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. The White Flight of Derek Black
How did Derek Black go from being the poster child for American white nationalism to renouncing the ideology – and his father?
(Washington Post, 31 minutes reading time)
He never used racial slurs. He didn’t advocate violence or lawbreaking. He had won a Republican committee seat in Palm Beach County, Fla., where Trump also had a home, without ever mentioning white nationalism, talking instead about the ravages of political correctness, affirmative action and unchecked Hispanic immigration.
2. The voters who elected Trump and bowl alone
In the wake of the election of Donald Trump, questions are being asked how pollsters missed the result. Garrett M Graff of Wired reckons they didn’t pay enough attention to men on their own in bowling alleys.
Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam’s 2000 bestseller, Bowling Alone, which traced the growing disengagement of blue-collar white Americans from civic life and the decline of community ties and so-called social capital in these former industrial areas. “It’s folks who were a part of what used to be the American middle class and aren’t anymore.
(Wired, 10 minutes)
3. Duterte’s war on drugs is creating a generation of orphans
As Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte ramps up his campaign to wipe out drug dealing, he creates a generation of orphaned children.
(South China Morning Post, 14 minutes)
Until recently, Sam would have been in school during the day. He was enrolled in the fifth grade. But now, having lost his parents to the drug clean-up, “I can’t afford it,” he says. “It’s very hard.”
4. What are US special forces doing in Yemen?
Maybe you’re up to speed on the civil war in Yemen. Maybe you think it’s a far-away punchline to a Friends joke. Either way, the question of why US special forces are there is important.
(Vice, 11 minutes)
The U.S. doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to picking friends in Yemen. Washington’s ostensible partner in the fight against extremists there was once President Ali Abdullah Saleh, a wily autocrat who, when faced with an uprising during the 2011 Arab Spring, sent U.S.-trained and -equipped security forces to crack down on protesters and engage in open warfare with his political rivals on the streets of the capital Sana’a. Still, the U.S. hesitated to call for Saleh to back down.
5. Inside the Godfather’s notebook
In life, I believe you should not trust two types of people: those who don’t eat toast and those who’ve never seen The Godfather. The Hollywood Reporter this week published director Francis Ford Coppolla’s notebook from the seminal picture.
(The Hollywood Reporter, 9 minutes)
To organise his thoughts, Coppola made a “prompt book,” a theatre trick he learned in college at Hofstra. Into a three-ring binder he stuffed his annotated copy of the novel, scene-by-scene breakdowns, notes on the times and setting, cliches to avoid and casting ideas. He put it together sitting at a corner table in a cafe in San Francisco’s North Beach. “I was living a dream,” he recalls. “There was lots of noise and Italian being spoken and cute girls walking through; it was La Boheme.”
6. How Hillary Clinton blew it
Hillary Clinton was political royalty facing a neophyte populist tarred as racist and misogynistic, yet she lost. Here Quartz looks at just how she and her campaign did that.
(Quartz, 15 minutes)
Before she became the standard-bearer for a movement against Trump, Clinton’s campaign—a multimillion-dollar effort with the most talented operatives and innovative tech available—had a problem explaining what she stood for. Not in terms of the issues, where Clinton’s wonky record set the tone, but in terms of, “why her, why now?”
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
Taste is a funny thing. But many of the things we eat don’t taste like what they are. Those flavours are made in factories like the one Michelle Hagen worked in in Cincinnati. The New Yorker told her story back in 2009.
If you like sports drinks, or something with açaí or pomegranate or huckleberry on its label, you may well have tasted one of Hagen’s creations. Naming the products that contain her flavors, however, would undermine the confidentiality agreements that Givaudan keeps with its clients, and elicit a severe reprimand.
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