Coming home

It's Free for All Friday!

It’s Free for ALL Friday!

Each week I keep track of some of the off-the-path things I've found, and work extra-hard to make sure you never hit a paywall, using my own subscriptions, gift links, and other (100% legal) hocus-pocus.

Photo by Hans Isaacson on Unsplash

Coming home

We’ll start today with a few stories on the release of 16 people from Russia in one of the biggest and most complex prisoner swaps in U.S. history. This really is a great story, and I’m happy for everyone who was returned and their families.

• Evan Gershkovich, Paul Whelan and Alsu Kurmasheva stepped onto U.S. soil late Thursday at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, where they were greeted by President Biden and Vice President Harris. The three Americans were part of a prisoner swap involving seven countries, including the United States, Russia and Germany. Russia released 16 detainees in exchange for eight Russians held in other countries, including assassin Vadim Krasikov, who had been imprisoned by Germany. (Washington Post)

• Here's a very long Wall Street Journal story on how so much of this came together, what life was like in prison for Gershkovich, and how Biden spent the last hour before he announced that he wouldn't run for reelection after all. This runs 9,000 words, and has all kinds of details. (WSJ)

• There are still Americans left in Russia. One likely to get more attention now perhaps is Marc Fogel, age 62, an American teacher at a school for expats in Moscow who was arrested in 2021 while carrying 14 vape cartridges of marijuana into the country, and is now serving a 14-year prison sentence in Russia for alleged drug smuggling with intent to sell to his students (he insists it was for his personal/medical use). (Washington Post)

• As long as I have the chance to bring this up, I also like to remind the world of Austin Tice, a Georgetown law student who disappeared while reporting from Syria in 2012 for The Washington Post, McClatchy, and other organizations, and who is believed to be held by the Syrian government or groups aligned with it. To be clear, he's been held for 12 years under what must be hellish conditions. (The Guardian)

Why Katharine Graham’s Washington Home Has Sat Vacant for 22 Years

The home of the former Washington Post publisher was once a hub of power and comity. But after an “insane” renovation spat, its new owner is looking to sell.

President-elect John F. Kennedy was there for dinner the night before his inauguration. Years later, President-elect Ronald Reagan was there too. So were Truman Capote, Princess Diana, Supreme Court justices, cabinet members, diplomats, financiers and thousands more who came to a hub of bipartisan Washington power where guests dined, debated and often parted as friends.

For nearly 60 years, Katharine Graham presided over the grand Beaux-Arts house at 2920 R Street in Georgetown, first as the young bride of Philip Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, and then as publisher herself after her husband’s death. After she died in 2001 her estate sold the home to Mark Ein, a venture capitalist and philanthropist who owns Washington City Paper and has a stake in the city’s N.F.L. team, the Commanders, and in its world-class tennis tournament, the Mubadala Citi D.C. Open. He paid $8 million.

Since then, the house has sat vacant, its iron fence rusting and its front lawn pocked with weeds. Inside, its once-grand dining room attests to a long-ago Washington where legislators from both parties got together on weekends instead of fleeing the fractious capital. The evolution of the storied house tracks the city’s own journey into polarized camps where presidents rarely, if ever, drop by private homes.

LINK: New York Times

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Posing as ‘Alicia,’ This Man Scammed Hundreds Online. He Was Also a Victim

I would not have imagined I could become sympathetic to the people running intense online scams to separate lonely Americans from their life savings. But then, I read this.

In late December, Guracha Belachew Bersha helped lead a small but brazen rebellion.

He’d been enslaved for 16 months in a twisted new criminal empire in which Chinese gangsters traffic people from around the world, often to remote and lawless parts of Southeast Asia, and force them to sit at computers all day scamming strangers online. The cyber frauds they’re forced to commit are called pig butchering, named for the way the perpetrators fatten up their victims by gaining their trust before taking their money and cutting them loose.

Behind the scenes, the scammers are victims too.

At the time of the uprising, his life was like an episode of the dystopian TV show “Black Mirror.” The 41-year-old IT professional from Ethiopia, who goes by the nickname Billy, was trapped in a criminal enclave in Myanmar, where his captors made him assume the fake online alter ego of a rich Singaporean woman they called Alicia. He had to memorize a manual on how to seduce men online and manipulate them into pouring their money into bogus investments.

The scale of these operations and their rapid expansion is hard to fathom. The United Nations says hundreds of thousands of people like Billy may have been trafficked to Myanmar and Cambodia for what they call “forced criminality,” a new and perverse phenomenon in which people are threatened or tortured into committing illegal acts.

