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.
The Slender Man doesn’t exist – but his very presence in the minds and imaginations of others led two 12-year-old girls to plan to murder another girl. What was going on?
(The Guardian, approx 27 mins reading time)
About five hours later and a few miles away, while resting in the grass alongside Interstate 94, Morgan and Anissa were picked up by a pair of sheriff’s deputies. The deputies approached them carefully, aware that the girls were possible suspects in a stabbing but confused by their age. One of the men noticed blood on Morgan’s clothes as he handcuffed her. When he asked if she was injured, she said no.
2. I made my shed No 1 on TripAdvisor
Oobah Butler once had a job putting up fake reviews on TripAdvisor. Then one day, they wondered, is putting up a fake restaurant possible on the site? Here’s what happened.
(Vice, approx 15 mins reading time)
One £10 burner later and “The Shed at Dulwich” officially exists. Now, I need to list an address – but doing so makes easy work for any skeptical fact checkers. Plus, I don’t technically have a door. Instead, I just list the road and call The Shed an “appointment-only restaurant”.
A juicy profile of the US’s First Lady, Melania Trump, and her unusual marriage.
(Vanity Fair, approx 21 mins reading time)
Stone said. “He always wanted to run. She is the one who pushed him to run just by saying run or do not run. I don’t think she was ever too crazy about it.” She knew her husband wanted to run for president. And she knew that, if he didn’t, he was likely to be knocking around their gilded triplex in Trump Tower, muttering about how he should have done so. “She said, ‘It’s not my thing. It’s Donald’s thing,’ ” according to Stone. “And I think she understood he was going to be unhappy if he didn’t run.”
Here’s a profile for Mike Pence, the evangelist Vice President who’s at Donald Trump’s side.
(The Atlantic, approx 50 mins reading time)
In Pence, Trump has found an obedient deputy whose willingness to suffer indignity and humiliation at the pleasure of the president appears boundless. When Trump comes under fire for describing white nationalists as “very fine people,” Pence is there to assure the world that he is actually a man of great decency. When Trump needs someone to fly across the country to an NFL game so he can walk out in protest of national-anthem kneelers, Pence heads for Air Force Two.
In this unflinching and honest depiction of childbirth, Kathleen McCaul Moura writes about our common thinking around labour and induction, and the two different experiences she had giving birth.
(Granta, approx 20 mins reading time)
She thought that I was frightened to let go of the baby. I don’t think I was. I had begun to have visions of carrying an eighteen-year-old around in utero which I didn’t find pleasant. What I was was simply frightened. I’d been wheeled into a darkened operating room to have a catheter shoved inside me and then inflated. I’d vomited several times. I had blood running down my legs.
6. Secret chronicles of Islamic State
He called himself Mosul Eye, and was an undercover historian and blogger who wanted to show the world what the extremists in Islamic State were really about.
(Associated Press, 17 mins reading time)
For nearly two years, he’d wandered the streets of occupied Mosul, chatting with shopkeepers and Islamic State fighters, visiting friends who worked at the hospital, swapping scraps of information. He grew out his hair and his beard and wore the shortened trousers required by IS. He forced himself to witness the beheadings and deaths by stoning, so he could hear the killers call out the names of the condemned and their supposed crimes.
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
This 2013 article is the chilling tale of a serial killer who terrorised communities in California from 1976 to 1986. He has never been caught, but a group of online obsessives are doing their best – along with a retired detective – to find him out.
(LA Mag, approx 30 mins reading time)
“I think I found him,” I said, a little punchy from lack of sleep. My husband, a professional comedian, didn’t have to ask who ‘him’ was. While we live in Los Feliz with our young daughter, my online life has been taken over by unsolved murders – and with maybe someday solving one of them, on a web site I launched in 2006 called True Crime Diary.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say