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. How football’s data boom began
In the mid-80s, top-level English club Watford began to send VHS tapes of matches across the world to Fiji to have their games analysed over the course of a year.
(BBC Sport, 5 minutes reading time)
Checking his pigeon-hole on the way to his office he found a padded envelope among the usual correspondence. It had an airmail sticker and a postmark from Watford, England.
Inside was a VHS videocassette and a letter. The tape contained recordings of Watford matches against Chelsea in the First Division and Crewe Alexandra in the Milk Cup. The letter was from Watford manager Graham Taylor, who politely asked for the cassette to be returned to England “together with an analysis in due course”.
This is how match analysis was carried out by a top-level English club in the 1980s – trusting the only tape recording of a game to long-distance airmail, having the analysis done by hand and then returned over 12 months later.
2. The book that burned in the Blitz and sank in the Titanic
A incredibly lavish book, the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, has had an unfortunate history with exceedingly bad luck after it sank aboard the Titanic. The replacement, which was finished in the late 1930′s, was then burned in attacks by German bombers during the Blitz.
(BBC, 12 minutes reading time)
Measuring 16in by 13in (40cm by 35cm), the book was encrusted with 1,050 jewels including specially cut rubies, topazes and emeralds. About 100sq ft (9sq m) of gold leaf and some 5,000 pieces of leather were used in its creation.Sangorski agonised over every detail, at one point borrowing a human skull so he could accurately depict it in his artistic vision. He even bribed a keeper at London Zoo to feed a live rat to a snake so he could capture the grisly image from first-hand experience.
The Daily Mirror considered the finished work to be “the most remarkable specimen of binding ever produced”. Others simply described it as the “Book Wonderful”.
It was given an enormous price tag.
In the UK, over five million payphone calls are still being made every year. The Guardian examines who is still making these calls.
(The Guardian, 15 minutes reading time)
Walk round a city, a town, a village and you see them. The last phone boxes. Once you start seeing them, you see them everywhere. For a while, I became preoccupied by their contradictory presence, often standing proudly on a street corner, completely ignored. At their peak, in the mid-1990s, the British population of phone boxes was about 100,000. Now, there are just over 20,000 working boxes left, which still sounds like quite a lot, given it’s hard to imagine anyone actually using one. And yet, they do. According to Ofcom, 5m calls are still made from phone boxes annually. Five million! It seems impossible. A number so surprisingly large it made me think there must be a lone guy in a box somewhere obsessively making one-minute calls all day to random numbers.
4. The hustler at the end of the world
Inside the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic and how one man tried to jump into supplying PPE on an industrial scale from his home.
(The Verge, 24 minutes reading time)
Kaplan had an in-home dog-training company that, like many businesses, was impossible to sustain under quarantine. So what now? The stock market had crashed. No one knew what was going on, who to trust, what to believe. Morgues were full. Ventilators were rationed. Personal protective equipment (PPE) was scarce. Anything felt possible.
How Madeira has become a home for thousands of digital nomads who work from the sun-dappled island in the middle of the ocean.
(GQ, 18 minutes reading time)
No place is making it work quite like Madeira. While countries from Aruba to Georgia have been trying to lure nomads to boost their pandemic-ravaged economies, this tiny island off the coast of northwest Africa is leading the way. Barrett and the other visitors here are part of Digital Nomads Madeira, a unique program catering to their needs—helping them find rental homes, equipping them with a state-of-the-art coworking space in the center of town, and organizing social events, like today’s yoga session, via a private Slack channel.
6. The Off Switch: Authoritarian states and dissent
An in depth examination by Rest of World on how authoritarian states clamp down on dissenters, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
(Rest of World, 25 minute reading time)
On February 27, a few days after Russia invaded Ukraine, radio journalist Valerii Nechay returned to St. Petersburg from a trip to the North Caucasus to find three men in his apartment. Wearing masks to disguise their features, they told him that if he wanted his mother to be left unharmed, he should leave the country. They needn’t have bothered. Nechay already had a one-way ticket booked to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. “It actually just helped me to pack my bags much quicker,” he said. From Armenia, he traveled on to Georgia and then on again. Rest of World agreed not to disclose his current location, out of concern for his safety.
…AND ONE FROM THE ARCHIVES…
The great writer Andrew O’Hagan’s series looking at what happened inside Grenfell Tower on the night of the tragic fire.
(London Review of Books, approx 298 mins reading time)
In the 15th century, ‘tower’ was another way of naming heaven. But Rania always felt Grenfell Tower was too tall. They were at the top and you could see the Hammersmith and City trains coming in and out of Latimer Road Station. From some of the flats you could see the cars, like ants, crawling up the Westway, and from others you were looking at the financial district, all those new towers in the distance with the Shard in the middle.
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