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.
Getting a ‘blue tick’ on Instagram is hard to get, but it turns out that some people had hit on a strange scheme involving Spotify and fake albums to try and get theirs.
(ProPublica, approx 20 mins reading time)
Influencers, socialites, models, businesspeople and all manner of clout chasers rely on Instagram to flaunt their lifestyle, generate income and establish a personal brand. Some influencers and models told ProPublica they face a barrage of impostor accounts trying to run scams to trick their fans. They also run the constant risk of malicious actors fabricating evidence and filing user reports to convince Instagram to ban their accounts. They see a badge as one of few options available that can help them protect their accounts and business. Others covet the blue tick as a status symbol. The result is a steady supply of well-heeled customers willing to pay five figures to get verified.
An interview with the veteran director and composer.
(The New Yorker, approx 23 mins reading time)
In conversation, Carpenter, now seventy-four, is terse in a way that might seem hostile if it weren’t accompanied by hints of deadpan comedy. He has an aversion to discussing the art of movies, which might be a by-product of the same tortured perfectionism that contributed to his early retirement more than a decade ago. Carpenter hasn’t directed a movie since his snake-pit thriller “The Ward” (2010), and he’s kept a wary, selective distance from the industry in the time since. I still have an e-mail from a publicist explaining that Carpenter would not be attending that year’s Toronto International Film Festival because he “has been called for jury duty (seriously).”
The story of Daniel Boldor, who claimed to have found tonnes of gold and copper and then sold it on, paying people to dig it up. But his story wasn’t as he said it was.
(The Guardian, approx 15 mins reading time)
And for years, they said, he had somehow got away with it – until 2015, when Boldor’s biggest-ever shipment was busted by Chinese customs officials, who crowbarred open one of the cargo containers of metal he had dispatched, and discovered 20 tonnes of rocky soil inside. Now Boldor was in Romania’s legal crosshairs. On the other side of the country, in the Black Sea port of Constanța, one of the country’s most dogged prosecutors was attempting to have Boldor convicted and sentenced to as many as 10 years in prison on charges ranging from tax evasion to customs fraud.
An environmental disaster caused a salt pan to emerge in Uzbekistan. Now it’s a tourist trap.
(The Washington Post, approx 15 mins reading time)
It began, like so many tragedies, with hubris. From the 1920s onward, as part of a plan to collectivize agriculture, the Soviet Union determined that a vast swath of its Central Asian vassals would be given over to cotton. Inefficient irrigation canals, dug by hand, redirected water from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya — two rivers that originated in the high glaciers of the Tien Shan Mountains — to feed the thirsty monoculture that soon covered millions of hectares of previously uncultivated land.
BeReal is an app that promises it’s more real than other apps, and less addictive than them too. Here’s what it is about.
(The Guardian, approx 7 mins reading time)
The app prompts users to take a simultaneous front and back camera picture every day at a specific time, within a two-minute window. Users can take it later, too, but can’t see their friends’ content until they’ve posted themselves. This is supposed to ensure that users snap a picture of whatever they’re doing at the time – no matter how unglamorous – paired with a selfie – no matter how unkempt – to promote a way of relating more authentically to friends online.
A short story from Ben Lerner.
(The New Yorker, approx 29 mins reading time)
When I became a father, I began to worry not only that I would die and not be able to care for my daughter but that I would die in an embarrassing way, that my death would be an abiding embarrassment for Astra—that in some future world, assuming there is a future, she will be on a date with someone, hard as that is for me to imagine, and her date will ask, “What does your father do?,” and she will say, “He died when I was little,” and her date will respond, “I’m sorry,” hesitate, and then ask, in a bid for intimacy, how I died, and Astra will feel ashamed, will look down into her blue wine, there will be blue wine in the future, and say, “He had an aneurysm on the toilet,” which is one of the ways I often fear I might die.
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
A piece from 1996 on Mikhail Gorbachev, who died earlier this week.
(The New Yorker, approx 54 mins reading time)
Gorbachev was the last General Secretary of the Communist Party and the first—and last—President of the Soviet Union. He resigned Christmas Night, 1991—an event that marked the end of Soviet history. His fate, unique in a thousand years, was to be a retired czar, free to accept plaudits and lecture fees abroad, free to suffer the disdain of a people he did so much to liberate. For their part, the republican leaders divided up the perquisites of traditional Kremlin power: the private jets and limousines, the communications systems and palaces, twenty-seven thousand nuclear warheads. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was probably inevitable, but the haste and vanity of those who dissolved it was extraordinary.
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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