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.
Slovenian basketball “wonder boy” Luka Doncic is moving to the NBa A – here’s what you need to know about him.
(ESPN, approx 19 mins reading time)
In truth, Doncic isn’t just outplaying the other teenagers in Europe — he’s also outplaying most, if not all, of the adults. He signed with Real Madrid at age 13 and made his EuroLeague debut at 16. Now, at 19, he is averaging 22 points, 7.6 rebounds and 7 assists per 36 minutes (through April 5), leading the second-best league in the world in player efficiency. Every month, throngs of scouts trek to Spain, hoping to glean new pieces of data that will help them calculate whether Doncic’s worth matches his hype. “Our reports are that he’s the kind of guy who’s very rare,” one NBA executive says.
When writer Kate Elizabeth Russell began writing her book My Dark Vanessa, she saw it as a romance. Then, she changed her mind.
(Vulture, approx 20 mins reading time)
Later, she read everything she could find about him. In a Rolling Stone profile, he declared his favorite book was Lolita. She couldn’t check the book out from her local library — every copy had been lost or stolen — but she discovered the text on a rudimentary website and felt a thrill when she realized it was about a sexual relationship between a girl around her own age and a much older man. “I didn’t know that was an option,” she recalled thinking at the time.
Do you get them? This might be why.
(The Atlantic, approx 10 mins reading time)
The not-exactly-clinical diagnosis for this late-weekend malaise is the Sunday scaries, a term that has risen to prominence in the past decade or so. It is not altogether surprising that the transition from weekend to workweek is, and likely has always been, unpleasant. But despite the fact that the contours of the standard workweek haven’t changed for the better part of a century, there is something distinctly modern about the queasiness so many people feel on Sunday nights about returning to the grind of work or school.
Irish novelist Anne Enright speaks to us about her new book Actress, and her thoughts on badly-behaved Irish literary stars, Hollywood and being a ‘reluctant feminist’.
(TheJournal.ie, approx mins reading time)
Why do you have to fix the situation when you’re not causing the problem? Why do you have to do the extra labour, and the emotional labour, and all the labour – when you could be off writing your books and selling them in Germany and maybe doing a deal in Norway, and just being happy?”
5. The unwelcome revival of ‘race science’
A look at how the bogus ‘race science’ is being discussed again.
(The Guardian, approx 18 mins reading time)
There are scores of recent examples of rightwingers banging the drum for race science. In July 2016, for example, Steve Bannon, who was then Breitbart boss and would go on to be Donald Trump’s chief strategist, wrote an article in which he suggested that some black people who had been shot by the police might have deserved it. “There are, after all, in this world, some people who are naturally aggressive and violent,” Bannon wrote, evoking one of scientific racism’s ugliest contentions: that black people are more genetically predisposed to violence than others.
Ben Affleck hasn’t had the most wonderful few years. But after going through rehab, and getting some good roles in new films, he’s ready to be vulnerable.
(The New York Times, approx 15 mins reading time)
“You’re trying to make yourself feel better with eating or drinking or sex or gambling or shopping or whatever. But that ends up making your life worse. Then you do more of it to make that discomfort go away. Then the real pain starts. It becomes a vicious cycle you can’t break. That’s at least what happened to me.”
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
In 2003, Tad Friend wrote about people who take their lives from the Golden Gate bridge.
(The New Yorker, approx 24 mins reading time)
As it happened, a number of TV crews were at the south end of the bridge, filming standups about heightened terrorism precautions. A Telemundo crew came out, and Alarab began to read a declaration about Iraq’s defenseless women, children, and elderly. “Wake up, America!” he said. “This war will be known as ‘the war of cowards and oil’ across the world!”
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