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.
Jen Graves received an email from an artist last spring that she found intriguing. But when she went to interview the woman, she realised that things were not exactly as they seemed… and that sometimes artists are driven to lie for their art. (The Stranger) (Approx 23 minutes reading time – 4699 words)
The reason I’m withholding her name now is the same reason I didn’t write about her then—to avoid handing a pile of free PR to somebody who was blatantly lying to get it. Every artist wants distance from her early work. There wasn’t any reason to lie. Except if one wants a sexier story.
David Kushner meets the geeks on the front lines, the badass hackers and code warriors who can get into your email and then some. They’re not the outlaws of the internet anymore, he tells us, and meet at hacker conventions. There’s even a war taking place between government and industry to get the geeks to work for them. (Rolling Stone) (Approx 23 minutes reading time – 4645 words)
Government agencies and corporations fly Street around the world to see if he can bullshit his way into their most sensitive data centers. He has scammed his way into a bank in Beirut, a financial center across from Ground Zero, a state treasury department. He usually records his infiltrations on a spy watch, a 16-gigabyte HD video recorder with infrared lights, then turns over the footage to his clients
Susan Faludi looks at the concept of ‘leaning in’, created by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and its expanding group of followers. Never accepting things at face value, Faludi looks at what is expected of women who lean in, and what the reality for them is in the workplace. (The Baffler) (Approx 44 minutes reading time – 8911 words)
When asked in a radio interview in Boston about the external barriers women face, Sandberg agreed that women are held back “by discrimination and sexism and terrible public policy” and “we should reform all of that,” but then immediately suggested that the concentration on such reforms has been disproportionate, arguing that “the conversation can’t be only about that, and in a lot of ways the conversation on women is usually only about that.”
Elizabeth Hyde Stevens writes about Jim Henson – the man behind The Muppets – and how he faced the challenge that almost every artist faces: how to make money from making art. This essay from her serial Make Art Make Money outlines how he managed it. (Longreads) (Approx 19 minutes reading time – 3984 words)
The artist was creating the Disney World attraction Muppet*Vision 3D when he died suddenly in 1990 from a rare infection. When you think of leaving an artistic legacy of lasting good, I don’t think you can aim much higher than Henson’s—the work he created is beloved by so many, twenty-three years after his death, in more than a hundred different countries.
Susan Berfield writes about the largest food fraud in US history, when a plot to import millions of pounds of cheap honey from China was uncovered. The fraudsters wanted to disguise the honey’s origins – and sell it to a country whose residents consume more honey than anyone else in the world. (Business Week) (Approx 13 minutes reading time – 2708 words)
The broker, a small-time businessman from Taiwan named Michael Fan, had already received advice from ALW about how to get Chinese honey into the US ALW executives had told him to ship his honey in black drums since the Chinese usually used green ones. And they had reminded him that the “taste should be better than regular mainland material.”
Yochi Dreazen outlines how the new terrorist training ground is Mali, where al-Qaeda conquered a broad swathe of the country last year. Is the new face of terror African? Dreazen believes so. (The Atlantic) (Approx 38 minutes reading time – 7763 words)
Camouflage pickup trucks full of Malian soldiers now rumble down Gao’s otherwise empty streets, and a handful of small bars and restaurants have reopened. Castel and other Malian beers, strictly forbidden under the Islamists, are freely available, though they’re usually served warm because of the city’s frequent power outages.
…AND ONE FROM THE ARCHIVES…
In 2005, Vanity Fair carried an exclusive interview with Mark Felt, the ‘deep throat’ who leaked information about President Richard Nixon’s Watergate cover-up to Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Here’s what he had to say. (Vanity Fair) (Approx 12 minutes reading time – 2583 words)
Who in the top echelons of government had mustered the courage to leak secrets to the press? Who had sought to expose the Nixon administration’s conspiracy to obstruct justice through its massive campaign of political espionage and its subsequent cover-up? Who, indeed, had helped bring about the most serious constitutional crisis since the 1868 impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson—and, in the process, changed the fate of the nation?
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