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.
Rachel Aviv meets Tyrone Hayes, who believed that a herbicide called atrazine was harmful – and said it publicly. Then Hayes became convinced that the company who asked him to test the product was stalking him.
(New Yorker – approx 43 minutes reading time, 8704 words)
He believed that the company was trying to isolate him from other scientists and “play on my insecurities—the fear that I’m not good enough, that everyone thinks I’m a fraud,” he said. He told colleagues that he suspected that Syngenta held “focus groups” on how to mine his vulnerabilities.
2. Playing basketball for Gaddafi
Alex Owumi was a US basketball player who signed a contract to play for a Benghazi team – but did not realise that Muammar Gaddafi would be his new employer. Little did he also know that the country was about to enter war.
(BBC News – approx 20 minutes reading time, 4170 words)
A military convoy is coming closer and closer. Then, without warning, shots. People running, people falling. Dead bodies all over the ground. I’m praying, praying that this is a dream, that I will wake up sometime soon. With these bullets flying everywhere, I’m hugging the floor of the rooftop. I am so frightened
Seth Fiegerman meets some of Facebook’s first employees, and finds out about their experiences. Some thought Mark Zuckerberg’s early projects were ‘trivial’, so the success of Facebook took them by surprise.
(Mashable – approx 17 minutes reading time, 3411 words)
Ezra Callahan was nearly broke when he opened the email from Sean Parker: “What are you doing?” What was he doing? He was sitting in front of a shared computer at a youth hostel in Dublin, trying to come to terms with the fact that the money he’d saved up during college had all but run out… “Come work at Facebook,” Parker wrote in the email.
Ethan Brown tells us the story of the Jeff Davis 8, eight female sex workers who were killed in Louisiana. It was believed that their deaths were the work of a serial killer – but a new investigation has come up with a scarier theory.
(Medium– approx 33 minutes reading time, 7501 words)
One fact is clear: local law enforcement is far too steeped in misconduct and corruption—and this extends to the task force, which is dominated by detectives and deputies from the sheriff’s office—to run an investigation with the integrity that the murdered women and their families deserve after nearly a decade in which no one has been brought to justice.
Jeff Sharlet journeys underground in Russia, to forbidden gay clubs and places where people are in danger because of their sexuality. Being gay in Russia means you are always under threat.
(GQ – approx 38 minutes reading time, 7641 words)
Yes, there are killings. In May, a 23-year-old man in Volgograd allegedly came out to a group of friends, who raped him with beer bottles and smashed his skull in with a stone; and in June a group of friends in Kamchatka kicked and stabbed to death a 39-year-old gay man, then burned the body. There’s a national network called Occupy Pedophilia, whose members torture gay men and post hugely popular videos of their “interrogations” online.
Patrick Michels brings us the story of Jeffrey Holliman, who left his troubles behind by becoming a survivalist out in East Texas woods. A run of break-ins gave a clue as to how he was faring.
(Texas Observer – approx 31 minutes reading time, 6295 words)
Whenever Meagan returned home from work alone, she always had somebody on the phone. She’d fling the door open dramatically like a TV cop, in case the burglar was inside. She and her husband installed motion detectors and lights around the house. “My yard just glows like an airport now,” she says. At night, she left the TV on. She slept on a couch in the living room, between her daughter’s bedroom and the front door.
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
Pic: Victoria Will/Invision/AP
Philip Seymour Hoffman died last week. This profile by Lynn Hirschberg back in 2008 looks at his incredible talent and versatility.
(New York Times – approx 36 minutes reading time, 7205 words)
“Phil and his longtime girlfriend, Mimi [O’Donnell], came to a party at my house, and he had on three coats and a hat. I said, ‘Take off one of your coats; it’s hot in here.’ His girlfriend said, ‘He’ll maybe take it off in a half-hour.’ It’s such an obvious metaphor, but Phil has a protective cocoon that he sheds very slowly. It takes him a while to make friends with his environment. And yet you know the men he plays the minute you meet them.”
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say