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.
Susan Milius writes about naming fungus… wait! Come back! This is far more fascinating than you’d believe. Seriously.
(Science News, approx 18 minutes reading time, 3755 words)
The problem is that reproductive modes can take entirely different anatomical forms. A species that looks like a miniature corn dog when it is reproducing sexually might look like fuzzy white twigs when it is in cloning mode. A gray smudge on a sunflower seed head might just be the asexually reproducing counterpart of a tiny satellite dish–shaped thing. Just by looking at them, you’d never know.
Jim Dwyer tells the story of Noemi Álvarez Quillay, an Ecuadorian girl who tried to make her way from Central America to The United States illegally. Her tragic story is a cautionary one.
(New York Times, approx 14 minutes reading time, 2951 words)
In March, a month after she left home, the police picked up Noemi and a coyote in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The authorities took her to a children’s shelter. She was described as crying inconsolably after being questioned by a prosecutor. A few days later, she was found hanged from a shower curtain rod in a bathroom at the shelter.
Andrew O’Hagan goes to Tangier, and meets the ‘aesthetes’, the talented ex-pats who have been tempted by its bright colours and “whiff of old scandal”.
(T Magazine, approx 37 minutes reading time, 7598 words)
In a shrinking world, Tangier is a place where eccentricity is celebrated, where fiscal nomads and expatriates thrive in the midday sun, where light filters through the palms and makes an atmosphere of dreaming. With its bright colors and whiff of old scandal, it is a place of the mind, stranded perfectly at a gathering point of sweet-scented opposites.
4. From Ivy League student to heroin addict
Laura Dimon introduces us to Keri Blakinger, author of IV League, who went from talented student to convicted felon, via drug use.
(Policy Mic, approx 8 minutes reading time, 1745 words)
For a comparison, a doctor might prescribe a patient to take one or two 5 or 10-milligram doses of Oxycontin per day when recovering from surgery. Blakinger swallowed 1,600 milligrams. She describes the hours that followed as a series of “snapshots of clarity surrounded by dense pillars of cognitive fog.” There was a flash of handcuffs, of an interrogation room, an arraignment, an orange jumpsuit, a metal toilet and shower “caked in vomit.”
Mikal Gilmore meets the man of the moment, George RR Martin, and quizzes him for 10 hours about his famous books. Don’t worry, the entire transcript isn’t here – but it’s a comprehensive read.
(Rolling Stone, approx 31 minutes reading time, 6318 words)
I’m proud of my work, but I don’t know if I’d ever claim it’s enormously original. You look at Shakespeare, who borrowed all of his plots. In A Song of Ice and Fire, I take stuff from the Wars of the Roses and other fantasy things, and all these things work around in my head and somehow they jell into what I hope is uniquely my own.
Amy Dempsey visits the Stewart family. One member, Michael, killed a woman 12 years ago. His mother. Dempsey finds out how the family coped.
(Toronto Star, approx 38 minutes reading time, 7762 words)
The incident left a family shattered. With June dead and Michael in a psychiatric hospital, the remaining Stewarts — father David, his son Peter, and twins John and Rebecca — faced a devastating situation. How does a family learn to live with a loss of such magnitude while occupying conflicting roles: husband, daughter and sons of the victim, and also father, sister and brothers of the killer?
…AND A CLASSIC READ FROM THE ARCHIVES…
In 1934, HG Wells interviewed none other than Joseph Stalin. Here’s how it went.
(The New Statesman, approx 33 minutes reading time, 6702 words)
Stalin The United States is pursuing a different aim from that which we are pursuing in the USSR. The aim which the Americans are pursuing arose out of the economic troubles, out of the economic crisis. The Americans want to rid themselves of the crisis on the basis of private capitalist activity, without changing the economic basis.
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