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.
1. Stranded and injured in a California desert
Claire Nelson was out for a hike in the Joshua Tree National Park when she slipped while getting off a boulder and broke her hip. She ended up stuck in the park in the baking sun for days.
(BBC, approx 7 mins reading time)
Claire had landed on her left side, shattering her pelvis. She tried to get up, but found she could not move. She tried to call emergency services, but her phone had no signal. “This was something I thought wouldn’t happen to me – not because I thought I was a pro-hiker – it just seemed like such an extreme scenario that you don’t imagine that this happens in real life.
2. The girl who tricked New York
The so-bizarre-it-can’t-be-real true story of Anna Delvey, a rich socialite who took New York by storm… but who wasn’t who she claimed to be.
(The Cut, approx 42 mins reading time)
That turned out to be a promise. Over the next few weeks, Delvey stopped by often to ask Neff’s advice, slipping her $100 each time. Neff would wax on about how Mr. Purple was totally washed and Vandal was for hipsters, while Delvey’s eyes would flit around behind her glasses. Eventually, Neff realized: Delvey already knew all the cool places to go — not only that, she knew the names of the bartenders and waiters and owners. “This is not a guest that needs my help,” it dawned on her. “This is a guest that wants my time.”
3. Stephen Miller, Trump adviser
The Atlantic calls Stephen Miller ‘Trump’s right-hand troll’. Here’s a profile of the speechwriter and immigration enforcer.
(The Atlantic, approx 45 mins reading time)
In the campy TV drama that is Donald Trump’s Washington, Miller has carved out an enigmatic role. He lurks in the background for weeks at a time, only to emerge with crucial cameos in the most explosive episodes. The one where Trump signed a havoc-wreaking travel ban during his first week in office, unleashing global chaos and mass protests? Miller helped draft the executive order.
4. Millennial women are conflicted about being breadwinners
This in-depth article looks at what millennial women think about earning more than their partners.
(Refinery29, approx 15 mins reading time)
When asked how they would feel if they knew right now that they would always be the breadwinner in their current marriages and relationships, words like “tired,” “exhausted,” and that special one, “resentful” turned up over and over again. One woman responded, “It’s stressful. It’s a huge responsibility. I pressure myself to stay in the job I’m at even if I’m unhappy there.”
5. The surprising history of fingerprints
Something to entertain friends with at your next dinner party: the history of fingerprinting.
(The Paris Review, approx 12 mins reading time)
Mark Twain boosted the nascent forensic science into the realm of common knowledge with his novels Life on the Mississippi (1883) and Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894). The plots of both stories included murders solved with fingerprints (in the latter’s case, at a sensational trial). Galton had classified prints based on types of patterns, still known today as “Galton details,” but real-world fingerprinting for forensic application would struggle with a system to classify, index, and reference the marks for decades.
6. The Nxivm sex cult that preached empowerment
Earlier this year, news broke about a ‘sex cult’ called Nxivm, which was based in the US and recruited attractive people wanting to improve their lives. Here’s the story behind it all.
(New York Magazine, approx 43 mins reading time)
First, they stripped naked. One by one, they lay on a massage table while a female osteopath, also a Nxivm member, used a cauterizing pen to brand the flesh near their pelvic bone. She carved a symbol that some women thought represented the four elements or the seven chakras or a horizontal bar with the Greek letters “alpha” and “mu,” but if you squinted and looked again, contained within them a different talisman: a K and an R — Raniere’s initials. Not all the women were told that these initials were present in the symbol.
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
In 2014, Elon Green wrote about the untold story of the Doodler Murders, which seemed to have been forgotten about.
(The Awl, approx 19 mins reading time)
Cavanaugh was the first victim in a string of homicides that, to this day, remain unsolved. From January 1974 to September 1975, The Doodler — or, as he was sometimes known, the Black Doodler, on account of his skin color — caught the eye of the Castro’s bar patrons by drawing caricatures and cartoons of them.1 Amused, flattered, perhaps titillated by the attention, man after man would leave the bar with their killer for a more secluded, intimate spot. Once they were alone, the men were stabbed and their bodies left on waterfronts and in parks.
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