"Small Things Like These" is an unusual story with links to "Spotlight" and "Philomena." It's about how an entire town can be complicit in the evils of the Catholic Church. Bill Furlong works with coal, in Ireland, in the 1980s; he delivers coal to various businesses and houses. One of his clients is a local convent, which is also a Magdalene laundry. These laundries existed from the 1700s all the way through the 1990s, in Ireland; unwed mothers were sometimes incarcerated, separated from their children, forced to contribute labor, made to fear early deaths. (Some died very young; infants were also allowed to die.) Bill visits the convent once and meets a woman who asks to be escorted to the river, "just so I could drown myself." Women plead to know anything about their babies, whom they can't see. But routines are routines; the laundry does a really nice job with bedclothes and with shirts. Also, it's rumored that the nuns at the la...