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.
Scott Johnson looks at what happened when Sarah Jones, a camera assistant, was killed in a train accident on the set of Midnight Rider. He talks to another woman injured in the incident about the fateful day.
(Hollywood Reporter, approx 14 minutes reading time, 2856 words)
But her father, Richard Jones, says that in a phone conversation the night before she died, his daughter told him she was “nervous about a few things.” He says, “She was a little bit surprised about it being low-budget. … She made a comment that some of the people asking her questions should have known more than her, and she thought that was odd.” The day she died, says her father, was her first on the set.
David A Fahrenthold brings us the story of the employees who work 230 feet underground, processing paperwork by hand in a rather inefficient, outdated system.
(Washington Post, approx 23 minutes reading time, 4655 words)
The employees here pass thousands of case files from cavern to cavern and then key in retirees’ personal data, one line at a time. They work underground not for secrecy but for space. The old mine’s tunnels have room for more than 28,000 file cabinets of paper records. This odd place is an example of how hard it is to get a time-wasting bug out of a big bureaucratic system.
3. From the streets to the World Cup
Patrick Nathanson tells the story of Afriyie Acquah, who was ‘adopted’ by a Belfast family after growing up on the streets in Ghana. His success began with an Irish sporting academy.
(BBC Sport, approx 8 minutes reading time, 1677 words)
“He had the build of a normal 15-year-old but he made really experienced players look average,” says Robinson. “I recollect being on the sidelines and our scout was there and everybody was just looking at each other going ‘Goodness me!’ At the end of the session our chief scout said he was the brightest star he’d ever seen throwing on a Glentoran shirt.
Simon Kuper looks at the killing of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose death sparked the First World War. His assassin, Gavrilo Princip, is still a divisive symbol, says Kuper.
(FT, approx 16 minutes reading time, 3248 words)
No wonder Franz Ferdinand was worried about visiting Sarajevo. He spoke of his anxiety about leaving his three young children fatherless and asked his uncle, Emperor Franz Josef, whether he really needed to go. At dinner on June 27, he voiced his doubts again. Yet he went the next day. Worse, he went almost without security.
Malcolm Gladwell writes about a memoir by a former religious radical who lived in the religious community with David Koresh that was targeted by police in Texas in 1993.
(New Yorker, approx 29 minutes reading time, 5989 words)
In the resulting gun battle, four ATF agents and six Davidians were killed. The FBI was called in. The Davidian property was surrounded. An army of trained negotiators were flown to the scene, and for the next fifty-one days the two sides talked day and night—arguing, lecturing, bargaining—with the highlights of their conversations repeated at press conferences and broadcasts around the world.
Amber Leigh Turner explores the idea of ‘flat design’ on the web, a trend that has exploded in popularity. It is supposed to ‘future-proof’ items, cutting the fluff.
(The Next Web, approx 8 minutes reading time, 1778 words)
Just like how flat Web design today was around for a while before Microsoft and Apple made it popular, the Swiss style of design can be traced as far back as the 1920’s in Germany, but it was the Swiss who made it explode in popularity and earned the namesake (for the Art History buffs, the Bauhaus school in Germany focused on architecture and typography, and the typography has similarities to Swiss design but where practicing this design style before the Swiss took claim).
…AND A CLASSIC READ FROM THE ARCHIVES…
In 1922, journalist and writer Djuna Barnes met James Joyce for a profile in Vanity Fair. It’s described as the most significant interview he ever gave. Brainpickings has the story behind it, and excerpts.
(Brainpickings, approx 8 minutes reading time, 1641 words)
The thought that Joyce was once a singer may not come as a revelation to the casual reader of his books. One must perhaps have spent one of those strangely aloof evenings with him, or have read passages of his Ulysses as it appeared in The Little Review, to have realized the singing quality of his words.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say