IF YOU WANT a juicy longread to sink your teeth into, you’ve come to the right place.
Here are three to save for a moment of peace, or devour straight away.
Though this isn’t strictly a longread, it’s still a really fascinating one – an interview with documentarian Nick Broomfield about his latest work, which looks at how a serial killer got away with killing African Americans because police just weren’t interested in investigating the crimes. (NY Mag, 15 mins)
NHI is police slang for No Human Involved. When they radio something in, it’s always abbreviated. NHI is used when a prostitute or drug addict is killed. It means, pick the body up, don’t really bother doing proper forensics; this won’t need anything more than a cursory examination. The police don’t see these women as people. When community members raised concerns in the ’80s, police were like, “Why are you so worried? He’s just killing prostitutes.”
A visceral description of butchery in the US, by a former vegetarian. Not the easiest read for the squeamish.
(Aeon, 21 mins)
But even on the farm, the butchering was done off-site at a slaughterhouse. We would round up pigs and load them into a trailer, and days later we’d pack frozen bricks of meat into the chest freezer, labelled with the farm’s logo. Even then I wondered at the jobs of the people who worked at the slaughterhouse, how they’d chosen what I saw then as such unfortunate work. I couldn’t help but wonder, who would want to do that?
Louise Troh loved Thomas Eric Duncan, the first man to die in the US of Ebola. In her new book, she writes movingly about their relationship. (Vanity Fair, 20 mins)
When Eric came to Dallas I was afraid he would not love me when he saw how old I’d become. I was 54 years old, 10 years more than him. My legs hurt. Gray was coming into my hair. I worked as a certified nurse assistant at a senior living center. My hands were rough from so much Clorox, so many years of cleaning. Dishes. Pots. Sinks. Diapers. Toilets. Floors. Cleaning everything. And the next day, cleaning again.
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