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.
An interview with Sarah Jessica Parker about the return of Sex and the City.
(Vogue, approx 15 mins reading time)
Since shooting began in July, details about the new series have been kept under tight wraps, with a vigilance more usually accorded to Top Secret state files. This, of course, has only stoked public excitement: TikToks and Instagrams of the actors shooting on location have been analyzed with a kremlinologist’s dedication. Does a scene for which some of the extras are dressed in black suggest that a main character would be killed off, and if so, who? (Samantha? Carrie’s husband, Mr. Big? Her former paramour, Aidan?) “I’m going to leave you very unsatisfied,” Parker says, friendly but firm, when I attempt to prod her for details.
On the theft of the Irish Crown Jewels from Dublin Castle, at the turn of the 20th century.
(Atlas Obscura, 29 mins reading time)
His job also included guarding what would become known as the Irish Crown Jewels, consisting of a heavily jeweled star, badge, and collars. The star, an eight-pointed wonder about four inches across, featured dozens of pristine Brazilian diamonds, described that year as being “of the purest water,” meaning the highest quality known. That star surrounded both a shamrock made of emeralds and a cross of rubies. The badge was similar: diamonds, emeralds, and rubies, set in silver. The value of the pair, according to a police notice, was, in today’s money, somewhere north of £3 million, or $4.5 million.
The story of a Syrian refugee and his battle to bring his family across the Belarus-Poland border.
(Radio Free Europe, approx 8 mins reading time)
Leaving Safa and his family members in the forest for much longer could be fatal. At least 10 migrants had already died attempting the same passage. But trying to smuggle them out and drive them to Germany, where he hoped they’d receive asylum, would risk their arrest in an area of Poland that has been turned into a militarized zone as the number of migrants crossing from Belarus, encouraged by the authoritarian regime of Alyaksandr Lukashenka, has skyrocketed. “I’m at my wit’s end,” Srour said in German one morning this past week, after local activists in the town of Hajnowka had staged another failed nighttime attempt to bring his family to one of the safe houses organized by locals, who risk incarceration for helping refugees.
George Monbiot about how capitalism is killing the planet, and how people need to focus not on micro consumer changes, but on the larger picture.
(The Guardian, approx 15 mins reading time)
The current ratio reflects a determined commitment to irrelevance in the face of global catastrophe. Tune in to almost any radio station, at any time, and you can hear the frenetic distraction at work. While around the world wildfires rage, floods sweep cars from the streets and crops shrivel, you will hear a debate about whether to sit down or stand up while pulling on your socks, or a discussion about charcuterie boards for dogs. I’m not making up these examples: I stumbled across them while flicking between channels on days of climate disaster. If an asteroid were heading towards Earth, and we turned on the radio, we’d probably hear: “So the hot topic today is – what’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened to you while eating a kebab?” This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with banter.
These role-players ‘live’ in the game Grand Theft Auto. Here’s a look into their subculture.
(Narratively, approx 21 mins reading time)
The world in which this trial took place is set in Los Santos, a fictional city (although one clearly based on Los Angeles), that serves as the setting for the wildly popular action-adventure video game Grand Theft Auto (GTA). Back in 2016, a small, niche group of gamer-programmers created this new world by altering the code from GTA5 to create a large-scale, multiplayer system dedicated to role-playing, called NoPixel. NoPixel is a server of GTA5, meaning it uses enough of GTA’s data to keep the original game’s feel, but it also adds completely different rules and access to new parts of the map — a process called “modding.”
Earlier this week, our colleague Niall Sargeant at Noteworthy won an investigative writing award for his reporting on labour conditions in horticulture. Here’s one of those articles, about fears for migrant workers over their working conditions.
(Noteworthy, approx 28 mins reading time)
While traditionally, soft fruit and mushroom picking were largely a local affair, a 2018 Teagasc survey found that 77% of the workforce is now made up of foreign nationals, predominantly from Eastern European countries, including the Baltic States, Bulgaria and Romania. According to Europol, seasonal workers from this region are vulnerable to exploitation. A pan-European investigation earlier this year identified 44 suspects of human trafficking for labour exploitation and over 300 victims, many from Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania.
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was made on a small budget in 1974, in pretty crappy conditions – but became a seminal horror movie. Here’s the story behind how it was made.
(Texas Monthly, 58 mins reading time)
And all these years later, almost everyone involved feels permanently changed or, in some cases, permanently scarred by the film. At least one actor—Ed Neal, who played the “hitchhiker”—can’t speak about it without becoming enraged. Robert Kuhn, a trial lawyer who invested in the film, would waste years fighting for the profits that should have poured into Austin but were instead siphoned off by a distribution company. Marilyn Burns, the strikingly beautiful actress who became the prototype for the “final girl” in horror films, never realized her great promise, partly because the film was a “résumé-killer.”
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