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. Raped and waiting for justice
In the village of Kavumu in the eastern Congo, there has been a series of horrific attacks on women and children. As Lauren Wolfe writes, they are still fighting for justice.
(The Guardian, approx 26 mins reading time)
Denise was, by some counts, the 39th child to be raped in the village of Kavumu, since the first was reported on 3 June 2013. Each time, men in groups had kidnapped a girl of between 18 months and 11 years old from her bed, raped her, and either returned her to her home or left her in a nearby field, which is farmed by demobilised soldiers. At least two girls have died from their injuries.
In what is surely one of the saddest stories you’ll read all year, this explores the impact of the 2011 tsunami in Japan on families who are still searching for their loved ones. We meet the man who became a diver so he could find his wife, and a mum who sends a lunch into the ocean every day for her daughter.
(New York Times Magazine, approx 32 mins reading time)
On weekends, Hiromi prepared special lunchboxes for Emi that she would deliver into the sea on Sunday. They were packed with Emi’s favorite meals, things like pork soup, Salisbury steak, deep-fried shrimp, all in special boxes that decomposed. She tossed the boxes off boat ramps, piers or rock ledges or set them gently adrift on the water. Always someplace hidden, where no one would see her. She had done this for five years.
3. Memories of Trump’s wedding
Joseph O’Neill was at Trump’s wedding in 2005 – and he’s recalled it all for us. It’s as odd as you imagine.
(New Yorker, approx 13 mins reading time)
As for those very few who didn’t watch TV or read the tabloids, or respect these media, surely even these miseries bore the groom the respectful good will one naturally bears any person who has just committed himself, for the third time, to the noble and demanding sacrament of marriage. About his latest union, Donald had predicted, in People, “I think it will be very successful.”
Denis Cuspert was a German jihadist who ended up in Syria singing songs for Isis – here’s how.
(Fader, approx 25 mins reading time)
Though he left rap, Cuspert never abandoned music. He began instead singing songs in praise of the international jihad, what jihadists refer to as nasheeds. Traditionally, nasheeds are songs of uplift, mostly a cappella, about Islam, its practices, and its history. But these were songs about fighters-in-arms, about explosions, about mass murder. In one, a German-language adaptation of a jihadist anthem called “Qariban Qariba,” Cuspert declared, Enemies of Allah, we want your blood/ It tastes so wonderful.
The Mascho Piro tribe have lived unconnected to the outside world in Peru for many years. But after a young man was killed, all eyes were on the tribe.
(New Yorker, approx 55 mins reading time)
One day, after hours on the river with no sign of human habitation, we rounded a bend and saw a dugout canoe, carrying a woman and a child, both with long black hair and naked torsos. At the sight of us, they began screaming and paddling frantically toward the riverbank, where a row of crude shelters sat on a bluff that was cleared of jungle. They shouted a word over and over: pishtaco.
6. How hiking the Appalachian trail changed me
Robert Moor trekked 2,000 miles along the Appalachian Trail and found it changed him in many ways – not least in that he became a hairier, thinner, veiner version of himself.
(Buzzfeed, approx 17 mins reading time)
There was a certain romance to all this — on some level we fancied ourselves wild animals, despite our absurdly modern clothing and gear — but it was practical, too. The human body has evolved to get all hairy and greasy and gross. It remembers its origins, even if we don’t. Surprisingly quickly, your nose stops noticing what you smell like, and starts tuning in to the subtler aromas of the forest. One day while I was hiking, I remember catching a whiff of something alien floating on the breeze — a cloying chemical smell. Minutes later, a group of Girl Scouts came around the bend, and I pinpointed it: Herbal Essences shampoo
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
In this 2009 essay, Vanity Fair explores the impact of JFK’s death, and the battle over the official account of it.
(Vanity Fair, approx 53 mins reading time)
Of all the books written about the Kennedy assassination—by some counts more than 2,000—the one book commissioned by the Kennedys themselves and meant to stand the test of time has virtually disappeared. The fight over Manchester’s book—published on April 7, 1967, by Harper & Row after more than a year of bitter, relentless, headline-making controversy over the manuscript—nearly destroyed its author and pitted him against two of the most popular and charismatic people in the nation: the slain president’s beautiful grieving widow, Jacqueline Kennedy, and his brother Robert F. Kennedy. And the struggle would bring to both Jackie and Bobby a public-relations nightmare.
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