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Your weekend long reads 🗞️

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USA TODAY

Is today feeling like a bones day or a no-bones day? Either way, there's great stuff to read.

Hello again, friends of The Short List! It's John, here to show you what you've missed this week from the USA TODAY Network.

►In 2013, Phoenix engineer-entrepreneur Paul Elio pledged to produce a three-wheeled car that would get 84 mph and cost less than $7,000. As excitement and anticipation grew for the vehicle – and the 1,500 manufacturing jobs it would create – Elio Motors collected millions in car pre-orders. But nearly a decade on, no vehicles or manufacturing jobs have been created, leaving tens of thousands of people alternately wondering, waiting or fuming, and some investors wishing they hadn’t bought into the hype. USA TODAY's Nathan Bomey and Craig Harris unravel the strange saga in the series, "Waiting for Elio."

► It's a horrific story that touched a nerve with readers: On a train outside Philadelphia, a woman was raped while fellow riders did nothing to intervene – not even call 911. Why didn't riders help the woman? In such cases, most people conduct a subconscious cost-benefit analysis, writes USA TODAY Opinion contributor Catherine A. Sanderson. If the benefits outweigh the costs, we help; if the costs outweigh the benefits, we don't. Meanwhile, the incident highlights the importance of standing up to more mundane acts of sexual violence, writes USA TODAY's Alia Dastagir: "Intervening includes everything from shutting down a sexist joke to insisting a friend not stay at the party alone to believing the person who tells you someone you admire committed harm."

►Today, more than 100,000 Americans are on the national organ waitlist, and scientists for decades have dreamed of using animals to help solve the shortage of donor organs. This week, USA TODAY broke the news that surgeons in New York successfully attached a kidney grown in a genetically altered pig to a human. Reporter Karen Weintraub was on the scene with Dr. Robert Montgomery, head of the Transplant Institute at NYU Langone Health, as he performed the procedure. Check out her detailed, dramatic account of what may be a major scientific breakthrough.

There are more great reads below. Have a great weekend. And wherever you are, I hope you find what you're looking for.

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