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.
What goes on in the most isolated location on the planet? Quite a lot, according to Cullen Murphy.
(The Atlantic, approx 23 mins reading time)
The oceanic pole of inaccessibility goes by a more colloquial name: Point Nemo. The reference is not to the Disney fish, but to the captain in Jules Verne’s novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. In Latin, nemo means “no one,” which is appropriate because there is nothing and no one here. Point Nemo lies beyond any national jurisdiction. According to Flightradar24, a tracking site, the occasional commercial flight from Sydney or Auckland to Santiago flies overhead, when the wind is right. But no shipping lanes pass through Point Nemo. No country maintains a naval presence. Owing to eccentricities of the South Pacific Gyre, the sea here lacks nutrients to sustain much in the way of life—it is a marine desert. Because biological activity is minimal, the water is the clearest of any ocean.
A trauma surgeon who worked in Gaza earlier this year reached out to volunteer health workers to share their experiences in the besieged region since 7 October 2023.
He received responses from 65 of them. This is some of what they saw in their own words.
(The New York Times, approx 12 mins reading time)
At the time, I assumed this had to be the work of a particularly sadistic soldier located nearby. But after returning home, I met an emergency medicine physician who had worked in a different hospital in Gaza two months before me. “I couldn’t believe the number of kids I saw shot in the head,” I told him. To my surprise, he responded: “Yeah, me, too. Every single day.”
The so-called ‘Patriot Wing’ holds a group of inmates convicted for their involvement in violence at the US Capitol, and they’re running it like a gang. Tess Owen spent a year speaking to one of them, and learned that the group are become more radical in prison.
(Intelligencer, approx 33 mins reading time)
Patriot Wingers tell me that many are in fact leaving the block more committed to the January 6 cause than ever. In August, I spoke with Brandon Fellows, 29, who during the attack had smoked a joint with his feet on the desk of Oregon senator Jeff Merkley. He’d been held in the wing for two years, and he was now living in a luxury apartment building in D.C., paid for in part by American Patriot Relief, one of the many organizations that bankroll the rioters. “The election was stolen,” he said, “and now, looking back, we had a right to overthrow the government. We still do, at this moment. And I wish it would happen, truthfully.” When I talked to Fellows again in early September — he’d just returned from a skydiving trip — he said, “I definitely am so much more for overthrowing the government after what they did to me. I’m totally down. Especially if Trump doesn’t get in. I want it to happen. I wasn’t onboard before, but now — fuck these guys.”
It’s the go-to advice from social media commenters when a woman shares something about a male partner that is problematic. Rebecca Jennings writes about why.
(Vox, approx 9 mins reading time)
This overall ethos of “divorce him” might have more to do with the fraught relations between the sexes at the moment, both online and off. There’s a growing sense that men and women are drifting away from one another, politically and culturally. Women have become more progressive in recent years, and in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s demise, they’ve doubled down on their support of abortion rights; some men (and some women, too), meanwhile, are preaching the return of regressive gender roles amid a backlash to Me Too. “I’ll take the bear” is a sentiment you’re likely to see in the comments of videos on social media, referring to the question of whether a woman would rather be left alone in the woods with a bear or a man.
Willy Staley asks whether Netflix and other streaming services have not only changed out viewing habits, but also scrambled our ability to make sense of our culture.
(The New York Times, approx 23 mins reading time)
What we’re paying for, in the end, is not any one show, or any three or 10 or 50 shows, but rather this fathomless sense of abundance. Which in turn means that any given show just doesn’t matter quite as much as it could in the era of broadcast TV. In this context, even an undeniable hit can wind up feeling like a sort of failure. Take “Triple Frontier,” the 2019 action thriller starring Ben Affleck and Oscar Isaac: It was one of the platform’s most popular movies that year, but as Lotz points out in her book, that doesn’t mean it’s any more valuable to the company. A $115 million movie budget is hard for Netflix to justify at almost any level of viewership, given that at the end of the day it supplies just two hours of content for a subscriber base that’s paying for a sense of infinity. And indeed, Lotz’s skepticism was confirmed: Ted Sarandos, the company’s chief content officer, reportedly singled out the title in an internal meeting, calling for a better calibration between budget and audience. This was in the middle of 2019, when the financial press was starting to ask questions about the sustainability of Netflix’s debt-financed growth.
King Abdullah kept four of his daughters imprisoned for years. In this piece, Heidi Blake speaks to a doctor who worked for the Saudi royal family about what he saw, and how he tried to free them.
(The New Yorker, approx 23 mins reading time)
Back at the royal clinic, Burdick reviewed the princesses’ charts and was dismayed to learn that they were being regularly dosed with a combination of Valium, Ativan, Xanax, and Ambien. “They’re chemically immobilizing them,” he recalled thinking. He learned that he would now be required to write the medical orders for these drugs. “I felt between a rock and a hard place,” he wrote. If he refused, he reasoned, he would likely be replaced by someone more pliable, and, even if he could stop the drugs, an abrupt withdrawal after years of chronic use would have dire consequences. “With the intention of buying time to learn more about the difficult situation these young ladies faced, I set aside my ethics,” he wrote.
The hidden message of ‘Addams Family Values’.
(The Hollywood Reporter, approx 21 mins reading time)
The 1991 Addams Family necessarily plays up a lot of Addams’ cheeky dad-joke-friendly humor while Addams Family Values puts a much greater emphasis on sarcastic, bratty humor that’s best exemplified by Christina Ricci’s morbid, quippy Wednesday Addams and Joan Cusack’s gold-digging femme fatale Debbie Jellinsky, the latter of whom perfectly underscores the difference between the Addams Family’s monstrous-but-in-a-good-way thing and Debbie’s monstrous-but-in-an-America’s–Most–Wanted-way vibe.
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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