LINK: WSJ

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'A Cesspool': Laid-off Workers are Sick to Death of LinkedIn

Tech workers hate the Bay Area company's site. But more than ever, they need it.

LinkedIn, part job site and part social network, has become an all but necessary tool for the office-job-seeking masses in the Bay Area and beyond. As tech companies gut their workforces, people who would otherwise give the blue-and-white site a wide berth feel compelled to scroll for hours every day for job opportunities.

Founded in 2003 and based in Sunnyvale, LinkedIn's website and spokesperson tout its colossal scale: 18,500 employees support over 1 billion users, with 220 million in the United States and 67 million looking for jobs each week. Six people are hired every minute on LinkedIn, the company claims.

Much of the ire focused at LinkedIn is about its “Home” feed, an endless and personalized scroll that has just enough job listings to be useful but also a cacophony of viral and not-so-viral clickbait, ads and corporate-speaky announcements. These posts are the fodder for the 606,000-member subreddit r/LinkedInLunatics; the forum’s description says LinkedIn scrollers will find “rampant virtue signaling” and unlikely stories.

LINK: SF Gate

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I Remember the Last Time Simone Biles Was an Underdog—More Than a Decade Ago

The first time I saw Simone Biles in competition, she didn’t win. This, it would turn out, was an exceedingly rare experience, because winning has become synonymous with the Texan—it’s something she’s done more of than any other gymnast who ever tiptoed across a balance beam.

But back in the spring of 2013, at the American Cup in Worcester, Massachusetts, Biles was a fifteen-year-old newcomer who had just aged into the senior ranks. As a junior gymnast, she had done well but hadn’t been a standout. It wasn’t until her final junior seasons that she started to win significant titles, and those were only of the domestic variety. Her senior debut in Worcester was Biles’s first competition at the international level. ...

[M]y writing about that moment, at that moment, used tam[e] language: “When you watch the 15-year-old on all four events, you’re struck by how much potential Biles has, and she’ll only improve over the next couple of years if she avoids injury. . . . Biles’s tumbling, which would be extremely difficult even for more experienced gymnasts, seems easy for her, and she’ll certainly upgrade it in the near future.”

LINK: Texas Monthly

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She’s a Four-Time Olympian. Her Parents Want Her to Get a Real Job.

Lily Zhang is the most decorated American ever in her Olympic sport. Even she can’t escape parental career pressure.

Lily Zhang is the queen of American table tennis, a six-time national champ and four-time Olympian in the prime of her career. At only 28 years old, the California native can’t help but dream ahead about playing in front of a home crowd at the 2028 Los Angeles Games.

Her parents are less enthused. ...

It’s an Olympic twist on the age-old conflict between children pursuing unconventional dream jobs versus parents pushing the 9-to-5. And besides enduring frequent and unsolicited professional advice from Mom and Dad, what’s most annoying to Zhang is that she concedes they have a point.

For every Simone Biles or Michael Phelps who turn Olympic success into a fortune, dozens more eke by in less glamorous sports. They fly alone, in coach, to far-flung matches on the international circuit, competing for meager prize money and sponsorships.

One losing streak or ruptured ligament could put an end to it all. “There’s so many things that can happen that can take away your stability in an instant,” Zhang says.

LINK: WSJ

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Why Are There Virtually Zero All-Inclusive Hotels in the United States?

The phrase “all-inclusive vacation” often conjures visions of beaches, pool bars, free-flowing cocktails, and seemingly endless entertainment. Upon check-in, everything is taken care of from the moment of arrival to the minute of departure, promising a stress-free experience. Travelers can order whatever they want and as much as they’d like—because when staying at an all-inclusive, it’s already paid for.

The modern all-inclusive model is said to have originated when Club Med opened its first resort in Alcúdia, Majorca, Spain, in 1950. It’s become increasingly popular throughout the decades. Accommodations such as these are usually located somewhere beautiful and unique—and, more often than not, are associated with destinations like Mexico or the Caribbean.

So, why don’t we traditionally think of U.S. destinations when we plan an all-inclusive escape? Some resorts in the U.S. offer all-inclusive or mostly inclusive offerings—but they’re not nearly as common as in other regions. To investigate, we interviewed more than half a dozen hoteliers and hospitality experts to understand why all-inclusive resorts are so few and far between in the United States.

LINK: Fodors