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.
Rebecca Solnit on 10 ways to confront the climate crisis without losing hope.
(The Guardian, approx 16 mins reading time)
Movements, campaigns, organisations, alliances and networks are how ordinary people become powerful – so powerful that you can see they inspire terror in elites, governments and corporations alike, who devote themselves to trying to stifle and undermine them. But these places are also where you meet dreamers, idealists, altruists – people who believe in living by principle. You meet people who are hopeful, or even more than hopeful: great movements often begin with people fighting for things that seem all but impossible at the outset, whether an end to slavery, votes for women or rights for LGTBQ+ people.
An interview with everyone’s favourite Succession character.
(The New Yorker, approx 16 mins reading time)
The first scene that we shot was between Kieran and me, but it was supposed to be a guy, so the crude language in it was just the way they always talk to each other. I tried to do this thing where I straddled being unflappable but being grossed out. You know how Gerri is always wincing and rolling her eyes and pretending she didn’t hear? But she’s not clutching her pearls. It’s so crazy, because I’m such a dizzy dame. Like, I wouldn’t be a good Gerri in real life.
A look at an international smuggling operation, the first hint of which came when a padded envelope arrived at Calgary airport… and started to move.
(The Walrus, approx 16 mins reading time)
As it was being sorted, a customs agent saw the package move. Inside the envelope was a slim cardboard box with holes along its sides. Inside that box were two small fabric pouches with duct-taped edges. An agent carefully opened the pouches into a plastic mail-carrying bin. Golf ball–size baby turtles emerged, crawling toward corners, scrambling over one another’s shells, and shuffling up the box’s walls. There were eleven turtles in total. There was no food or water.
Current political issues in Northern Ireland due to Brexit could be a threat to the Western Alliance, Tom McTague writes.
(The Atlantic, approx 11 mins reading time)
And yet even if Brexit—and the specific form of Brexit that Britain has pursued since 2016—lies at the root of this crisis (which is true), it does not necessarily follow that London is wrong about the current threat to stability in Northern Ireland, or that it is wrong to try to combat this threat. It can be true both that Johnson is an untrustworthy and irresponsible leader who has made the situation worse and that the deal he signed (which he claimed was great and won an election to ratify) really does threaten the very peace settlement in Northern Ireland that it was meant to protect. What is more, if this is the case, the EU must share some responsibility for the mess, for the deal was made as much in Europe as in Britain.
5. The terrifying truth of Se7en
Don’t ready this unless you have already watched the film Se7en, directed by David Fincher… Here’s an extract from a book about the director.
(The Ringer, approx 14 mins reading time)
The film’s outer shape is that of a thriller, specifically the kind of gritty, big-city police procedural patented in the sweltering ’70s by Sidney Lumet: preparing for his first day on the job, David Mills (Brad Pitt) jokingly tells his wife Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow), “Serpico’s got to go to work.” (“You might want to get rid of this little crusty in your eye, Serpico,” she responds sleepily). More significantly, Se7en erects itself as a landmark in the history of serial-killer movies. The genre began in earnest in 1931 with Fritz Lang’s M, whose guilt-wracked pederast is played by Peter Lorre as a mewling victim of his own insatiable compulsions, as well as a broken byproduct of early 20th-century modernity.
6. ‘I could have been a racist killer’
An interview with ‘Mike’, who became a Nazi but gradually turned his life around.
(BBC, approx 14 mins reading time)
He had just met a new friend through a messaging group online. Paul (not his real name) invited Mike to visit his home, where he lived with his parents. It was an ordinary house on a quiet cul-de-sac in an upmarket suburb of a major US city. They were meeting to “shoot some propaganda videos”. Paul opened the door in full Nazi uniform. He took Mike straight to his garage. “It was just like a clothing store for Nazis,” Mike says. The walls were lined with weapons – ammunition, cartridges and many guns.” Paul had gathered a few other young men for the shoot. They loaded guns and ammunition into a truck and drove out to some nearby hills.
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
A story from 2018 about Tangier, and how it is predicted it could be uninhabitable in less than 25 years due to climate change.
(PS Mag, approx 23 mins reading time)
Back in 2015, the science journal Nature ran a study warning of Tangier’s demise at the hands of sea-level rise due to climate change. The dire findings caught the attention of climate scientists and, of course, the island’s residents themselves, most of whom were skeptical. But it wasn’t until last June, when Donald Trump came calling, that Tangier’s plight crept into popular consciousness. After his advisers showed him a CNN report about the disappearing island and its pro-Trump inhabitants, the president phoned Eskridge and personally urged him to drop any concerns about sea-level rise. And suddenly everyone, it seemed, had an opinion on what was happening on this previously obscure island, rendering Tangier a poster child for both sides in the national conversation on climate change.
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