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. Creative minds and insecurity
Mark O’Connell writes about how a trip to Dublin’s Web Summit made him confront his own sense of insecurity – and how lack of confidence is not an uncommon trait among creative people.
(New York Times – approx 9 minutes reading time, 1864 words)
It is there even as I type these words, in my realization that almost all writers struggle in this way; that the notion of a self-doubting writer is as close to tautology as to make no difference, and that to refer to such a thing as a “struggle” is to concede the game immediately to cliché, to lose on a technicality before you’ve even begun.
David Simon - creator of The Wire – believes there are two Americas, and that their coexistence is a “horror show”.
(The Guardian– approx 14 minutes reading time, 2915 words)
I’m utterly committed to the idea that capitalism has to be the way we generate mass wealth in the coming century. That argument’s over. But the idea that it’s not going to be married to a social compact, that how you distribute the benefits of capitalism isn’t going to include everyone in the society to a reasonable extent, that’s astonishing to me.
Hermione Hoby sits down for cheese and gluten-free crackers with musician Amanda Palmer and her novelist husband Neil Gaiman. Whether you’re a fan of either of them or not, you’ll find they give an interesting look into the world of modern-day celebrity.
(The Guardian – approx 11 minutes reading time, 2299 words)
She adds: “You rarely see men saying: ‘I want to feel about my wife the way Neil Gaiman feels about his wife.’ But you do see a lot of women going: ‘I can’t wait to find a husband like Neil Gaiman!’ But I think that could also be that I reveal a lot more about the inner workings of the marriage and Neil’s more stand-offish.”
Heather Havrilesky compares and contrasts Joan Didion and Nora Ephron: strong, funny, sharp and witty women, but each in their own radically different ways.
(Bookforum – approx 7 minutes reading time, 1582 words)
When life gave Ephron lemons, in other words, she made a giant vat of really good vodka-spiked lemonade and invited all of her friends and her friends’ friends over to share it, and gossip, and play charades. Whereas when life gave Joan Didion lemons, she stared at them for several months, and then crafted a haunting bit of prose about the lemon and orange groves that were razed and paved over to make Hollywood, in all of its sooty wretchedness
Paul Solotaroff meets the animal activists who work within the meat industry to expose cruelty to animals. Not surprisingly, agribusiness wants them gone.
(Rolling Stone – approx 35 minutes reading time, 7063 words)
You’re a typical milk cow in America, and this is your life. You are raised, like pigs, on a concrete slab in a stall barely bigger than your body. There, you never touch grass or see sun till the day you’re herded to slaughter. A cocktail of drugs, combined with breeding decisions, has grossly distended the size of your udder such that you’d trip over it if allowed to graze, which of course you’re not.
Andrea Elliott introduces us to Dasani, an 11-year-old who lives with her family at a decrepit homeless shelter in New York. Circumstances are difficult, but Dasani’s spirit shines bright.
(New York Times – approx 33 minutes reading time, 6630 words)
Her mornings begin with Baby Lele, whom she changes, dresses and feeds, checking that the formula distributed by the shelter is not, once again, expired. She then wipes down the family’s small refrigerator, stuffed with lukewarm milk, Tropicana grape juice and containers of leftover Chinese. After tidying the dresser drawers she shares with a sister, Dasani rushes her younger siblings onto the school bus.
…AND ONE FROM THE ARCHIVES…
Protesters outside the Rivonia Trial. Pic: AP/Press Association
For the week that is in it, here is Nelson Mandela’s statement from the dock during the opening of the defence case in the Rivonia Trial in South Africa, 1964.
(RFK in the Land of Apartheid – approx 55 minutes reading time, 11,133 words)
We had no doubt that we had to continue the fight. Anything else would have been abject surrender. Our problem was not whether to fight, but was how to continue the fight. We of the ANC had always stood for a non-racial democracy, and we shrank from any action which might drive the races further apart than they already were. But the hard facts were that fifty years of non-violence had brought the African people nothing but more and more repressive legislation, and fewer and fewer rights.
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