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 some of the week’s best reads for you to savour.
When Erik Maund, the spoiled heir to a Texas car dealership empire, got a text threatening to tell his wife he had been cheating on her, he responded by ordering two murders.
Privilege, stupidity, Charlie Sheen’s former bodyguard and a hangout called ‘the Shithole’ all feature in this excellent longread by Katy Vine and Ana Worrel.
(Texas Monthly, approx 32 mins reading time)
“Let me get you in touch with a divorce lawyer. That’s what I would have told him,” said someone who knew Erik. That was one possible course of action: Erik could have told his wife everything. Or he could have called the cops. He could have just paid up. After all, he was worth millions of dollars, and the sender might have gone away. He chose a fourth option, one that would cost him a lot more money and, ultimately, his freedom. Four years and a jury trial later, it’s still hard to pinpoint just what motivated his ruinous decision. At first glance, Erik comes off as a spoiled heir missing a moral compass, who in trying to outwit a blackmailer wound up guilty of murder. As you look closer, a striking feature of the story is that Erik and many others involved, culprits and victims alike, were trying to chase away their demons with fantasies and desperate schemes—until all these delusions collided, leaving two people dead.
Emily Nussbaum writes about the history of ‘The Real World’, a radical experiment on MTV 30 years ago that saw seven strangers picked to live in a house together, which set the stage for some of the biggest reality TV shows around today.
(The New Yorker, approx 29 mins reading time)
Three decades later, Murray smiled when describing that early crisis to me—a small, dry smile that signalled his awareness of how much had changed since then. We were seated in his home office, in Santa Monica, in the beautiful mansion that “The Real World”—which ran for thirty-three seasons, and spawned multiple spinoffs—had built for him and his long-term partner, Harvey Reese. Murray had had an impressive career, producing celebreality shows, unscripted competitions, and shows devoted to cultural uplift: on a shelf were Emmys for Outstanding Unstructured Reality Program (“Born This Way,” about people with Down syndrome) and Outstanding Nonfiction Special (“Autism: The Musical”). In the age of “Keeping Up with the Kardashians”—an archly aspirational franchise that Murray had helped produce—that brief battle over “pebbles in the pond” felt like something from a lost era, a time when Generation X’s obsession with authenticity was at its height. It was a philosophy that now felt as obsolete as the Shakers. But, back in 1992, his cast had nearly walked out of their own Eden. “We threw pebbles in the pond,” Murray said. “And they threw back a boulder.”
Joy Milne could smell that her husband had the condition years before he was diagnosed. This beautifully written piece explores her work with researchers.
(The New York Times, approx 28 mins reading time)
Les spent long hours in the surgical theater, which in Macclesfield had little in the way of ventilation, and Joy typically found that he came home smelling of anesthetics, antiseptics and blood. But he returned one August evening in 1982, shortly after his 32nd birthday, smelling of something new and distinctly unsavory, of some thick must. From then on, the odor never ceased, though neither Les nor almost anyone but his wife could detect it. For Joy, even a small shift in her husband’s aroma might have been cause for distress, but his scent now seemed to have changed fundamentally, as if replaced by that of someone else. She thought he smelled vaguely of his mother.
Sophie Vershbow’s moving article tells the story of how she went on a journey to discover the cousin she never knew, Jeffrey Bomser, who died of AIDS-related causes in 1989.
(Esquire, approx 33 mins reading time)
The enduring bias against gay and bisexual men was a huge distraction for people with HIV and AIDS, who struggled to get medical care and live openly at a time when the majority of those with the virus were men who had sex with men. Public perception around the LGBTQ + community has radically changed in recent years, but in the late 1980s, the perception of AIDS as a “gay disease” immediately closed many off from caring about it as an issue, or even caring about the people dying from it. The ability to see one’s own public image so clearly while facing down your impending mortality leaves me in awe of my cousin.
Jeff believed that the more people who knew about AIDS and people who had it, the better chance there would be of finding a cure. He was aware of his privilege as a charismatic, straight-passing, sober, middle-class white man dealing with a diagnosis mostly shared at the time by gay men and disadvantaged IV drug users who were being systematically ignored. For so long, Jeff’s privilege had been used to feed his ego and drug addiction, but in the final years of his life, he used that privilege and charisma to contribute to a movement.
A look inside the industry of eel fishing and what it takes to be successful in the lucrative world.
(The New Yorker, approx 36 mins reading time)
During a favorable market and a hard elver run, a Mainer may earn a hundred thousand dollars in a single haul. Each license holder is assigned a quota, ranging from four pounds to more than a hundred, based partly on seniority. Even the lowest quota insures a payout of six thousand dollars if the price per pound breaches fifteen hundred, which happens with some regularity. Maine is the only place in the country where a kid can become eligible for an elver license at fifteen and win a shot at making more money overnight, swinging a net, than slinging years’ worth of burgers. Elvermen have sent their children to college on eels, and have used the income to improve their homes, their businesses, their boobs. This year, more than forty-five hundred Mainers applied for sixteen available licenses.
Have you ever wondered how intense it is to work in a manic, Michelin-starred kitchen? Nick Thompson finds out what it’s like.
(VICE, approx 14 mins reading time)
The kitchen is a constant whirl of choreography. At 10.40 a.m., young Ciaran is dripping an oil of some sort into a machine and making taramasalata. KP is on the mains section, chopping shallots lengthways. Morgan is moving a weighing scale. Sam is pushing a great big silver bowl into the fridge, and bringing out a massive saran-wrapped, sausage-shaped galantine of guinea hen and rabbit. Mahalia is slapping and working the dough. There are shouts of “backs” as chefs rush around the obstacle that is me.
When the prep’s over, there’s a massive clean up job. The sections are wiped clean at warp speed. As they get ready for lunch service, huge chopping boards come out and heat lamps are turned on. KP is on the phone, livid about a chicken delivery fuck up. “Today would be great, yeah,” he says. Followed soon after with: “This is your problem, you created it, you need to fix it!” And: “I dont really give a fuck to be honest with you, mate, I need those chickens today!”
Legendary actor Donald Sutherland died this week at the age of 88. Here’s an interview with him from 2018.
(Rolling Stone, approx 19 mins reading time)
Klute is funny, because … like I said, I don’t watch my movies. I have never seen it. And last fall, 60 Minutes decided they were going to do a profile on me. Anderson Cooper and a crew came up to where I live in Canada, they set up a screen and began projecting clips from my films as he asked me questions. And we got to Klute, and they start showing a scene with my character and Bree. And I started watching, and it was like, “Oh … oh, wow … that guy is good. He’s good, I like him.” [Laughs] Really, it was fascinating – I was so distant from it that I could look at the actor and onscreen and think “That’s wonderful, what that man is doing … I really love this actor.”
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