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.
In 2013, 20-year-old Emma Carey went skydiving for the first time. She fell 14,000 feet to the ground out of a helicopter after her parachute got tangled. Incredibly, she survived.
Ryan Hockensmith writes about the aftermath of the accident, how Carey learned to walk again and what she has accomplished since it happened.
(ESPN, approx 25 mins reading time)
About 20 minutes in, it was go-time. Emma looks at Jemma, says “I love you” and then jumps out of her side of the helicopter with her instructor. Thirty seconds later, Jemma jumps from the other side. Jemma closes her eyes for the duration of her jump — she hates every second of it. Emma, on the other hand, loves it. She soars for the first half-minute, soaking in her first skydive. About 30 seconds in, she feels a tap on her shoulder, the signal from her instructor to cross her arms to brace for the jolt of her chute going off. She crosses her arms and then … nothing. She’s not slowing down. She feels a tug on her hair, and she tries to see what the instructor is doing behind her. He’s out cold, unconscious from the ropes attached to the chutes. She can see the chutes, giant chunks of red fabric, flailing around in bunched-up bundles. They’re not supposed to be bunched-up bundles.
Forensic authorities have said that the remains of at least 52,000 people were unidentified as of 2020. According to some estimates, it could take 120 years to identify them all. Amy Reed-Sandoval writes about the quest to do so.
(The New Yorker, approx 11 mins reading time)
Enríquez’s goal in life was to excavate ancient sites. She had come to Ciudad Juárez on an invitation from a friend from her archeology program, Alberto Peña Rodríguez, who was part of a team hired by the state’s prosecutor to exhume unidentified bodies buried in a common grave in one of the city’s cemeteries. The team had recently examined a similar, smaller grave in the city of Chihuahua, and was trying to replicate this effort on a larger scale. When the clandestine grave was discovered nearby, Rodríguez had instructed Enríquez and her colleagues to examine it, and had given the group specific instructions: they were to extract the remains, analyze the bones, develop biological profiles of the deceased containing details of their sex, height, age, and the like, and gather DNA samples.
Usually, this kind of work was done not by archeologists but by forensic anthropologists—scientists who study human remains to identify deceased persons and solve criminal cases. Before leaving for fieldwork, Enríquez had paged through all the forensic-anthropology guides she could find, including the United Nations “Manual on the Effective Prevention and Investigation of Extra-Legal, Arbitrary and Summary Executions,” from 1991, which became known as the Minnesota Protocol. The work it described was a far cry from unearthing ancient artifacts.
You may have read that days before the Paris 2024 opening ceremony, the Canada women’s football manager was suspended after a drone was used to spy on another team’s training sessions.
In this piece, Jacob Whitehead writes about the history of spying in the sport.
(The Athletic, approx 8 mins reading time)
Go back two more decades and ahead of a vital away World Cup qualifier against Norway in 1993, England manager Graham Taylor was so convinced his team were being watched that he moved their training base to a military facility. The issue? That new location was near the house of the chief sportswriter of one of Norway’s leading newspapers, who subsequently published their tactics the next morning. England lost, 2-0, in Oslo, ended up missing out on the 1994 World Cup, and Taylor got sacked.
Similarly, in a case of paranoia outweighing perspective, the Chilean football federation once sent up their own device to destroy a drone hovering over their session before a match against Argentina. It was perhaps football’s first case of aerial warfare since Roy Keane’s infamous tackle on Alfie Haaland. In this case, it turned out the questionable drone was a surveying tool being used by a Chilean telecommunications company.
In 1987, Ryan Nourai’s mother was shot in the head after being kidnapped, but she survived. Now, after her death, her son writes about investigating what happened to her, and even tracking down the men responsible in this poignant piece.
(Esquire, approx 22 mins reading time)
After my mother died, the incident remained, hanging over everything. Because those twenty-four hours were so horrific and so influential on her life as well as mine, which made them feel both unresolved and dynamic, I fixated on the incident more than I grieved her death. As months passed, then years, I came to believe I could learn about my mother by learning about the incident. Did she find the strength to survive in the faith that she might eventually raise a child? If I could find out the make of the gun, could I know if our relationship ever dulled her pain or chased her nightmares? If I found the names of the two men who shot her, would I feel closer to my mother or further away?
Timothée Chalamet is set to star as music legend Bob Dylan in a new biopic to be released early next year. Here, director James Mangold speaks about making the film, and Chalamet’s acting brilliance.
(Rolling Stone, approx 17 mins reading time)
I didn’t want to turn Bob Dylan into a simple character with a simple thing to unlock that then makes you go, “Ah, now I get him.” I don’t think that’s possible, having gotten to know him. I also think it’s pretty clear he spent most of his life trying to avoid that exact act by anybody. Which is an act of, by nature, reduction — reducing someone to a simple epiphany, a plot-point Freudian history of their life.
So then my role as a dramatist becomes, if I’m not going to do that… which in a way I did do in Walk the Line. It’s a difference. Johnny Cash is defined by his upbringing, the loss of his brother, the shame he’s carried in life, and an addiction that was driven by the sorrows of his childhood. It lines up very clearly. And his music being about, kind of, imprisonment and darkness — it’s all in incredible, dramatic harmony with these psychological observations about him. None of that would be that easy with Bob.
In this powerful longread, an edited version of a lecture, renowned Austrian writer Martin Pollack shares his experience of being born into a Nazi family during the Second World War and how he came to terms with it.
(The Guardian, approx 20 mins reading time)
Why do people turn so easily from being “ordinary men”, as the historian Christopher Browning describes them, into ruthless murderers, convinced that they are doing the right thing, and that they are serving a just cause? The historical record shows that when the state sanctions murder against minorities, people are more likely to perpetrate violence.
And when the conflict is over, they get on with their normal life as fathers and husbands. Society doesn’t seem to have much of a problem with reintegrating them. This is also true for the next generations. Most of my peers are still reluctant to face the reality of Nazi crimes, or to admit that many of their grandparents and parents had supported the Nazi regime as willing followers, or maybe even taken part in the crimes. They demand we draw a thick line under the past, and let bygones be bygones.
It’s been a year since the incomparable Sinéad O’Connor died at the age of 56. In this interview from 2021, she looks back on her life and career.
(The New York Times, approx 12 mins reading time)
But the overreaction to O’Connor was not just about whether she was right or wrong; it was about the kinds of provocations we accept from women in music. “Not because I was famous or anything, but because I was a human being, I had a right to put my hand up and say what I felt,” O’Connor said. Some artists are skilled at shocking in a way designed to sell more records, and others at tempering their political rage into palatable music, but “Sinead is not the tempering type,” her friend Bob Geldof, the musician and activist, told me. “In that, she is very much an Irish woman.”
Note: The Journal generally selects stories that are not paywalled, but some might not be accessible if you have exceeded your free article limit on the site in question.
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