The return of Adele, Taylor, Jae Park, the Pentagon Papers case, the 2020 election — and more!
 NOVEMBER 19, 2021 THE BIG STORY
Oklahoma's governor commuted the death sentence of Julius Jones, hours before his scheduled execution  Julius Jones in 2018 Oklahoma Department of Corrections via AP Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt on Thursday commuted the death sentence of Julius Jones, just four hours before he was scheduled to be executed.
Jones, 41, had been on death row for 20 years after he was convicted for the 1999 murder of Paul Howell during a carjacking. Jones and his family have insisted he was home playing games on the night of Howell's murder. He's long blamed the murder on his codefendant, Christopher Jordan, who accepted a plea deal from prosecutors in exchange for testifying against Jones.
More than 6.5 million people had signed an online petition calling for Jones to be spared from death, and Oklahoma students also walked out of class on Wednesday in protest against his impending execution by lethal injection. The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board had twice recommended his sentence be commuted, but the final decision rested with the governor. STAYING ON TOP OF THIS
A judge temporarily blocked the New York Times from publishing Project Veritas documents A judge on Thursday took the rare step of temporarily blocking the New York Times from publishing certain documents about the right-wing activist group Project Veritas. It's the first prior restraint order entered against the Times since the landmark Pentagon Papers case.
Thursday's order was styled as a temporary prohibition ahead of a potentially even more explosive First Amendment showdown: Westchester Supreme Court Justice Charles Wood will not only consider a longer-term prohibition, but also whether to order the Times to take down Project Veritas-related information from a Nov. 11 article.
The Times immediately challenged the order. "This ruling is unconstitutional and sets a dangerous precedent," executive editor Dean Baquet said in a statement. "When a court silences journalism, it fails its citizens and undermines their right to know. The Supreme Court made that clear in the Pentagon Papers case, a landmark ruling against prior restraint blocking the publication of newsworthy journalism. That principle clearly applies here. We are seeking an immediate review of this decision." SNAPSHOTS
Ohio lawmakers have introduced a law that would make abortion at any stage of pregnancy illegal. HB 480 is even more restrictive than Texas's six-week ban, and has already created a chilling effect among patients and medical providers.
RNC chair Ronna McDaniel said Republican candidates should still talk about 2020, even though Biden "painfully" won. "If he left the party, we would lose," McDaniel said of Trump. "If he left the party, Republicans would lose. He has built our party. He has added a new base."
LIFE ON EARTH
We've already irretrievably damaged our planet. These terrifying photos make that clear. It's not too late to prevent the worst of the Earth's climate catastrophe. But scientists agree — in order to do that, humanity needs to take aggressive action toward cutting greenhouse gas emissions immediately.
"Climate change is definitely not an abstract thing "out there." It is happening at my doorstep," said David Maisel, whose aerial photographs from around the world have been sounding the alarm about environmental damage for years.
"The firestorms in California and throughout the West in the past few years have occurred at an unprecedented scale within recent human history. My hopes for the future are that governments and citizens alike, activists and consumers alike, can embrace the idea of tackling climate change head-on."
 The Mining Project (Clifton, AZ 1), 1989 David Maisel
 The Fall (Borox 6), 2013. Borox is "strange, ashen landscapes in a mining and agricultural region of La Mancha. The soil is laden with the mineral borax, which gives a surreal, ashen quality; the landscape shines, almost like a grey sea in a desert." David Maisel
 Tailings Pond 14, Vicinity of Pedro de Valdivia, Atacama, Chile David Maisel 🎶 GIVE ME A MEMORY I CAN USE
30 is the record Adele was born to make  Hold me like I'm more than just a friend! CBS Photo Archive / CBS via Getty Images Adele was already relatable, writes Michael Blackmon. But as she's gotten further into her career, she has mastered the art of providing the public with just enough information to satisfy the demands of being a star without compromising herself or her craft in the process.
FALL IS LIFE
Longreads to take the edge off a long week  Taylor Swift performs onstage during the 36th annual Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Dimitrios Kambouris / Getty Images for The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Taylor Swift somehow made Red even better In the last 15 months, Taylor Swift has set a new bar for pop star ubiquity: She released two No. 1 albums, 2020's pair Folklore and Evermore, the former winning Album of the Year at the Grammys earlier this year. This past weekend, she released the rerecording of Red, and in the process she smashed multiple records, including most streamed album in a day by a woman and most streamed woman in one day in Spotify history.
Though Swift's media savvy makes it look impossibly easy — inevitable, even — for Red (Taylor's Version) to have become a juggernaut, the success of the rerelease has hinged on a different superpower: her extraordinary talent for transforming herself and her life into the main text fans are engaging with. On the rerecord, there's plenty to be said about how her voice has changed or how her perspective has deepened. But the most potent instrument Swift plays on Red (Taylor's Version) is our knowledge of her past and our familiarity with her as a public story. With the rerelease of this pivotal record, Swift has once again made a complicated story her own.
One of K-pop's brightest stars is striking out on his own Since a quiet step back from the spotlight two years ago, Jae Park has arrived. In a landscape as tightly controlled as the K-pop industry, Park spent seven years in the public eye cementing a distinct personality for himself with his brazen "American openness" as the lead guitarist and vocalist for the group Day6.
Now, without his bandmates and under a brand-new moniker, eaJ, he says he's happier outside the idol industry and ready to make independent music. "I like to speak my mind because I feel like, in the idol world, it's very rare to find that," Park said on a recent livestream. "I get shit on, but it's cool. I'm OK with that."
Chloe Gong didn't set out to write a YA fantasy novel that mirrored our pandemic reality Set in 1920s Shanghai, Gong's historical fantasy novel These Violent Delights is a thoughtful and heart-pounding read — one that eerily parallels the world's response to the COVID-19 crisis. "I guess human nature and Western imperialist ideas just haven't really changed much," Gong told BuzzFeed News. "Because even though the monster and the madness in These Violent Delights was invented, the attitudes of the foreigners in the book very much were not." Seasons are changing and so are you. Both are good things. Alexa 📝 This letter was edited and brought to you by Alexa Lee and BuzzFeed News. You can always reach us here.
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