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.
Why did Britney Spears’ father begin conservatorship, and what did it mean? A look at his life and what led up to their relationship going sour.
(Vulture, approx 35 mins reading time)
Years later, when people heard the haunting details of the conservatorship, there would be an impulse to assume that it was in some sense necessary and that somewhere it had just gone bad. But the conservatorship of Britney Spears is not a conflict that accrues moral complexity under further investigation. This is not the cloying tendency of American fans to conjure obstacles out of extreme privilege, not the “prison of fame” or the isolation of superstardom or the trials of being trailed by paparazzi. It is a matter of an extraordinary woman deprived of basic human rights over a period of 13 years.
A look at a sexual harassment suit ongoing at Tesla.
(RollingStone, approx 36 mins reading time)
A year after being hired, Blickman is one of seven former Tesla workers who have filed sexual-harassment lawsuits against Musk’s car company in the past 10 months. The women, most of whom were let go, allege a level of sexual harassment that paints Tesla as more like one of William Blake’s dark “Satanic Mills” than a high-flying Silicon Valley corporation saving the environment.
3. Move fast and break things?
A Twitter engineer talks to a journalist about the future of the company after Elon Musk’s takeover.
(Technology Review, approx 7 mins reading time)
A massive tech platform like Twitter is built upon very many interdependent parts. “The larger catastrophic failures are a little more titillating, but the biggest risk is the smaller things starting to degrade,” says Ben Krueger, a site reliability engineer who has more than two decades of experience in the tech industry. “These are very big, very complicated systems.” Krueger says one 2017 presentation from Twitter staff includes a statistic suggesting that more than half the back-end infrastructure was dedicated to storing data.
Judy and Scott’s son Michael sat them down one day to tell them he believed he was evil. What followed were many tests and diagnoses, but the parents believed there was another reason for his problems.
(Now This, approx 40 mins reading time)
Michael is now a sophomore at a major university, considering a teaching career. He is doing well in school, and says he is feeling great. Though he doesn’t remember many of the details of his two-year illness, he says, after a pause, “The pain I put my entire family through still haunts me.
An absorbing and literary look at moss and biology, through the lens of one person’s story.
(Aeon, approx 40 mins reading time)
Or rather, moss represented something for me. I’d been thinking about touch, about how out of touch with nature I am. I live in a city that has many parks and meadows, but I don’t touch nature enough; rather, I see it – the ornamental birches, the canal, the roses on the hedgerows. In summertime, I’ll swim with friends, or sunbathe and roll in sand and grass, but once we are back in our sanitised homes, I continue to live out of touch. I seek nature’s touch in small, appropriate, hygienic doses.
Are we all prisoners of geography, victims of geopolitics? The truth might be different to what some assume.
(The Guardian, approx 20 mins reading time)
Marshall noted how this gap in Russia’s natural fortifications has repeatedly exposed it to attacks. “Putin has no choice”, Marshall concluded: “He must at least attempt to control the flatlands to the west.” When Putin did precisely that, invading a Ukraine he could no longer control by quieter means, Marshall greeted it with wearied understanding, deploring the war yet finding it unsurprising. The map “imprisons” leaders, he had written, “giving them fewer choices and less room to manoeuvre than you might think”.
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
In this shocking story from 2013, a look at how people are adopting children who are advertised online.
(Reuters, approx 19 mins reading time)
The failure to keep track of what happens after children are brought to America troubles some foreign governments. So do instances of neglect or abuse that become known. Often cited is the case of the Tennessee woman who returned a 7-year-old boy she adopted from a Russian orphanage. The woman had cared for him only six months when she put the boy on a flight to Moscow in April 2010. He was accompanied by a typed letter that read in part, “I no longer wish to parent this child.”
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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