IT’S A DAY of rest, and you may be in the mood for a quiet corner and a comfy chair. We’ve hand-picked the week’s best reads for you to savour.
Sabine Heinlein writes about how a murderer prepares for a job interview, weeks after being released. Is he really a ‘free man’ now that he is out from behind the metal bars? How does real life treat him, and what happens when he attends classes to help prepare him for employment? (Long Reads) (Approx 25 minutes reading time – 6132 words)
Angel thought that once released from prison he would be a free man again. When he first got out, he had big dreams. He felt like a young man. He wanted to get an apartment, a job, and a woman. “I’ll find me a girl with kids. I don’t care.” He just needed some time to adjust to the world, some time to breathe and wander. Angel passively granted parole the authority to structure and control his life. He stoically accepted his parole officer’s decision not to extend his evening curfew.
Clair MacDougall meets with former child soldiers in Liberia, women who fought as girls in the country’s brutal wars. They committed unthinkable crimes, and were treated in an appalling fashion, often being raped and attacked. So what has happened to them as they have grown into women? (The Daily Beast) (Approx 20 minutes reading time – 4052 words)
Mary was 13 when she joined up on the side of the pro-Taylor government militias, and her scars tell the story of a girl who saw close combat. A bullet grazed her right knee during a fierce battle in northeastern Liberia near the border with Guinea. Puckered skin between her shoulders bears witness to a bullet that came dangerously close to her spine. And then there are the self-made markings of war: crude, roughly drawn tattoos that serve as totemic reminders of her deeds.
Tim Murphy journeys to Bayou Corne, Louisiana, a town that has almost been swallowed by a sinkhole. The sinkhole was an acre in size, but is now 24 acres and around 750 feet deep. What led to this sinkhole getting bigger? Everyone has a different answer. (Mother Jones) (Approx 15 minutes reading time – 3012 words)
One night in August 2012, after months of unexplained seismic activity and mysterious bubbling on the bayou, a sinkhole opened up on a plot of land leased by the petrochemical company Texas Brine, forcing an immediate evacuation of Bayou Corne’s 350 residents—an exodus that still has no end in sight. Last week, Louisiana filed a lawsuit against the company and the principal landowner, Occidental Chemical Corporation, for damages stemming from the cavern collapse.
Paige Brettingen wonders if Ireland can make Catholicism ‘cool’. To do this, she visits Ireland itself, meeting dedicated Catholics and those who believe there is a need for a better type of religious education. (The Atlantic) (Approx 06 minutes reading time – 1241 words)
Nearly seven decades later, in an aftermath of sex abuse scandals and growing secularization, the Catholic Church in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland grapples with declining parishes and disaffected Catholics. In the Republic, for instance, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin acknowledged in 2011 that some Dublin parishes have as little as 18 percent of Catholics attending Mass each week.
Mohamad Junai writes an essay about Kashmir, reflecting on the ‘stone battles’ of Anantan in 2009. Street battles broke out after two women were attacked by soldiers, and the community retaliated however they could. “Stone wars test human endurance,” writes Junai, “and their long history in Kashmir also says something about the collective endurance of Kashmiris.” (Guernica) (Approx 14 minutes reading time – 2921 words)
Once outside, the boys covered their faces with scarves and hoods. An auto-rickshaw stopped by and they got together to unload stones from it. Another rickshaw followed, and then another. My friend told me the stones were brought from a roadside pile a few blocks away, where they had been lying for a number of years and were originally supposed to fill potholes in the roads. Soon a number of other teenagers came out of other alleys and joined them.
Lucy Madison interviews Natalie, a feminist Mormon who lives in Idaho, about her upbringing, her religion, sexuality and more. She asks her about the idea of being a ‘perfect Mormon girl’, and transgressing the unspoken rules around femininity. (Some adult language) (The Hairpin) (Approx 8 minutes reading time – 1684 words)
It’s kind of the Mormon idea about how a woman’s supposed to act. Molly Mormons are women who are so spiritually obsessed that everything has to be by the book. Oh, your dress is not knee length! Oh no! It’s encapsulated by this sense that you have to be modest enough to be deemed attractive but not immodest enough to be deemed sexy. Being blonde and petite is sort of an added bonus. There’s a different type of body shaming that happens within Mormonism.
…AND A CLASSIC READ FROM THE ARCHIVES…
If you haven’t read any Sylvia Plath, this profile by Elizabeth Hardwick is a good place to start, if only because it delves into Plath’s work but also her own life story. It’s a look at her destructiveness, and how critics saw it; at Plath’s remoteness and her young talent. (The New York Review of Books) (Approx 24 minutes reading time – 4833 words)
The creative visitation was not from heaven, but from the hell of rage. Yet so powerful is the art that one feels an unsettling elation as one reads the lacerating lines. The poems are about death, rage, hatred, blood, wounds, cuts, deformities, suicide attempts, stings, fevers, operations—there is no question of coming to terms with them. They are also about children, her own who were intensely loved, but “child” and “baby” as mere words are often attached to images of pain and death.
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