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. Girls explain Star Wars to You
Irish writer Sarah Maria Griffin writes about the transformative experience of watching Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and seeing a character like Rey: a strong woman in a movie that celebrates the diversity of its cast.
(Scannain, approx 16 mins reading time)
It dawned on me extremely slowly that Rey was, in fact, not a love interest, or a B-Plot. I was on the edge of my seat, waiting for a gold-bikini scene. Waiting for her to have been written as all feist, no capability. Waiting for her to give up, already having given up on characters like her written by men a long, long time ago.
The photograph of the tiny body of Alan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach shocked people across the world. The New York Times met his family, and discovered that their tragic story goes beyond even that terrible incident.
(New York Times, approx 19 mins reading time)
Hours after Alan’s drowning, Abdullah told the story in anguish: The small boat foundered and flipped a few minutes into the journey. He tried to hold on to Ghalib and Alan, calling to his wife, “Just keep his head above water!” But all three drowned, one by one.
Cornell McKay has been locked up waiting for trial for 16 months. He’s accused of murdering a woman in broad daylight, but he says he’s innocent. In a story that those watching Making a Murderer will find fascinating, this is the story of how a similar-looking man was accused of similar crimes.
(St Louis Mag, approx 40 mins reading time)
That Saturday, August 18, around 2:20 in the afternoon, there’s another armed robbery two and a half blocks away. The victim is Megan Boken, a bubbly blond volleyball player who’s come back to her alma mater, Saint Louis University, for a tournament. When she resists and screams, the robber fires two bullets, at close range, into her neck and chest. Then he jumps into the passenger seat of a white Pontiac Sunfire that speeds off.
Vicente murdered his mother, father and his sister in Juárez, Mexico. This excerpt from a book about the killings looks at the incredibly high murder rate there, but also how poverty and political corruption feed into the violence.
(Longreads, approx 27 mins reading time)
It was after five in the morning, the sky already beginning to blush, when the cops could finally see through the smoke to the blackened skeleton of the truck with the soft-top back. A fireman was the first to approach and peer inside. What he found, he would later say in an interview, was more shocking than anything he had seen in a six-year career fighting fires: the burnt remains of three bodies, almost completely ravaged by the flames, lying on the collapsed backseat.
In 1967, Kathrine Switzer decided to enter the Boston Marathon. There was only one problem – women were banned from entering. A photo of officials confronting her has become iconic. Here’s the story behind the images of that confrontation.
(Deadspin, approx 15 mins reading time)
What emerged from the wetting agent was a three-part drama in black and white. The first image showed Semple angrily pawing at Switzer as Briggs (wearing bib No. 490) tried vainly to intervene, while the second featured the strapping Miller (390) shoving Semple away with a perfectly timed body block. In the finale, Switzer is regaining her balance and striding forward, her bib intact, while Semple stumbles toward oblivion.
Into adult colouring books, or just not sure what the craze is all about? Here’s the history behind them – and it’s much longer than you might think.
(New Republic, approx 9 mins reading time)
The first adult coloring book, published in late 1961, mocked the conformism that dominated the post-war corporate workplace. Created by three admen in Chicago, the Executive Coloring Book show pictures of a businessman going through each stage in his day, as though teaching a child what daddy does at work. But the captions, which give instructions on how to color the image, are uniformly desolate. “This is my suit. Color it gray or I will lose my job,”
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
If there’s one person you can trust to interview controversial people in a really interesting way, it’s Jon Ronson. Here’s his interview with one Katie Hopkins.
(The Guardian, approx 25 mins reading time)
I loathed her. Well, I didn’t loathe her, but her opinion that it was “fashionable” to be bullied and depressed made me very cross for several hours. Her migrant column was so extreme it read like an act of self-destruction, as if she was cutting the brakes of her own car. Why would someone write something so redolent of Nazi propaganda?
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