Sunday Paper PLUS Recommends—Week of July 5, 2026
At The Sunday Paper, we often discover books, podcasts, films, and other works that move the needle and spark inspiring change. This week, we are thrilled to hand the mic again to our Sunday Paper PLUS readers! Our thanks to Darlene, Mary Jo, and Harriet for their recommendations. We hope these suggestions open your heart and mind and encourage you to come together for meaningful conversations.
What Darlene Fuches is Watching
Most news shows move on before a story finishes breathing. The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper does the opposite, handing its reporters a full hour and letting them use every minute of it. Each week, CNN's longform team picks one subject and follows it wherever it leads, whether that's a family navigating political division, a community rebuilding after disaster, or the quiet machinery behind a headline everyone thinks they already understand. That patience runs through the whole team, from Cooper to correspondents like Sara Sidner and David Culver, all of them chasing the same kind of story instead of the same kind of headline. Stream the series now on HBO Max.
What Mary Jo Bokuniewicz is Reading
What if the most important political mind in the early republic wasn’t in the room where decisions were made—but writing letters from a farmhouse two hundred miles away? That’s the premise behind A Founding Mother, Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie’s new novel narrated entirely in Abigail Adams’s own voice. Abigail runs the farm, plays the markets, and buries neighbors lost to disease while John is off inventing a country, and when she finally joins him overseas, she arrives already the sharper political operator of the two.
What Harriet Kelly Gibbe is Listening To
Before Dandelion existed, there was “Choosin’ Texas,” the slow-burning heartbreak single that gave Ella Langley her first number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and made her one of country’s fastest-rising stars. Now the song has a home on her sophomore album of the same era, eighteen tracks she co-produced with Miranda Lambert and Ben West that trace her growth from the wilder days of her debut into a more grounded, searching sound.
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