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.
After World War II ended, a group of young Holocaust survivors were sent to the UK to recuperate. Now, their story is being shared.
(BBC, approx 10 mins reading time)
Two of the teenagers may well have been 13-year-old Ivor Perl and his 15-year-old brother, Alec. Born in the small town of Mako in southern Hungary, they had survived Auschwitz and a death march to Dachau. Then, in the autumn of 1945, they had been flown to Southampton and brought to recuperate in Ascot. Perl, who now lives in Essex, remembers that he met some girls on Ascot racecourse and “took a fancy” to them, but he cannot remember their names.
Laura Turner writes about her experience of pregnancy after three miscarriages.
(Catapult, approx 19 mins reading time)
I saw the doctor the next day. It was too early to tell whether I would miscarry, she said. She pointed to the screen with one hand while holding the wand in my vagina with the other. “There’s a fetal pole,” she said. “You’re still pregnant.” My husband took a picture of the fetal pole, which was a blurry white circle surrounded by enormous darkness, and texted it to our family thread. “Hope,” he wrote.
A look at what could be going on with Kanye.
(The Atlantic, approx 33 mins reading time)
There is an undeniable logic here. Like Trump, West is a persistent bearer of slights large and small—but mostly small. (Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Barack Obama, and Nike all came in for a harangue.) Like Trump, West is narcissistic, “the greatest artist of all time,” he claimed, helming what would soon be “the biggest apparel company in human history.” And, like Trump, West is shockingly ignorant. Chicago was “the murder capital of the world,” West asserted, when in fact Chicago is not even the murder capital of America.
Glasses wearer? Then you’ll find this deep-dive into the eyewear industry very interesting…
(The Guardian, approx 43 mins reading time)
During the 20th century, the eyewear business worked hard to transform a physical deficiency into a statement of style. In the process, optical retailers learned the strange fact that for something that costs only a few pounds to make (even top-of-the-range frames and lenses cost, combined, no more than about £30 to produce), we are happy, happier in fact, when paying 10 or 20 times that amount. “The margins,” as one veteran of the sector told me carefully, “are outrageous.” The co-founder of Specsavers, Mary Perkins, is Britain’s first self-made female billionaire.
A profile by the great Emily Nussbaum of Ryan Murphy, responsible for some of the most popular shows on TV over the past decade.
(The New Yorker, approx 63 mins reading time)
In 2003, on the more welcoming network FX, Murphy had his first hit: “Nip/Tuck,” a twisted plastic-surgery medical procedural spiked with satire about a looks-obsessed culture. He pitched the show, about a competitive friendship between two Miami doctors, as a tribute, in part, to one of his childhood obsessions: the Mike Nichols film “Carnal Knowledge,” which he saw as a love story about two straight men. “Nobody ever got the connection,” he told me. “I loved that movie ten times more than ‘The Graduate.’
6. Life after Harvey Weinstein
Georgina Chapman was married to Harvey Weinstein when all of the allegations emerged about him last year. Here’s how she’s been coping.
(Vogue, approx 26 mins reading time)
Our meeting, in her soon-to-be ex–town house that her soon-to-be ex-husband recently sold, was meant to be the moment when Chapman would finally, publicly address for the first time what happened. The night before, she had called me fairly late, and I thought she was going to back out. She sounded worried, apologizing profusely, talking fast. She was not ready to address anything too difficult, did not feel prepared. I reassured her that we could talk about her life before Harvey or about Marchesa—which is exactly what we did at first.
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
In 2008, Vanity Fair looked at Pitcairn Island, where the descendents of a ship of British mutineers live since the late 1700s. Allegations emerged of a culture of child molestation and rape that went back generations on the island.
(Vanity Fair, approx 55 mins reading time)
The year was 1789, and the mutineers acted just 23 days after leaving the sensual pleasures of Tahiti. Determined to avoid the hangman waiting in London, the outlaws sailed 8,000 miles before finding Pitcairn. Once there, they burned and sank their ship, then seemed to disappear from the face of the earth. The tale captured the world’s imagination, inspiring a novel by Jules Verne, a satirical short story by Mark Twain, scores of other books, and one blockbuster movie after another—five in all.
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