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. Turning her digital life against her
We are all so used to putting the details of our lives online, that we don’t stop to think about whether that is always a good thing. This fairly chilling read from Wired is about a woman whose digital life was “weaponised against her”.
(Wired, approx 42 mins reading time)
But Courtney’s concerns were mounting. The day before, she had gotten an email to an account she only used for spam. “How did you even GET this email address?” Courtney wrote back. “Leave me and my family alone!” A reply came accusing Steven of also using unsavory cybertactics to find out about Courtney’s online behavior, but added: “I am MUCH better at it. For example. Your Jetta, in the driveway”—and yes, that’s where it was.
2. The most hated poet in Portland
A few months ago, you might have seen a tweet mocking a poet, Collin Andrew Yost, for his Instagram poems. Here’s how it impacted on his life.
(The Outline, approx 17 mins reading time)
Users created parody poems using bad graphics and typewriters. They mocked Collin’s outfits: “is this a costume?” One user tweeted a photo of Collin in a short-sleeved white button up and jeans with conspicuous rips. A parody account, @WhitePoeticEdgelord, sprang up, bearing the bio: “I’m a bland white guy who thinks my one mission on Earth is to share the edgy poems written from my limited, privileged, unoriginal point of view with humanity.”
3. The post-Weinstein reckoning
As the stories about Harvey Weinstein and his ilk grow, Rebecca Traister looks at its impact on society – and us as individuals.
(The Cut, approx 31 mins reading time)
But it’s also harrowing because it’s confusing; because the wrath may be fierce, but it is not uncomplicated. In the shock of the house lights having been suddenly brought up — of being forced to stare at the ugly scaffolding on which so much of our professional lives has been built — we’ve had scant chance to parse what exactly is inflaming us and who. It’s our tormentors, obviously, but sometimes also our friends, our mentors, ourselves.
4. The quietest places on earth
Sometimes, we just want peace. Meghan O’Rourke went to the Hoh Rain Forest in Washington State, one of the quietest places on earth, to see if she could find it.
(New York Times Style Magazine, approx 13 mins reading time)
So I stopped. Entering the quiet spaces of woodlands, as the novelist John Fowles once put it, “is almost like leaving land to go into water, another medium, another dimension.” I sank into a medium where impressions arrived more slowly — and more completely. What I heard, oddly, was distance. An insect far to my left on the mossy floor; a gray jay, maybe 50 yards away; and, even farther, the Hoh River, its waters a quiet, claylike, alluvial blue, stained by the rocky beaches banking it.
5. Two All-Americans fall for Isis
Why did Mississippi-raised Muhammad Dakhalla and Jaelyn Young try to go to Syria to meet Isis?
(Psychology Today, approx 22 mins reading time)
Oda could be forgiven for his disbelief. Muhammad, called Mo by family and friends, had a 4.0 GPA at Starkville High School and had graduated cum laude from Mississippi State just a few months prior to his arrest. He had been accepted into the school’s graduate program in psychology and was supposed to start classes about a week after he was picked up at the airport. While Dakhlalla studied hard, he also hung out with friends, played pick-up soccer, and immersed himself in video games like Final Fantasy. While he didn’t drink—his father forbade it—he still attended house parties at Mississippi State. Altogether, Dakhlalla was a recognizably American kid: gaming nerd, soccer player, industrious student, and respectful son.
6. The making of an American Nazi
Andrew Anglin was a vegan antiracist – but this article looks at how and why he turned into a vicious alt-right troll.
(The Atlantic, approx 59 mins reading time)
It was in this spirit that Anglin “doxed” Gersh and her husband, Judah, as well as other Jews in Whitefish, by publishing their contact information and other personal details on his website. He plastered their photographs with yellow stars emblazoned with jude and posted a picture of the Gershes’ 12-year-old son superimposed on the gates at Auschwitz. He commanded his readers—his “Stormer Troll Army”—to “hit ’em up.”
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
In 1936, George Orwell wrote about his time in in the Indian Police in Lower Burma.
(George Orwell, approx 16 mins reading time)
For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically — and secretly, of course — I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos — all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective.
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