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.
Kathleen McLaughlin introduces us to Gao Yaojie, who became an enemy of the state after exposing the shocking cause of an AIDS epidemic in rural China.
(Buzzfeed – approx 26 minutes reading time, 5204 words)
Over months and years, her research into the epidemic took her across much of rural China. What she found astounded her: villages with infection rates of 20, 30, 40 per cent or more; whole communities of AIDS orphans, zero treatment options, and little awareness of what was sickening and killing a generation of farmers. Worse, the population did not know how the disease spread.
2. Reunited after being abducted
Richard Hooper writes about Luo Gang, who was kidnapped as a child and sold to a family in 1990. Twenty-three years later, he was reunited with his mother over a bowl of noodles.
(BBC – approx 10 minutes reading time, 2101 words)
“I was very afraid, but I had been abducted and I had no choice,” says Luo, who at first assumed living with this new family would be temporary. But when he realised there would be no reunion with his parents, Luo made the decision to start rehearsing his fading memories, determined that one day he would use them to find his way home.
Joe Jonas is just 24, but he has lived an unimaginable – and perhaps unenviable – life so far. A Disney-approved pop star and seemingly-celibate celebrity, he spills that behind closed doors, things weren’t always as they appeared.
(Vulture – approx 22 minutes reading time, 4429 words)
Being a part of a company like that comes with certain expectations. Not overtly, but there was a subtle vibe. We were working with Disney in 2007 when the Vanessa Hudgens nude-photo scandal happened. We heard that she had to be in the Disney offices for a whole day because they were trying to figure out how to keep her on lockdown.
Tracey Lien examines the gender stereotypes regarding toys, and particularly video games. Why are games aimed at girls pink and fluffy? And why do less girls play the games than boys?
(Polygon – approx 31 minutes reading time, 6362 words)
Most “girls’ sections,” if they exist, are lined with fitness titles and Ubisoft’s simplified career simulation series, Imagine, which lets players pretend they’re doctors, teachers, gymnasts and babysitters. As for the boys section — there isn’t one. Everything else is for boys.
Mark O’Connell looks at Deathwatch, an app that tells him how many days he has left to live – 16,277, at the time of writing – and how that information impacts on his life.
(New Yorker – approx 7 minutes reading time, 1403 words)
Because what you’re looking at, you realize, is something like a best-case scenario: this is how much time you have left provided you don’t get a terminal disease in your mid-thirties, or die in a car crash at forty-eight, or suffer a fatal stroke in your late fifties, or choke on the ham-and-Emmental sandwich you plan to hastily consume this very lunchtime. You’d be doing quite well, you realize, to have sixteen thousand two hundred and seventy-seven days left.
Euan Ferguson woke up one morning and felt as though he had slept heavily on his arm. For two days, he tried to carry on as normal, when his body was acting anyway but.
(The Guardian, – approx 15 minutes reading time, 3073 words)
My hands – hand – simply wouldn’t work, and it wasn’t just in a slipping-off-keys manner, which would be at least understandable given the amount of ash I’d spilt on my keyboard down the years. No, I was misrepresenting “so” as “of”, “my” as “to”, “in” as “by”, “as” as, once, interestingly, “proot” (go figure?) and the rest, and wasting a ludicrous amount of time backspacing
…AND ONE FROM THE ARCHIVES…
In 1996, David Foster Wallace wrote about the game of tennis. In his usual heavily-footnoted, obsessively curious style, he went beyond the court and into the physics and metaphysics of the sport.
(Esquire - approx 46 minutes reading time, 9331 words)
The realities of the men’s professional-tennis tour bear about as much resemblance to the lush finals you see on TV as a slaughterhouse does to a well-presented cut of restaurant sirloin. For every Sampras-Agassi final we watch, there’s been a weeklong tournament, a pyramidical single-elimination battle between 32, 64, or 128 players, of whom the finalists are the last men standing.
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