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. Harvey Weinstein’s accusers tell their stories
The news cycle this week has been dominated by accusations against Hollywood kingpin Harvey Weinstein.
In The New Yorker investigative journalist Ronan Farrow spoke to 13 of Weinstein’s accusers.
(The New Yorker, 38 minutes reading time)
As she objected, Weinstein took his penis out of his pants and pulled her head down onto it. “I said, over and over, ‘I don’t want to do this, stop, don’t,’ ” she recalled. “I tried to get away, but maybe I didn’t try hard enough. I didn’t want to kick him or fight him.” In the end, she said, “he’s a big guy. He overpowered me.” She added, “I just sort of gave up. That’s the most horrible part of it, and that’s why he’s been able to do this for so long to so many women: people give up, and then they feel like it’s their fault.”Weinstein appeared to find the encounter unremarkable.
2. Depression and addiction in the music industry
The death by suicide of Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington has put the focus on depression in the music industry. Forbes’ Steve Baltin sat with artists and industry workers to discuss the issues.
(Forbes, 13 minutes)
Travis Barker: Sobriety saved my life. My only my regret is it didn’t happen sooner. It was sad that it took a plane crash and almost dying to finally sober up. My second chance at life and my kids was enough to never touch drugs again. Being present and sober is something I wouldn’t trade for anything. Music is my drug.
3. “Sleep should be prescribed”
Sleep is great, isn’t it? It could be more that that. In his new book, sleep scientist Matthew Walker argues that we are in the midst of a “catastrophic sleep-loss epidemic”
(The Guardian, 18 minutes)
If there is one thing I tell people, it’s to go to bed and to wake up at the same time every day, no matter what. I take my sleep incredibly seriously because I have seen the evidence. Once you know that after just one night of only four or five hours’ sleep, your natural killer cells – the ones that attack the cancer cells that appear in your body every day – drop by 70%, or that a lack of sleep is linked to cancer of the bowel, prostate and breast, or even just that the World Health Organisation has classed any form of night-time shift work as a probable carcinogen, how could you do anything else?
Pop star Kesha has come through a life-threatening eating disorder and an ugly legal battle with her long-time producer to hit the top of the US charts with her latest LP. She tells Brian Hiatt of of Rolling Stone how.
(Rolling Stone, 23 minutes)
She remembers it all coming to a head at a dinner party with friends and family. She sat there, pretending to eat, trying to figure out how she could hide her food. “And I was like, ‘Oh, my God, what if they walk outside and see this food in a bush? Or they see it in the garbage can?’ And I just had all this mounting anxiety. And then finally I was like, ‘Fuck. This. Shit. Fuck this shit. I’m hungry!’ And I am so anxious that I feel like I’m going to explode from all the secrets. All the secret times I’m pretending to eat or other times I’m purging, and I’m trying to not let anybody know. And I’m just fucking sick of this shit.
5. Gaelic games’ most successful warrior
Rena Buckley has won 18 All-Ireland medals. 18.
She is the most successful person ever to play the sports. The42.ie’s Emma Duffy spoke to her in the wake of her latest triumph with the Cork camogie side.
(The42.ie, 11 minutes)
She realises that she’s been part of exceptional groups with both football and camogie, club and county, and without that, she might not be the most decorated player in Gaelic games history today. It’s always about the team.“I’ve been really, lucky,” she continues. “I’ve been playing on really good teams, clubs have been a huge help in terms of propelling you onto Cork teams.
“I’ve been very lucky in terms of injuries. I’ve gotten great support at home. I’ve been really, really lucky. I understand that I could have been born at a different time, or got bad injuries, or just that you wouldn’t have had such a good gang around.
6. A death at a Penn State Fraternity
When Tim Piazza arrived at Hershey Medical Center in Pennsylvania he had a lacerated spleen, an abdomen full of blood, and multiple traumatic brain injuries. He had fallen down a flight of stairs at a hazing event at his fraternity 18 hours beforehand.
Caitlin Flanagan of The Atlantic examines the behaviour of the fraternity and why deaths like this keep happening.
(The Atlantic, 47 minutes)
A fraternity death is, in some ways, like any other traumatic death of a young person. There is the horrifying telephone call, the race to the hospital, the stunned inability to comprehend basic information. (During cellphone calls on the two-hour drive, the doctor kept telling Evelyn that her son was “a very sick boy.”) But a fraternity death also brings multiple other levels of shock: The young person was killed because of something his friends did to him; his own university quickly backs away from any responsibility for his death; his parents become pariahs to the other members’ parents as they seek justice for their lost son.
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
American college sports are a massive, multi-billion dollar industry. But the players don’t get paid. This 2011 Atlantic article discusses how the structure of the industry could be the very thing to bring it down.
For all the outrage, the real scandal is not that students are getting illegally paid or recruited, it’s that two of the noble principles on which the NCAA justifies its existence—“amateurism” and the “student-athlete”—are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes. The tragedy at the heart of college sports is not that some college athletes are getting paid, but that more of them are not.
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