Several of this week's best stories examine the fragility of trust and the damage caused when one's belief in another's integrity shatters into pieces. Charity Johnson. New York Times television critic Alessandra Stanley. The United States military. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. All are guilty of betraying those around them: Johnson to family and friends, Stanley to readers, the military to its soldiers and the public, Rice, Hardy, and Goodell to the professional football league and its fans. But as these stories will also show, we, too, are often just as guilty. Guilty of not speaking up sooner. Guilty of being in denial despite knowing the truth. Guilty of lying—to ourselves and others. Trust, you've got to understand, is a complicated thing.

"Together We Make Football" by Louisa Thomas

The real problem is that infliction of pain is romanticized and ritualized. Hitting is the point. Inflicting injury is nominally avoided — but hurting the other team helps. "It's a bully division," Arizona's general manager, Steve Keim, told Grantland's Robert Mays earlier this year, "so we had to add our number of bullies to our defense." He meant that as a good thing.

"Forever Young" by Katie J.M. Baker

Longview, population 81,000, is a charmless city with nothing to do but hang out at churches and chain restaurants. But Charity seemed content. After school, she worked and spent time with her classmates and "mom," Tamica Lincoln, a 30-year-old McDonald's breakfast manager whom Charity moved in with in the spring. She posted Instagram photos of friendship bracelets, cookies "split with friends," and smiling teenage boys on a spring break trip to a nearby Christian university. She loved making her own Instagram "art": selfies juxtaposed with sayings like "Baby I'm a star" and "Honeybee, love me." Earlier this year, she posted a photo that read "My mommy was my best friend…"

"Love ur mom with your all cuz n a split second u cld lose her.." she wrote below the picture.

Charity has loved and lost so many "moms" that it's hard to keep track. Some of them reached out to Tamica when Charity's mugshot made international headlines in May. That's when Charity was arrested for intentionally giving false information to a police officer who received a tip that she was much older than her hair bows implied.

"Snackwave: A Comprehensive Guide To The Internet's Saltiest Meme" by Hazel Cills and Gabrielle Noone

It's important to note that snackwave is different from, say, a bunch of girls eating snacks and tweeting about them. Snackwave is defined by exaggeration and extremism. You don't just eat cheeseburgers. You wear a shirt covered in them. You don't just eat pizza. You run a blog devoted to collecting pictures of celebrities eating pizza. In a world of Women Laughing Alone With Salad, snackwave is our saviour.

"The Nation That Janet Built" by Joseph Vogel

During its reign, Rhythm Nation shifted more than seven million copies in the U.S., sitting atop the charts for six weeks in 1989 before becoming the bestselling album of 1990. It was the first album in history to produce No. 1 hits in three separate years (1989, 1990, 1991). Meanwhile, its innovative music videos—including the iconic militant imagery and intricate choreography of the title track—were ubiquitous on MTV.

But its impact was far more than commercial. Rhythm Nation was a transformative work that arrived at a transformative moment. Released in 1989—the year of Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, protests at Tiananmen Square, and the fall of the Berlin Wall—its sounds, its visuals, its messaging spoke to a generation in transition, at once empowered and restless. The Reagan Era was over. The cultural anxiety about what was next, however, was palpable.

"Son, Men Don't Get Raped" by Nathaniel Penn

In infantry training, I tore ligaments in my ankle. It wasn't a visible injury, so I was accused of faking it. After I was assigned to base, three individuals started singling me out. They would intentionally bump into me. When I was asleep, somebody punched me in the face. A month later, I was pulled out of the shower. They kicked me and beat me with a plunger, and I don't know if I lost consciousness or not, but the next thing I remember is my wrists were taped to the bedframe and they were holding a knife to my throat. Then they took turns sexually assaulting me.

"The New York Times, Shonda Rhimes & How to Get Away With Being Racist" by Kara Brown

I don't know Shonda Rhimes, (UNFORTUNATELY) but I have read and watched many of her interviews and I am quite familiar with her work. Angry is never something I have perceived her to be. This might not even matter if the title of Stanley's piece wasn't, "Wrought in Their Creator's Image." Stanley suggest that Shonda Rhimes' characters are a reflection of her — but only the black ones. Because of course a black woman cannot write about other black women without being inehrently autobiographical. Apparently, we are not afforded the same creative ability as literally every white man in Hollywood.

"I ate crickets because they're the future of food" by Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Still, the red tape that surrounds selling crickets for human consumption hasn't been overwhelming. Once the brothers got a permit to import a new species of cricket — the tropical house cricket, which is resistant to a virus that can decimate entire cricket farms — they were essentially cleared for business by the Canadian government ("they can't [survive the winter] in Canada," Jarrod explains, so there's no danger of them becoming an invasive species). The US has been equally lax, allowing the company to operate under GRAS self-determination, an FDA regulation that allows qualified outside experts, like those who authored the UN report on edible insects, to determine if a product is safe, instead of going through government officials.

When you think about it, Jarrod says, this makes perfect sense. More than a quarter of the entire human population eats insects on a regular basis, he says, so "it's not a novel food." The Western world has chosen to pass on eating insects for the past few hundred years, and it's the Goldins' plan to bring them back.

"Black Teen Girls Killed (But Do YOU Care?)" by Jamilah Lemieux

Heartbreakingly, Ball's mother Jerlean Moore told ABC "I feel like sometimes that I failed. What could I have done? What could I have taught her better?"

It isn't unreasonable to expect for a grieving family to wish that their dead loved one hadn't worked in the sex industry, one where women are often subject to increased abuse and harassment at the hands of clients, employers and law enforcement alike. Thus, there should be no judgment from any of us about Ball's lament about her daughter's work. But what I fear will happen here is a general sentiment among media makers and the public that because these women were sex workers, that their deaths are not cause for outrage and fear.

"The Other Huxtable Effect" by Jason Bailey

The program spent little time openly discussing the race of its protagonists, but it frequently returned to the experience of matriarch Clair as a woman who not only maintained a successful career while raising five children but who refused to suffer gladly any fools who questioned her ability to do so. If The Cosby Show's racial politics were merely implied, its gender politics were clear, pointed, and decidedly progressive. Everyone was so busy making a fuss over the show's blackness that relatively few noted, at the time, that Cosby had smuggled proud and vocal feminism into the country's most popular family sitcom.

Fiction Pick: "Jack, July" by Victor Lodato

The sun drilled the boy's head, looking for something. He closed his eyes and let the bit work its way to his belly, where the good stuff lived, where the miracle often happened: the black smoke reverting to pure white crystal. A snowflake, an angel. He smiled at himself in the dark glass. It was so easy to forgive those who betrayed you, effortless—like thinking of winter in the middle of July. It cost you nothing. Reflexively Jack scratched deep inside empty pockets, then licked his fingers. The bitch of it was this: forgiveness dissolved instantly on your tongue, there was no time to spit it out.

[Image via AP]