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.
A range of authors share their two-sentence short stories about the Christmas season. Each one is a joy in its uniqueness.
(Salon– approx 18 minutes reading time, 3613 words)
The year the head elf lost the naughty list was a good one for little Adrienne, aged 5, puller of hair, biter of friends, and tantrum throwing champion. Everyone was deemed nice, and so it was a true Christmas miracle to receive the pony she was told Santa would deny her.
Madeleine Hinchy writes about the dingo, an animal that is equally thought of as dangerous or cuddly. She speaks to people on both side of the divide.
(Narratively – approx 26 minutes reading time, 5360 words)
Hutchings and Hemberger know of at least five other pet dingoes living in neighboring urban areas. It’s one of the many contradictions in the narrative of the Australian dingo that in New South Wales you don’t have to have a special permit to own one as a pet. They are recognized under the 1998 Companion Animal Act as a domestic pet and like your neighbor’s poodle, just need to be registered and microchipped.
Paul Tough speaks to John Aldridge, who fell overboard from a boat and into the Atlantic… and his rescuers were looking in the wrong place to find him.
(New York Times – approx 37 minutes reading time, 7475 words)
The first thing you’re supposed to do, if you’re a fisherman and you fall in the ocean, is to kick off your boots. They’re dead weight that will pull you down. But as Aldridge treaded water, he realized that his boots were not pulling him down; in fact, they were lifting him up, weirdly elevating his feet and tipping him backward.
Lauren Wolfe writes about the rape of women in countries of conflict, and how victims are “terrified” to talk about what happened to them. This silence renders the crimes against them invisible, she argues – so what can be done?
(Women Under Siege – approx 8 minutes reading time, 1632 words)
In Jordan and Lebanon, I spoke to refugees, social workers, and psychiatrists who said the same thing about the women of Syria who’ve been violated. In fact, the survivors of this war are so frightened to talk about what happened to them, they only speak about their “neighbor” or “friend” who was raped.
Alexis C Madrigal writes about Netflix, and its intriguingly specific genres. To get a greater understanding of it, he spent weeks analysing Netflix’s data, and comes to the conclusion that the streaming service ‘deconstructed Hollywood’
( The Atlantic – approx 23 minutes reading time, 4798 words)
They capture dozens of different movie attributes. They even rate the moral status of characters. When these tags are combined with millions of users viewing habits, they become Netflix’s competitive advantage. The company’s main goal as a business is to gain and retain subscribers. And the genres that it displays to people are a key part of that strategy.
Gene Maddaus introduces us to two Hollywood producers, Remington Chase and Stefan Martirosian, and tells us about their almost unbelievable backgrounds.
(LA Weekly – approx 26 minutes reading time, 5368 words)
Their backgrounds include convictions for cocaine trafficking; ties to the Russian oil business, the Armenian government and the African diamond trade; and stints as federal informants. Most disturbing are allegations that they orchestrated a contract killing in Moscow — allegations that the Moscow police took seriously enough to investigate. Chase and Martirosian say they can explain everything.
…AND ONE FROM THE ARCHIVES…
In 1964, Isaac Asimov imagined a visit to the world in 2014. Was the world he imagined anything like it is today?
(NY Times – approx 12 minutes reading time, 2513 words)
Complete lunches and dinners, with the food semiprepared, will be stored in the freezer until ready for processing. I suspect, though, that even in 2014 it will still be advisable to have a small corner in the kitchen unit where the more individual meals can be prepared by hand, especially when company is coming. Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence.
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