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.
Eric Weinberg was accused of 18 counts of sexual assault – but for years before that he worked in prominent writing rooms. He didn’t have a great reputation for his behaviour, so how was he allowed stay in his jobs?
(The Hollywood Reporter, approx 19 mins reading time)
The incident illustrates how Weinberg, who on Oct. 25 pled not guilty to 18 counts of sexual assault including rape, was able to use his credentials as writer and producer on such sitcoms as Veronica’s Closet and Scrubs over the course of years to entice women to photoshoots where they allegedly were violated. Weinberg approached dozens of women — including at least one underage high school girl — at coffee shops and grocery stores. After his arrest in July, Georgina took her own account to the police, though it is not part of the 18 charges.
Journalists are sent many pitches for interviews throughout the week. For one day, Dan Kois said yes to all of them – no matter how strange they were.
(Slate, approx 18 mins reading time)
Sullivan is the managing editor for Lawn Love, a website that connects people to local landscaping businesses. I was talking to her because I had responded to a press release (“2022’s Best Cities for Witches”) emailed to me by Lawn Love earlier that day. I had to ask: Why was a lawn services company creating quasi-scientific studies about witches?
3. The World Cup’s forgotten team
A look at the price paid by thousands of migrant workers from Nepal who built the World Cup stadium in Lusail, Qatar.
(New York Times, approx 14 mins reading time)
These workers succumb to an array of ailments — premature heart attacks and unexplained heat-related health problems that one local official described as “environmental disadaptation” — that no one has committed to studying but will eventually kill thousands more of them. There have also been an alarming number of suicides over the past decade, with almost 200 recorded among Nepali migrant workers in Qatar.
4. Boom and bust in Silicon Valley
A look at why so many tech companies are laying off staff, and what it means for the tech industry.
(Slate, approx 7 mins reading time)
I suspect this reflects a significant change in the economics of the sector. For the last 20 years, Silicon Valley has had the wind at its back thanks to rapid adoption of new technologies like the internet and smartphones. As a result, the industry fared better than the broader economy during and after the 2008 recession.
How that favoured kitchen implement came to be.
(Longreads, approx 16 mins reading time)
It was the right product for the right time. Married women were beginning to seek jobs outside of the home, taking them away from the kitchen. A major oil crisis had bumped up the cost of cooking. And Rival knew what they were doing: The Crockpot was available in all the trendy colors of the day — harvest gold and avocado — and marketed as the pot that “cooks all day while the cook’s away.” In 1971, sales were $2 million. By 1975, they were $93 million.
Anne P Beatty writes about returning to live in her home town, and her reflections on ambition.
(The Rumpus, approx 14 mins reading time)
My parents claim that at two I clutched a postcard their friend had sent from Nepal and wandered the house chanting, “Kathmandu!” This seemed prescient when, in my twenties, I did end up in Nepal, among other places: Cambodia, Thailand, Namibia, Northern Ireland, Guatemala, Bolivia. I’d been sure I’d never return to Greensboro beyond those occasional summer stints during college, waitressing at a Mexican restaurant where the managers and dishwashers smoked pot under the overpass out back, and where no one was, in fact, Mexican. We blasted Jay-Z in the kitchen and endured Joan Osbourne while bussing tables. The whole time I thought about leaving.
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
The sculptor Anne Truitt used writing as a way to dig into what it meant to be an artist, an a mother balancing her work with her parenting duties. Here’s a look at how her journals have inspired others too.
(New Yorker, approx 11 mins reading time)
When Truitt died, in 2004, at eighty-three, she left behind a body of sculptural work—squared-off wooden columns, human-scaled and covered with bands of color—that challenged viewers to contemplate the limitations of their own senses. Similarly, in her journals, Truitt is often pushing to articulate something at the edge of discernment; much of the pleasure of reading them is in experiencing her thoughts still in formation as she sought to illuminate “the dark, driving run” of art-making.
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