Hope you’re having a great holiday season Great Falls.

Jenn ran away to Virginia for Christmas with her family and is catching up, so here’s the belated reading list for this week.

The New York Times: Jimmy Carter, peacemaking president amid crises, is dead at 100

The Atlantic: The Walmart effect

The Economist: China’s firms are taking flight, worrying its rulers

The Flathead Beacon: 69th Montana Legislature to commence next week

NPR: Housing industry struggles to help growing ‘gray wave’ of homeless seniors

Route Fifty: Rural Montana’s China tech challenge

NPR:  U.S. Congress members failed to get pay bump for 15th year

The Washington Post: ‘They were prison camps’: At least 3,100 Native American students died at U.S.-run boarding schools

Associated Press: Treasury says Chinese hackers remotely accessed workstations, documents in ‘major’ cyber incident

The New York Times: Research finds vaccines are not behind the rise in autism. So what is?

NPR: Bird flu has killed 20 big cats at a wildlife sanctuary

The New Yorker: The year creators took over

The Washington Post: They live in Las Vegas tunnels. Coaxing them out for treatment is hard.

City Lab: As churches empty, religious groups adopt new role: housing developers

The New York Times: How drug overdose deaths have plagued one generation of black men for decades

The Washington Post: A global boom in cocaine trafficking defies decades of anti-drug efforts

NPR: Wellpath faces dozens of lawsuits. What happens now that it’s filing for bankruptcy?

The Washington Post: Elderly student loan borrowers owe $121 billion. They ask Biden for relief.

The New Yorker: New Mexico’s nuclear-weapons boom

The Washington Post: Amid Arizona’s data center boom, many Native Americans live without power

Foreign Affairs: The return of total war: Understanding—and preparing for—a new era of comprehensive conflict

Rolling Stone: Will Someone Save ‘Sesame Street’?

The New Yorker: The elephantine memories of food-caching birds

The Washington Post: Sea level rise in the U.S. South is blowing past expectations. Here’s what’s driving it.

The New Yorker: How much does our language shape our thinking?

NPR: 2 men were found dead from exposure after looking for Sasquatch

The New York Times: Artists we lost in 2024, in their words

The Atlantic: You might be worried about the wrong algorithms

NPR: Public libraries reveal their most borrowed books of 2024

The New York Times: ‘Wicked’ alumnae class notes: What they learned at Shiz University

Bon Appétit: Why draft beer drinking is in decline