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. What does it mean to be a witch today?

The story of the Salem witch trials has fascinated people for centuries. Now, a new exhibition on the trials explores how the meaning of the word “witch” has evolved throughout that time. 

(Smithsonian Magazine, approx 7 mins reading time)

“Witch” has always been a capacious term. “Never one thing, she was several different beings at once,” historian Lyndal Roper writes in The Witch in the Western Imagination. All at once a seductress and a hag; a cunning shapeshifter and a gullible fool tricked into the service of the devil. The late journalist and Wiccan priestess Margot Adler wrote in Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers and Other Pagans in America that it’s exactly this “imprecision,” this ambiguity, that gives the word “witch” its power.

2. The gangland killings that rocked the Netherlands

In this audio longread, a look at how organised crime operated for years under the public’s nose in the Netherlands, until a series of shocking killings revealed how deep the problem went, ending in the murder of one of the country’s best-known crime reporters.

(The Guardian, approx 55 mins listening time)

Until early 2012, when a crew called the Turtles stole 200kg of cocaine belonging to a rival group from Amsterdam, and inter-gang violence spilled out into the streets of Dutch and Belgian cities, Dutch people had little sense of how deep the country’s organised crime problem went. Over the previous few years, cocaine had become more readily available, but murder rates stayed low – less than 130 a year. Natural disasters such as flooding were considered more immediate threats to public safety than crime.

3. Does talking to strangers make us smarter?

Joe Keohane writes about the studies that show how talking to people we’ve never met before, even in passing interactions, can make us wiser and happier.

(BBC, approx 12 mins reading time)

At a time when so many people feel lonely, estranged, excluded, disconnected, pessimistic, these findings are both useful and reassuring. Interacting with strangers, even in passing, can help us build or rebuild social networks, reconnect us with our communities, and shore up trust in the people around us. As a university student who participated in one of Sandstrom’s more recent experiments reported: “I felt like I had forgotten how to make friends, but this study reminded me that most people are friendly, and you just need to put yourself out there.”

4. Will sanctions against Russia end the war in Ukraine?

Over eight months since the war began, Sheelah Kolhatkar examines what effect the West’s sanctions against Moscow are having on its invasion of Ukraine. 

(The New Yorker, approx 32 mins reading time) 

Nicholas Mulder, a historian and the author of “The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War,” notes that, in these and other countries aggressively sanctioned by Western governments, despotic leaders lasted for years or remain stubbornly in place. “Sanctions are kind of like alchemy,” he said. “You apply all this pressure to this black box of a country’s economy and hope that, on the other side of that black box, political change comes out. But making sure that pain and pressure lead to the kind of change you want to see—that’s the real challenge, and often people underestimate how difficult that will be. And that’s why sanctions are often much less effective than you would think.”

5. Thatcher’s war on truth

A fascinating insight into how the British government of the 1980s began to change the way it communicated with its electorate, from a civil servant who had a front row seat into how writing to explain became writing to persuade. 

(The Guardian, approx 18 mins reading time)

By the time I left, seven years later, the Central Office Of Information was no longer the sole arbiter of what was and what wasn’t “objective information”. During the years they employed me, Thatcher had eroded this notion so effectively that we COI writers had little or no authority left. Advertising and public relations and lobbying agencies now clustered around Number 10 like flies over treacle, and the idea of truth had evaporated. Something got lost in those years. It is difficult to imagine the administrations of Tony Blair, David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss without the preparatory demolition of the foundations that Thatcher carried out. Never again would our governments allow us the dignity of knowing the facts and drawing our own conclusions from them.

6. The “ethically murky” practice of dark tourism

A look at the people who choose to visit destinations like the Chernobyl nuclear plant and North Korea instead of a sandy beach, and why they prefer to go to places to learn and reflect.

(The New York Times, approx 11 mins reading time)

As travel opens up, most people are using their vacation time for the typical goals: to escape reality, relax and recharge. Not so dark tourists, who use their vacation time to plunge deeper into the bleak, even violent corners of the world. They say going to abandoned nuclear plants or countries where genocides took place is a way to understand the harsh realities of current political turmoil, climate calamities, war and the growing threat of authoritarianism.

…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…

With Halloween just around the corner, some people will be settling down to watch some classic scary films. One of which, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, became a seminal horror film despite being made on a small budget in 1974. This is how it was made. 

 (Texas Monthly, approx 58 mins reading time)

And all these years later, almost everyone involved feels permanently changed or, in some cases, permanently scarred by the film. At least one actor—Ed Neal, who played the “hitchhiker”—can’t speak about it without becoming enraged. Robert Kuhn, a trial lawyer who invested in the film, would waste years fighting for the profits that should have poured into Austin but were instead siphoned off by a distribution company. Marilyn Burns, the strikingly beautiful actress who became the prototype for the “final girl” in horror films, never realized her great promise, partly because the film was a “résumé-killer.”