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.
Who came up with standard measurements, and who signs off on them? A fascinating look at this world.
(The Guardian, approx 16 mins reading time)
It was this abundance of measures that led to the creation of the metric system by French savants. A unit like the metre – defined originally as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the north pole – was intended not only to simplify metrology, but also to embody political ideals. Its value and authority were derived not from royal bodies, but scientific calculation, and were thus, supposedly, equal and accessible to all. Then as today, units of measurement are designed to create uniformity across time, space and culture; to enable control at a distance and ensure trust between strangers. What has changed since the time of the pyramids is that now they often span the whole globe.
The story of how a wonder drug used for immunosuppression in organ transplant patients has its roots in Easter Island.
(FiftyTwo, approx 19 mins reading time)
After piling the dry ice at the bottom of the freezer, they transferred the jars into an ice cream container on which Sehgal wrote ‘DO NOT EAT.’ They surrounded the treasure with frozen meat and layered it with more ice. The contraption was sealed with duct tape. Dry ice produces carbon dioxide, and a pressure build-up could lead to a catastrophe. “So we poked holes all around to make sure it was vented,” Ajai told me. “When the movers came, I told them to take the freezer and said it had food in it.”
3. The faces from Uyghur detention camps
The images are stark – thousand of photographs from the highly secretive Chinese system of mass incarceration in Xinjiang. They show the human faces inside the camps, and provide more information about what is going on with them.
(BBC, approx 13 mins reading time)
The cache reveals, in unprecedented detail, China’s use of “re-education” camps and formal prisons as two separate but related systems of mass detention for Uyghurs – and seriously calls into question its well-honed public narrative about both.
The government’s claim that the re-education camps built across Xinjiang since 2017 are nothing more than “schools” is contradicted by internal police instructions, guarding rosters and the never-before-seen images of detainees.
4. What happened to Lora Lee Michel?
The young Lora Lee Michel was a child film star, sharing the screen with Humphrey Bogart and Olivia de Havilland. But at 22, she was in prison. Soon after, she vanished.
(LA Times, approx 47 mins reading time)
Long before there was Britney Spears, Gary Coleman or Lindsay Lohan, there was Lora Lee Michel. A small-town girl with big Hollywood dreams caught up in the vortex of show business before many protections were in place for child entertainers. Hers was a classic tale of childhood stardom: the adorable moppet who got her once upon a time but not the happily ever after. Her story, as I soon discovered, was a parable, revealing the underbelly of Hollywood’s Golden Age and the perils facing child actors. But it was also one family’s search for answers and the buried secrets that have a way of eventually surfacing.
The book Gone Girl came out in 2011, catapulting author Gillian Flynn to success and then leading on to the brilliant film by David Fincher. Here’s a look at the book’s legacy.
(Esquire, approx 10 mins reading time)
Gone Girl kicked off a boom in the market for domestic suspense, a genre that focuses on interpersonal mysteries, often in the home, rather than police procedurals or detective novels. It has been around for ages and was popularized in the last century by the likes of authors from Daphne du Maurier to Patricia Highsmith. But over the past decade, “for fans of Gone Girl” has become shorthand for a very specific kind of psychological thriller.
The story of how the lead singer of The Offspring did a PhD in HIV research.
(Vice, approx 15 mins reading time)
I was stuck in traffic and blaring a ’90s alt-rock radio station when I heard an unexpected bit of breaking news. “That was The Offspring with ‘Come Out and Play,’” the DJ said, back announcing the previous song. “In May, that band’s singer, Dexter Holland, will deliver the commencement address at USC’s Keck School of Medicine. Pretty cool. OK, next up, here’s Everclear with ‘Santa Monica.’” It was a record-scratch moment.
…AND ONE FROM THE ARCHIVES…
In 2018, Time spoke to parents who lost their children in school shootings, and who found comfort with each other, joining ‘a group no one wants to join’.
(Time, approx 14 mins reading time)
The connection is not formal. There is no organizational structure, no listserv, no roster of names. But their bond is strong enough that they often describe themselves—glibly but also in earnest—as “the club.” There is only one criterion for membership: you sent a child to school one day and then never saw them again because of a bullet, leaving you with pain, loss and perhaps even other shattered children. “It’s a club you spend your whole life hoping you won’t ever become a part of,” says Nicole Hockley, whose son Dylan, 6, was killed in the December 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. “But once you’re in, you’re in.”
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