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 some of the week’s best reads for you to savour.
Mitch Barnett died earlier this year after spending years telling anyone who would listen about his concerns about the quality of Boeing 747 planes after working for the company for more than 30 years.
Another whistleblower, Josh Dean, died two months later. Sean Flynn looks at their cases, what they said about Boeing, and how Boeing responded.
(Intelligencer, approx 28 mins reading time)
And then there were the squibs. In the summer of 2016, dozens of the overhead units that contain the reading light and the air vent and, inside, the oxygen masks that are supposed to drop down in an emergency ended up in the MRSA. The damage was cosmetic, but they had to be disassembled, which included emptying the oxygen bottles. Normally, those bottles are triggered by a tiny explosive called a squib, which activates when you tug on the mask. But Mitch discovered a lot of those squibs didn’t work: Out of 300 he tested, 75 — one-quarter — failed. Mitch thought those bad squibs should be analyzed to figure out why a quarter of the passengers on a depressurized 787 might suffocate. Instead, he was removed from the squib investigation.
As many of the polls had predicted, Labour’s Keir Starmer has become the United Kingdom’s new Prime Minister after Labour won a landslide victory in the general election.
In this longread, written before people went to the polls, Pippa Crerar examines how the party might govern the UK.
(The Guardian, approx 11 mins reading time)
The first hours are intended to set the tone for the new government. Those closest to Starmer say that, unlike some of his more showy predecessors, he’s not performative. “It’s not politics as spectacle. It’s politics designed to get better outcomes,” says one insider. As director of public prosecutions, one of Starmer’s proudest reforms was to replace paper files with digital ones. It may not have created many headlines, but it sped up the criminal justice process and meant fewer files were lost. His focus on simply doing what works is also likely to be at the heart of his Labour administration if the party takes power this week. Taken in isolation, some measures may not seem particularly ambitious, even a little dull. But his team insist they will be the building blocks that create something substantial.
In this profile of Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Joe Hagan speaks to members of the Kennedy family and close friends, who reveal why they believe the US presidential candidate should not be Joe Biden’s successor.
(Note – this article contains an image of an animal carcass that some may find distressing.)
(Vanity Fair, approx 33 mins reading time)
Last year Robert Kennedy Jr. texted a photograph to a friend. In the photo RFK Jr. was posing, alongside an unidentified woman, with the barbecued remains of what appears to be a dog. Kennedy told the person, who was traveling to Asia, that he might enjoy a restaurant in Korea that served dog on the menu, suggesting Kennedy had sampled dog. The photo was taken in 2010, according to the digital file’s metadata—the same year he was diagnosed with a dead tapeworm in his brain. (A veterinarian who examined the photograph says the carcass is a canine, pointing to the 13 pairs of ribs, which include the tell-tale “floating rib” found in dogs.) The picture’s intent seems to have been comedic—Kennedy and his companion are pantomiming—but for the recipient it was disturbing evidence of Kennedy’s poor judgment and thoughtlessness, simultaneously mocking Korean culture, reveling in animal cruelty, and needlessly risking his reputation and that of his family.
In this piece, interspersed with musical clips, Joshua Barone writes about why we still love Beethoven’s anthem for unity and hope, 200 years on.
(The New York Times, approx 8 mins reading time)
Beethoven designed it to be easily sung and hard to forget. It is in common time, with four beats per measure, and unfolds in neat, four-bar phrases. Often, with the melodic line moving either up or down the scale. People with no musical training can learn this almost immediately, unlike with most national anthems. “The Star-Spangled Banner,” for example, and awkward leaps that trip up even professional singers. This simple song, though, was revolutionary. Before 1824, no symphony had included a chorus. And in Beethoven’s Ninth, it comes out of nowhere. The first three movements are purely instrumental, and the finale starts in a similar vein.
Despite the advances in technology, some people still love a floppy disk.
(BBC, approx 13 mins reading time)
If you remember a time when using floppy disks didn’t seem weird, you’re probably at least 30 years old. Floppy disks or diskettes emerged around 1970 and, for a good three decades or so, they were the main way many people stored and backed up their computer data. All the software and programmes they bought came loaded onto clusters of these disks. They are a technology from a different era of computing, but for various reasons floppy disks have an enduring appeal for some which mean they are from dead.
How do astronauts go to the toilet in space? In this essay, Becky Ferreira discusses the logistics of it, and what the process of disposing of said-waste will look like amid the push to return people to the moon.
(WIRED, approx 10 mins reading time)
Everybody poops, including astronauts. In fact, the first picture Neil Armstrong ever snapped from the surface of the moon shows a jettisoned waste bag that may well contain poop. The Apollo crews left a total of 96 bags of waste, including urine and feces, across their six landing sites, which are still sitting there to this day: a celestial reminder that wherever humans go, we bring our shit with us.
These Apollo jettison bags, sometimes shorthanded as the “poo bags,” have been the subject of much interest and speculation since they were deposited on the moon more than 50 years ago. Human feces is packed with microbial life, which means that the moon hosted life on its surface for an unknown period of time after each Apollo landing. Learning how long those microbes survived in the extraterrestrial excrement would reveal tantalizing insights into the mystery of life’s origins on Earth and its potential existence elsewhere. The bags also raise questions about our cultural heritage and environmental impact on the lunar environment, while underscoring the intractable problem of managing and disposing of off-Earth biological waste.
Did the FBI steal nine tons of US Civil War-era gold? Chris Heath investigates the mystery.
(The Atlantic, approx 38 mins reading time)
The affidavit related a story from a document titled “The Lost Gold Ingot Treasure,” which had been found in the archives at the Military History Institute, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The tale, in its barest bones, was this: In June 1863, a caravan of Union soldiers transporting a shipment of gold through the mountains became lost. Three men were sent to get help and eventually one returned with a rescue party, which located the group’s abandoned wagons but no men, no gold. Teams from the Pinkerton detective agency scoured the hills. In 1865, two and a half buried ingots were found, and, later, the bones of three to five human skeletons. The rest of the gold remains missing.
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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