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.
Matthieu Aikins asks: What made a 17-year-old police chief’s assistant shoot seven marines with an AK47 on a hot August night in Afghanistan? To find out the answer he looks at the recent wave of insider attacks on security forces in the country.
(Mother Jones – approx 31 minutes reading time, 6216 words)
The attacks have confounded military leaders. There was no parallel experience in Iraq or Vietnam, where the United States also battled powerful insurgencies while simultaneously training local forces. Nor does the cultural hypothesis fully explain why insider attacks exploded in the last two years, after thousands of coalition soldiers have been in Afghanistan for nearly a decade and the bulk of the surge troops were in place by the summer of 2010.
Nick Bilton looks at the story behind Twitter: the myths that surround how it was started, the fractious relationships that emerged as it became more successful, and how exactly it managed to become a start-up that made millions. Are all things fair in love and Twitter?
(New York Times - 30 approx minutes reading time, 6188 words)
In the Valley, these tales are called “the Creation Myth” because, while based on a true story, they exclude all the turmoil and occasional back stabbing that comes with founding a tech company. And while all origin stories contain some exaggerations, Twitter’s is cobbled together from an uncommon number of them.
File photo. Pic: AP Photo/Kostas Tsironis
Connor Ke Muo is partly in hiding. Living in San Francisco, away from his family in Taiwan, he can be himself: a gay man. But when it comes to his family, things are different. His sexuality is a barrier between them all.
(Buzzfeed - approx 19 minutes reading time, 3850 words)
Since the first dumb pangs of puberty, I’d rehearsed coming out to my parents with all my weapons, my darted words and humanist morals. I’d heard them wave the word “f***ot” in front of countless TV shows and dinner parties like the burning end of a cigarette, and I’d stashed every homophobic thing they’d said in a vat of my private resentment against them. I was ready to fight.
Helen Fawkes had things she wanted to do with her life – but it wasn’t until she told her time was limited that she set out to tick off every thing on her ‘list for living’. Here is her inspirational and heartbreaking story of her cancer diagnosis and what she did next. (BBC News) (Approx 11 minutes reading time – 2237 words)
This cancer business is so horrific that it can easily take over your identity. Having this gives you something else to focus on and makes you feel like you again. So far I’ve managed to do 10 of them. I’ve pulled a pint in my local pub, I went to Paris with a group of friends just for lunch, modelled in a fashion show and zoomed down a zip wire. Next weekend I will present a Radio 4 programme, Pick of the Week, which will mean another big tick.
Amazon.com Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. Pic: Stephen Brashear/AP/Press Association Images
Brad Stone brings us Jeff Bezos, the man behind Amazon, and the story of how the business ‘became the everything store’. He spoke to hundreds of friends – current and former – of Bezos, and found out about the power he wields over his staff and how he managed to turn the company into the behemoth it is today.
(Business Week – approx 36 minutes reading time, 7359 words)
The one unguarded thing about Bezos is his laugh—a pulsing, mirthful bray that he leans into while craning his neck back. He unleashes it often, even when nothing is obviously funny to anyone else. And it startles people. “You can’t misunderstand it,” says Rick Dalzell, Amazon’s former chief information officer, who says Bezos often wields his laugh when others fail to meet his lofty standards. “It’s disarming and punishing. He’s punishing you.”
James Palmer meets the ‘kept women’ of China, who have rich lovers who visit them when they can get time away from their wives. What stokes this culture of mistresses, and what is it like to be a ‘second wife’?
(Aeon - approx 15 minutes reading time, 3000 words)
She’d walked the common path for country girls becoming mistresses, or ernai (literally, ‘second woman’). She’d gone to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, at 17, where she’d worked as a hostess at a karaoke bar at a hotel, before moving to Beijing to do the same. Her work involved entertaining men, including, if they paid enough, sleeping with them; that was how she’d met her lover, who’d offered to set her up after their fourth ‘date’.
…AND ONE FROM THE ARCHIVES…
Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood. Pic: AP Photo, file
In 2000, Sam Kashner looked at the infamous case of the death of Natalie Wood, and asked: What really happened on her fatal voyage? She was terrified of deep water, so how did she end up out in the Pacific in the middle of the night? (Vanity Fair – approx 62 minutes reading time – 12481 words)
Around midnight Payne heard a woman yelling, “Help me, someone please help me!” The voice was coming from near the stern of Splendour and, Payne believed, from someone in a dinghy. He awakened Wayne, who heard the cries, too. The couple claimed they hadn’t responded because a loud, drunken party was raging on another nearby yacht, and they had thought someone was just “playing around.”
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