11 of Our Best Weekend Reads

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/08/arts/11-of-our-best-weekend-reads.html

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Welcome to the weekend. Ready or not, the holidays are upon us. Maybe you are out buying gifts, or staying in and making cookies. Whatever you’re doing, we have some great journalism for you.

At the president’s New Jersey golf course, an undocumented immigrant has worked as a maid since 2013. She said she never imagined she “would see such important people close up.”

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Some were teaching their children a lesson, and others were honoring their former commander in chief.

[Also read “George Bush, Who Steered Nation in Tumultuous Times, Is Dead at 94”]

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Our chief film critics single out a Mexican remembrance of things past and four American documentaries about the way we live now.

[Also read: “The 28 Best Albums of 2018”]

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Psychiatric advance directives allow patients with serious mental illness to specify the treatment they want if they become too sick to say so.

[From Opinion, also read: “Can We Stop Suicides?”]

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For a special breed of Americans, making and decorating cookies is a form of therapy and a tasty way to commune with others.

[Also read: “A Makeover for the Most Spirited Cookies on the Plate”]

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Practical or luxe, quirky or classic, these gifts will send just the right message to the people you are oh-so-grateful for this year. Sort by interest or price, or browse until you’ve checked everyone off your list (and maybe discovered a few gifts for you, too).

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The former first lady’s long-awaited memoir, “Becoming,” recounts with insight, candor and wit her family’s trajectory from the Jim Crow South to Chicago’s South Side and her own improbable journey from there to the White House.

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Ms. Heckerling, the pioneering director behind “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” is turning “Clueless” into a musical. Will she finally get her due?

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Becoming an influencer is hard, as our columnist found out when he tried creative photography, consultations and even bots to propel his food-obsessed corgi to fame.

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While Samuel Issiah Williams studies information science at Cornell, he must search campus events for his next meal. Mr. Williams’s story is part of the 107th annual campaign of The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, which is underway and ends in January 2019.

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Can the streaming service’s offerings live up to the joy — and the tears — of the cable channel’s? Our reporter investigated. Above, a shot from Netflix’s “A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding.”

[Also read: “‘A Christmas Carol’ Turns 175”]

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