel to Canada. Windsor is right there through the tunnel, we visited often, we can see it across the river. In college, Windsor was the chosen location for fraternity date parties — we’d literally take charter busses over the border — because in Windsor, you could drink at the age of 19. Anyhow this article isn’t about any of that really, but it is about how Detroit and Windsor are pals and their fates and their auto industries and their people are so intertwined and Donald Trump is really doing his absolute best to fuck that up.
How America’s Elite Colleges Breed High-Status Careers—and Misery
evan mandery // mother jones // september 2025
The “career funnel” is a sociological term used to describe how elite universities perpetuate inequality by steering elite college graduates into six-figure roles in three specific high-paying fields — finance, tech, or management consulting. Mandery follows a high-achieving Stanford graduate who entered college with a commitment to social justice and found himself, post-graduation, at McKinsey & Company, like so many other bright students who’d once hoped to serve the common good. And now he is in fact a consultant.
*Right-Wing Media and the Death of an Alabama Pastor: An American Tragedy
mark warren // esquire // april 2024
A genuinely heartbreaking story of a beloved mayor, pastor and businessman, beloved by his small Alabama community, who felt his rebuilt life slipping between his fingers after his private life — some of it objectively upsetting but most of it only subjectively so — was exposed by a malicious, merciless reporter working for conservative website 1819 news.
Lizzo Starts Over
allison p. davis // vulture // september 2025
A masterful profile of an artist in transition, as Lizzo mourns what it felt like to have her hands on the zeitgeist and the blow of the allegations against her and her fans eagerness to believe them. What happens when you get famous so fast, when that comfortable space where employees are friends is too vulnerable to power dynamics for it to remain that way?
The Average College Student Today
hilarious bookbinder // november 2025
IS THIS TRUE
Hotdogs in Zion
jacob silverman // the baffler // june 2016
At The Holy Land Experience in Orlando, owned by Christian media corporation Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), Jesus is crucified most afternoons, the Oasis Palms Café offers a “Yom Kippur Plate” containing turkey and cornbread, needless bling exists just about everywhere and yet — ” somehow, this bewildering theme park resists crude jokes or finger-pointing.” Silverman asks what he can learn from the Holy Land Experience about what evangelical Christians want from Jews and Israel — a question that remains insistently compelling, nine years post-publication.
Mourning and Melancholia in Las Vegas
isaac ariail reed // the hedgehog review // fall 2025
I related to this sentence a lot but also I love academic analyses of Las Vegas: “This was my kind of place: hyper-nerdy about (supposedly) lowbrow culture, aficionado-friendly, and piping out just enough twentieth-century pop music to warm you up on a cold desert night.”
‘That Baby Is Going to Die’
amelia schonbek // the cut // november 2025
After years of unheeded warnings and multiple visits from CPS, Raylee’s family was able to pull her out of public school to be homeschooled — and unfortunately, homsechooling has become a way for abusive parents to shield their children from outside supervision, and any attempts to regulate have been met with a powerful homeschooling lobby. Do you ever think about how if we got rid of lobbying the whole country would get like 100x better
Life and Death at the County Fair
michael adno // the bitter southerner // november 2025
I realize this TIRTL is very themed-entertainment heavy but ultimately I am who I am, and I f*cking LOVE the county fair. (In fact we even had a County Fair at A-Camp on account of this passion.) Grew up going to the Clinton County Fair in Ohio, where my cousins showed sheep, some of my best childhood memories!
The things that have always haunted me about being an American, a Southerner, and a Floridian are the same things that make me proud of my home. The cast of eccentric people here renews my hope one night and reaffirms all my doubts the next. I’ve learned there are few places as ripe for thinking about where you’ve been and where you’re going as the county fair.
(feature image photo by Richard Baker / In Pictures via Getty Images)
Omg another! I haven’t finished the first TIRTIL!! what bounty is this…truly giving thanks
Academic here, wanted to weigh in on the “Average College Student” article: yeah, it’s mostly accurate to my experience teaching university over the last ten years or so. Most of my classes weren’t quite that bad (thankfully), but overall I’d say that hits the mark on issues facing undergrads: K-12 schools failing them, Covid having hit them really hard, and of course the influence of phones and social media being particularly acute on Gen Z. To be fair though, they are pretty self-aware about the phones; when I’ve had class discussions on the issue, I’ve always been surprised just how candid and frustrated they are about their relationship to technology, and how worried they are for their younger Gen Alpha siblings and cousins (what they call “the tablet babies”). Here’s hoping things might turn around in the future; I know “bell-to-bell” phone bans in K-12 schools are still a controversial idea, but pilots in my area have been well-received by high schoolers, who have (subjectively) reported feeling more socially and mentally engaged during the day. Perhaps that policy could have some positive effect on college cohorts down the line, but it remains to be seen.