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. I live-streamed every second of my life
In the early 00s, couple Tanya Corrin and Josh Harris set up cameras all over their apartment to film every moment of their lives. Here, Corrin reflects on what happened next.
(Dazed, approx 12 mins reading time)
This melancholic scene isn’t a TV drama though, but a live computer stream that captured the couple’s lives, transmitted to a quarter of a million viewers via 32 cameras and 76 microphones set up around their home. Speaking over the phone 19 years after the break-up, Corrin declares: “No one had done what we did”. And she’s right.
A Fitbit helps track a murderer.
(Wired, approx mins reading time)
The criminal oversights didn’t end there. As Karen’s body was unzipped from the body bag and laid out at the morgue, the coroner took note of a black band still encircling her left wrist: a Fitbit Alta HR—a smartwatch that tracks heartbeat and movement. A judge signed a warrant to extract its data, which seemed to tell the story Karen couldn’t: On Saturday, September 8, five days before she was found, Karen’s heart rate had spiked and then plummeted. By 3:28 in the afternoon, the Fitbit wasn’t registering a heartbeat.
3. Ignore the coronavirus productivity pressure
These are weird times, not holiday times. So ditch the pressure to do everything you couldn’t do when you were commuting.
(New York Times, approx 10 mins reading time)
“It’s tough enough to be productive in the best of times let alone when we’re in a global crisis,” said Chris Bailey, a productivity consultant and the author of “Hyperfocus: How to Manage Your Attention in a World of Distraction.” “The idea that we have so much time available during the day now is fantastic, but these days it’s the opposite of a luxury. We’re home because we have to be home, and we have much less attention because we’re living through so much.”
The author of this piece says that Trump has failed ‘the biggest test of his life’ over the coronavirus.
(The Guardian, approx 11 mins reading time)
“The US response will be studied for generations as a textbook example of a disastrous, failed effort,” Ron Klain, who spearheaded the fight against Ebola in 2014, told a Georgetown university panel recently. “What’s happened in Washington has been a fiasco of incredible proportions.”
One of the biggest debates about the coronavirus pandemic is how useful masks are. Here’s a look at that debate.
(The Atlantic, approx 15 mins reading time)
Confusingly, in public-health circles, the word airborne has a technical meaning that’s not just “carried through the air.” When people are infected with respiratory viruses, they emit viral particles whenever they talk, breathe, cough, or sneeze. These particles are encased in globs of mucus, saliva, and water. Bigger globs fall faster than they evaporate, so they splash down nearby—these are traditionally called “droplets.” Smaller globs evaporate faster than they fall, leaving dried-out viruses that linger in the air and drift farther afield—these are called “aerosols.” When researchers say a virus is “airborne,” like measles or chickenpox, they mean that it moves as aerosols.
A profile of the young climate activist.
(Rolling Stone, approx 14 mins reading time)
Greta read all she could and sometimes went online and battled with climate deniers, oft exclaiming triumphantly, “He blocked me,” to her parents. She eventually wrote an essay on the climate crisis for a Swedish newspaper. Eco-activists contacted her, and Greta mentioned the inspiration she took from the school strikes after the Parkland, Florida, mass shooting, and suggested a climate version. The activists showed little interest. Greta didn’t care and slowly broke out of her cocoon.
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
This piece from 2015 is about a fugitive called James T Hammes, who was on the run from the FBI. To try and escape them, he went hiking along the Appalachian Trail… for six years.
(SB Nation, approx 40 mins reading time)
Two days later, on Monday, May 18, the FBI announced the search for a 53-year-old accountant accused of embezzling $8.7 million from an Ohio-based Pepsi distributor had come to an end. His name: James T. Hammes. His story had been featured on two fugitive TV shows, America’s Most Wanted and CNBC’s American Greed. Authorities say Hammes, over the course of 11 years, took the funds through a series of banking transfers while working as a controller for the distributor. Then he vanished.
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