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.
The story of Ana Belén Pintado, one of thousands of Spanish children who were taken from hospitals and sold to wealthy Catholic families at the end of dictator Francisco Franco’s regime.
(The New York Times, approx 41 mins reading time)
Pintado had long known about the phenomenon of babies stolen from hospitals in Spain. The thefts happened during the end of the regime of Francisco Franco, the right-wing dictator who ruled the country until 1975, and even today the disappearances remain a subject of mystery and debate among scholars. According to the birth mothers, nuns who worked in maternity wards took the infants shortly after they were delivered and told the women, who were often unwed or poor, that their children were stillborn. But the babies were not dead: They had been sold, discreetly, to well-off Catholic parents, many of whom could not have families of their own. Under a pile of forged papers, the adoptive families buried the secret of the crime they committed. The children who were taken were known in Spain simply as the “stolen babies.” No one knows exactly how many were kidnapped, but estimates suggest tens of thousands.
2. The beginning of the end of the Internet?
Charlie Warzel writes about how a US court has upheld a Texas law stating that online platforms with more than 50 million monthly active users no longer have First Amendment rights regarding their editorial decisions.
(The Atlantic, approx 10 mins reading time)
To give me a sense of just how sweeping and nonsensical the law could be in practice, Masnick suggested that, under the logic of the ruling, it very well could be illegal to update Wikipedia in Texas, because any user attempt to add to a page could be deemed an act of censorship based on the viewpoint of that user (which the law forbids). The same could be true of chat platforms, including iMessage and Reddit, and perhaps also Discord, which is built on tens of thousands of private chat rooms run by private moderators. Enforcement at that scale is nearly impossible.
3. Alone at the edge of the world
A look at the story of yachtswoman Susie Goodall, the lone woman to enter the Golden Globe race to sail around the globe in 2018.
(The Atavist, approx 78 mins reading time)
The rumble grew. The darkness hulked forward. In her hair, against her skin, through the rigging of the boat, the wind began to rise. By morning, 25-foot swells pitched the sailboat. Wind howled at 50 knots. It was nothing Goodall couldn’t handle. Below deck, she threw on her lightest rain gear; her intention was to raise a storm jib, a small sail that is the bare minimum needed for maneuverability in heavy weather. She climbed out of the cabin and tethered herself to one of the rings she’d soldered to the deck. And then she looked up.
A shocking account of a Vegas con-man and his family, and how they conspired to injure themselves, staged car crashes and pocketed $6 million in insurance money.
(Intelligencer, approx 42 mins reading time)
Mize averaged six staged accidents a year, and they nearly always happened at night. He had people scout out-of-the-way crash sites with no cameras. He preferred Las Vegas to Spokane: fewer Good Samaritans who might stop at the scene of a crash. Months in advance, he’d arrange for one of the co-conspirators to buy a used luxury car and get insurance with high limits — $100,000 payout per person, $300,000 per accident.
5. The deadly trek to reach the US border
Julie Turkewitz writes about the Venezuelan migrants risking their lives trekking the Darién Gap in an effort to reach the United States.
(The New York Times, approx 9 mins reading time)
To the south, Venezuela, under an authoritarian government, has become a broken country, fueling a massive exodus of people seeking to feed their families. More than 6.8 million Venezuelans have left since 2015, according to the United Nations, mostly for other South American nations. Yet amid the pandemic and growing economic instability exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, many people have not found the financial footing they had sought in countries like Colombia and Ecuador. So many Venezuelans are on the move again, this time toward the United States.
6. Are you the same person you used to be?
A fascinating look at personalities, and whether or not people can ever really change.
(The New Yorker, approx 23 mins reading time)
Efforts to understand human weather—to show, for example, that children who are abused bear the mark of that abuse as adults—are predictably inexact. One problem is that many studies of development are “retrospective” in nature: researchers start with how people are doing now, then look to the past to find out how they got that way. But many issues trouble such efforts. There’s the fallibility of memory: people often have difficulty recalling even basic facts about what they lived through decades earlier. (Many parents, for instance, can’t accurately remember whether a child was diagnosed as having A.D.H.D.; people even have trouble remembering whether their parents were mean or nice.)
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
The winner of Brazil’s tight election race between current president Jair Bolsonaro and former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is set to be announced later this month. This article from 2019 looks at the incumbent, described as an “authoritarian” who “borrows from the Trump playbook”.
(The New Yorker, approx 34 mins reading time)
Like many autocrats, Bolsonaro came to power with a suddenness that alarmed the élites. He had run a low-budget campaign, consisting mostly of a social-media effort overseen by his son Carlos. At events with supporters, he posed for selfies making a gesture as if he were shooting a machine gun. He promised to “reconstruct the country”—and to return power to a political right that had been in eclipse for decades. In the inaugural ceremony, he vowed to “rescue the family, respect religions and our Judeo-Christian tradition, combat gender ideology, conserving our values.”
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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