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.
Bryce Covert’s deep dive on the legal complaints and government records alleging racial discrimination, sexual harassment and safety hazards at Elon Musk’s electric car company.
(The Nation, approx 25 mins reading time)
After Jermaine Keys’s twins were born, he needed more than the $15 an hour he was earning at a construction company. So in September 2019, Keys got a job at Tesla’s Fremont factory, which paid about $23 an hour. “It was a big difference,” he told me. At first, Keys enjoyed the job. But a few months in, his supervisor started calling him “boy.” Keys heard white coworkers use the N-word and call people “monkey.” There was a swastika drawn with a black marker near where he clocked in to work every day. Black workers, he said, were made to do things like clean up the work area when the assembly line was slow; white ones weren’t. “It was just hurtful,” Keys said. When he said something to a supervisor, he was told to put his head down so he wouldn’t get fired.
US Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks about the harms of deepfake porn, the newest frontier in gender-based violence which is now easier than ever to create.
(Rolling Stone, approx 21 mins reading time)
Deepfake porn is just one way artificial intelligence makes abuse easier, and the technology is getting better every day. From the moment AOC won her primary in 2018, she’s dealt with fake and manipulated images, whether through the use of Photoshop or generative AI. There are photos out there of her wearing swastikas; there are videos in which her voice has been cloned to say things she didn’t say. Someone created an image of a fake tweet to make it look like Ocasio-Cortez was complaining that all of her shoes had been stolen during the Jan. 6 insurrection. For months, people asked her about her lost shoes. These examples are in addition to countless fake nudes or sexually explicit images of her that can be found online, particularly on X.
Ocasio-Cortez is one of the most visible politicians in the country right now — and she’s a young Latina woman up for reelection in 2024, which means she’s on the front lines of a disturbing, unpredictable era of being a public figure. An overwhelming 96 percent of deepfake videos are nonconsensual porn, all of which feature women, according to a recent study by the cybersecurity company DeepTrace Labs. And women who face multiple forms of discrimination, including women of color, LGBTQ+ people, and women with disabilities, are at heightened risk to experience technology-facilitated gender-based violence, says a report from U.N. Women.
A seven-tiered lobster tower, the world’s largest cheese selection and a chocolate fountain are some of the features of an extravagant all-you-can-eat buffet that has become the highest grossing restaurant in France. Lauren Collins paid it a visit.
(The New Yorker, approx 24 mins reading time)
Last year, more than three hundred and eighty thousand people paid fifty-two euros and ninety centimes for the pleasure of visiting Les Grands Buffets. Drinks cost extra, but they are sold at a minimal markup, so a bottle of Mercier champagne costs twenty-five euros, about the same as it does in the supermarket. Everything else is unlimited, from caviar to stewed tripe. There are nine kinds of foie gras on offer, and five pâtés en croûte, including one known as Sleeping Beauty’s Pillow, which involves a panoply of meats (chicken, duck, wild boar, hare, quail, sweetbreads, ground pork) and is considered by connoisseurs to be “charcuterie’s holy grail.” The chef Michel Guérard has called Les Grands Buffets “the greatest culinary theater in the world.” Guinness has certified its cheese platter, featuring a hundred and eleven varieties, as the largest known to restaurant-going man. It’s more of a cheese room.
Luke Mogelson reports from the front line in Ukraine, where one of the country’s most skilled units is attempting to win back territory while outmanoeuvring threats from drone strikes.
(The New Yorker, approx 52 mins reading time)
The commander sat at the head of a table, studying a map. His call sign was Perun—the name of a Zeus-like god from Slavic mythology—and he looked the part. He was tall and trim, with a razored scalp and a traditional Cossack mustache that drooped to his jaw. He’d served in the Army for five years in the early two-thousands, and was discharged when he was twenty-five. As a civilian, Perun built a lucrative business fabricating and installing doors with intercom systems, which are ubiquitous in Ukraine. Many of his customers were in the Donbas, the eastern region where, in 2014, Russia incited and backed a separatist uprising. Perun continued to work there, regularly crossing separatist checkpoints in a van loaded with doors and welding equipment. He sometimes transported rifles and explosives, which he used to assassinate Russian agents and their local proxies. Perun said that he performed his guerrilla activities on his own, “unofficially,” without oversight from the Ukrainian government. “No one suspected me,” he recounted. “I was wearing overalls, and I had my tools.” His doors were so heavy that soldiers never bothered to look underneath them.
50 years after the release of Stephen King’s first published novel, horror authors reflect on its impact on the literary genre, it’s enduring legacy as a book, and why it’s still really scary.
(Esquire, approx 15 mins reading time)
Small towns, bullies, supernaturally gifted children, a skin of normality pulled across the ugly bones of the world: These are themes we see again and again in King’s work. Carrie White may have telekinetic abilities, her mother may be lost in a fog of extreme religious mania, the book may even end in a holocaust of pig’s blood and fire, but so much of the nightmare is mundane and tragically human. That flat reality is evoked both in the story’s details and in its structure, which intersperses long narrative sections with an assemblage of faux documentation (including excerpts from a fictional Esquire article). It presents that most Kingian of worlds: brutal reality, temporarily disturbed by extraordinary moments of human goodness, badness, and otherworldly forces. I’ve long argued that King is an American realist at heart—that the supernatural is mostly a tool he uses to stir the human drama that really interests him. I once asked him if the theory held any water. “It doesn’t even leak,” he replied.
Imperial College London won the latest series of the famous BBC quiz show for the fifth time this week, a record for any university in the country. This article looks at how the methods of former team member Brandon Blackwell helped them to get there.
(The New York Times, approx 13 mins reading time)
Mr. Blackwell applied to just one place, Imperial College, a science and engineering school with about 20,000 students, located in the South Kensington section of London. It was hardly an obvious choice. Imperial had not won “University Challenge” since 2001. But he knew that when players buzz in to answer questions, the show’s unseen narrator shouts the name of the school, followed by the name of the player. “So he would have to yell ‘Imperial Brandon!’” he explained. “I’m a ‘Star Wars’ fan. I loved that.”
In September 2016, he began executing the plan: Get admitted to Imperial. Move to London. Make the school’s “University Challenge” team. Win the championship. Go pro. Nothing about this seemingly long shot scheme would be left to chance. Mr. Blackwell would study “Challenge” like a puzzle that could be solved, dreaming up what he privately called BISQUE, the Brandon Imperial System for Quiz Efficiency. And he would apply this system with an approach that is quintessentially American and decidedly out of favor among Britain’s academic elites. He would work at it, shamelessly.
OJ Simpson died this week at the age of 76. The former NFL star became one of the most notorious figures in American history when he was charged with the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman in 1994.
Below is a collection of articles from The New York Times from that time, covering the murders of Brown and Goldman to Simpson’s arrest to his infamous acquittal.
(The New York Times, approx 8 mins reading time)
The bloody gloves that have become part of the folklore of the O. J. Simpson trial dramatically became its focus today as Mr. Simpson struggled, and finally succeeded, in pulling them on in front of the jurors.
“Too tight, too tight,” the defendant muttered, grimacing as he wrestled with the gloves only a few feet from the jury box. But after a few moments in which they appeared too small for his hands, already clad in latex medical-style gloves in order to keep the evidence pristine, he squeezed the leather ones on.
Still, they appeared snug. His fingers did not reach all the way in to the tips of the gloves, as if he could not get them all the way on.
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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