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.
An interview with the iconic musician and writer about creativity and her career.
(Harper’s Bazaar, approx 14 mins reading time)
Perhaps the one commonality in Smith’s many published works of literature is a sense of permeable reality and open boundaries, as her writing within a single volume can move from memory to observations of the natural world to the blurred moments between her dreaming and waking. She’s released 11 studio albums, and she still tours, often incorporating readings of poetry or bits of nonfiction into her live shows.
Laura Preston writes about her year pretending to be a chatbot.
(The Guardian, approx 23 mins reading time)
Meanwhile, we operators, with our advanced degrees in the humanities, had aptitudes Brenda lacked. We were intuitive, articulate and sensitive to the finer points of delivery. At $25 an hour we also cost almost nothing to employ, by corporate standards. Under the Brenda-operator alliance, everyone came out ahead: the operators got paid better than they would as adjunct professors, and Brenda became more likable, more convincing, more humane. Meanwhile, Brenda’s corporate clients were satisfied knowing they had not replaced their phone lines with a customer-service bot. What they were using, instead, was cutting-edge AI backed by PhDs in literature.
Lauren Ashleigh Hays turned up at a domestic violence centre in Missouri, and spoke about her shocking experiences. But she wasn’t who she said she was.
(Elle, approx 15 mins reading time)
For the next two and a half years, Lauren thrived. She led story time for the kids at a local library, appeared in a production of a Jesus-centered domestic violence play, and gleefully kissed her fair share of the town’s young men. She went to water aerobics and made friends with an excitable mob of young women, who wore a uniform of short summer dresses with tennis shoes in the sticky Missouri heat. But the persona she was building would turn out to be an outrageous lie.
That’s what Allison Stice believes.
(Romper, approx 6 mins reading time)
At lunch, I saved my fellow WFH husband from his typical run for subs by pointing him to the roasted veggies and told him how we could combine them for grain bowls with already cooked brown rice today, roll them up for burritos tomorrow and have fajitas with any leftovers on the third. He generously pretended to be grateful despite his obvious desire for fast-casual, and I felt smug. When I got out the Tupperware, though, I saw the peppers and onions were congealed with olive oil, and had lost the flavorful crunch they’d had fresh out of the oven. Still, I soldiered on.
A look at how three Afghan women were brutally murdered in Greece.
(Atavist, approx 50 mins reading time)
I chose my next words carefully. Few things spook people like the mention of murder. “I’m looking for them,” I replied. “Something bad happened to them in Greece.” The man held my gaze for a moment and took a sip of his smoothie. Whatever he was weighing, when he set his glass down he seemed to have made up his mind. “I know all these people, and I know their story,” he said. “I will tell you everything.”
A reporter returns to Afghanistan to investigate the secretive ‘Zero Units’, said to be funded, trained and armed by the CIA, and involved in killings.
(Pro Publica, approx 52 mins reading time)
Mahzala’s neighbors had pressed me to meet her; I was a foreigner, I must be able to help. Three months had passed since the raid. The neighbors believed it was the work of the feared Zero Units — squadrons of U.S.-trained Afghan special forces soldiers. Two more homes in the area were targeted that night, they said, though no one else was killed. Everyone acknowledged the Taliban had been in the area before; they were everywhere in Nangarhar province. But Mahzala’s sons? They were just farmers, the neighbors told me.
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
A 2007 article about the Sami people, who are behind Europe’s oldest known music.
(The Guardian, approx 11 mins reading time)
‘It’s not a “land” at all, actually,’ says Harald Gaski, professor of Sami literature at the University of Tromso. ‘Samiland is a theoretical conception,’ he says. ‘It has no borders, therefore it can stretch.’ Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why these largely peaceful people were perceived as such a threat by the Norse who came up from the south to colonise and to subjugate them. Socially and racially, the Lapps were considered an impoverished people, and named accordingly. Lapp means ‘patch’ in Swedish.
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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