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.
Moritz Hochschild had a not so great reputation as a businessman, but he also rescued tens of thousands of Jews from the Nazis.
(The Guardian, approx 21 mins reading time)
In 2004, after five years of sorting through thousands of pages of correspondence with consulates, businesses and international Jewish organisations, the team revealed their astonishing discovery. The papers demonstrated that Moritz Hochschild had helped to rescue as many as 22,000 Jews from Nazi Germany and occupied Europe by bringing them to Bolivia between 1938 and 1940, at a time when much of the continent had shut its doors to fleeing Jews.
The 340 cipher created by the Zodiac killer had been unsolved for decades – until three amateurs got their hands on it.
(Popular Mechanics, approx 17 mins reading time)
The Zodiac’s first cipher, included in the July 31 letter, had been solved within a week by an amateur husband-and-wife team—but it had only revealed more of the killer’s raving. The second, now known as “the 340” due to the number of characters in it, would prove a much more difficult challenge. It came with a letter for the Chronicle, reading in part: PS could you print this new cipher in your frunt page? I get aufully lonely when I am ignored, so lonely I could do my Thing !!!!!!
Bushra Seddique writes about the experience of escaping from Afghanistan.
(The Atlantic, approx 19 mins reading time)
My friend—a German writer and academic—had been trying to help my family flee the country. Now she told me she had gotten my two younger sisters and me on the list for a flight to Frankfurt, a last-minute evacuation negotiated by the German government and a nonprofit group. “What about my mom?” I asked. She didn’t reply for a moment. “I was not able to get her on this flight,” she answered. Please, I begged her: “My brothers are gone and my father is living with his second wife. She just has us, no one else, for God’s sake please do something.”
Hua Hsu’s father moved to Taiwan, and the pair kept up a correspondence by fax. Here, he writes about how communicating about music bonded them.
(The New Yorker, approx 22 mins reading time)
Every now and then, I rewarded his quick, careful attention by interspersing the next set of math questions with a digest of American news: I told him about Magic Johnson’s announcement that he was H.I.V.-positive, I narrated the events that led up to the Los Angeles riots, I kept him up to date on the fate of the San Francisco Giants. I told him about cross-country practice, made honest commitments to work harder at school. I listed the new songs I liked, and he would seek them out in Taipei’s cassette stalls and tell me which ones he liked, too.
Wendy Williams was an American TV host and presenter of The Wendy Williams Show, where she interviewed celebrities and joked around with her own racy sense of humour. But last year, she disappeared off the screen. Now comes the full story of what happened.
(Hollywood Reporter, approx 23 mins reading time)
On the morning of Sept. 30, 2021, two television executives made their way to Wendy Williams’ apartment in downtown Manhattan. As the longtime producers of The Wendy Williams Show, Debmar-Mercury co-presidents Mort Marcus and Ira Bernstein were trying to assuage the fears of the talk show’s 100-person staff, who they knew were reading about Williams’ health struggles in the press.
Comedian, actor and writer Steve Martin thought his career was winding down – then he starred in Only Murders in the Building. Here, he talks about what’s next.
(The Hollywood Reporter, approx 15 mins reading time)
Martin’s pursuit of big laughs is the stuff of comedy legend. It also has surpassed 60 years. Born in August 1945, he was hamming it up at various jobs at Southern California amusement parks as soon as he could legally work. He began stand-up in earnest by age 18 and ultimately hit the highest highs of one of the most difficult professions. Since the 1980s, he’s been the unlikely leading man of films like Roxanne, L.A. Story and the Father of the Bride movies. For Martin, every bit of the work — yes, even sophomoric remarks about baby fat — still demands constant refining.
…AND ONE FROM THE ARCHIVES…
How Twitter changed music.
(Pitchfork, approx 14 mins reading time)
As Twitter itself was rapidly approaching something close to cultural ubiquity—in late 2010, the platform claimed a 200 percent spike in users over 2009—Kanye had unlocked one of its core secrets. Social scientists called it “ambient awareness”: a potent sense of ersatz intimacy with a person that derives from immersion in a stream of their text-based micro-updates. As music writer Jonah Weiner showed in an August 2010 Slate “profile” of Kanye that used his tweets as imaginary interview responses, the rapper was doing something else new, too: bypassing the gatekeepers in lieu of a straight-from-the-source press cycle. “No, I don’t get to ask any questions, but I do get a constantly updating record of West’s thoughts, whereabouts, cravings, jokes, meals, flirtations, bon mots, and on and on,” Weiner wrote.
Note: The Journal generally selects stories that are not paywalled, but some might not be accessible if you have exceeded your free article limit on the site in question.
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