This Week's 10 Must-Reads + America's Trust Issues

This OZY series explores how institutions are battling declining trust — and what’s replacing them.

Institutions are not getting it done. The rise of populists from the United States to Brazil to Europe shows a declining faith in politics as usual. Big tech companies have been exposed for playing fast and loose with our data. The Roman Catholic Church swept pedophiles under the rug. Industries from Hollywood to the Nobel Prize committee have been rocked by mistreatment of women in the #MeToo era. Traditional media is taking it on the chin, and new media — except for OZY, of course — tends to drive people deeper into their warring tribes.

Amid all this wreckage, OZY asked this question: In whom do we trust anymore? Our exclusive series explores how traditional institutions are trying to restore trust, the new players who are swiping it away, the unlikely areas where trust thrives and some lessons from history about where the trust came from in the first place.

Television’s first news anchorman and modern-style broadcast were brought to you by the fine people at Camel cigarettes.

Sure, we’re used to awkward host-read ads on podcasts, and the multiplicity of “sponsored content” adorning our news media, but this is different. This is a nationally televised anchorman — that paragon of public trust and gravitas — telling viewers to smoke ’em if they’ve got ’em. The voice of authority is a Kansan named John Cameron Swayze, the host of NBC’s Camel News Caravan, which debuted on American television screens in 1949. Swayze would prove to be a news pioneer, a trailblazer in a seersucker blazer. And though we may cringe or chuckle at the Camel cigarette references adorning the nightly news, private sponsorship was essential to launching the anchorman and the broadcast journalism endeavor we know today.

Swedish literary critic Mikaela Blomqvist, 31, is bringing a new perspective to an old, male institution.

Mikaela Blomqvist prefers reading quietly with a cup of tea and distances herself from the daily gossip within the small, insular cultural scene in Sweden. But that doesn’t mean the well-known, 31-year-old literary critic doesn’t have opinions. She just prefers to deliver them in assured, measured tones.

That might be why the Swedish Academy tapped Blomqvist of the Göteborgs-Posten — Sweden’s second-largest paper — to be on the committee that will recommend the next winner of the Nobel Prize in literature. It’s a major leap for Blomqvist. It’s the first time since the prize was first awarded in 1901 that nonmembers will join the prestigious committee that chooses — on behalf of the Nobel Foundation — the world’s highest honor in literature.