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.
When a Bitcoin mine moved to the small town of Granbury in Texas, some of the residents there started to experience heart palpitations, chest pain, migraines and panic attacks.
Andrew Chow spoke to 40 of them, who believe their symptoms are connected to the arrival of the mine.
(TIME, approx 19 mins reading time)
It didn’t occur to Sarah that these symptoms could be linked. But in January 2024, she walked into a town hall in Granbury and found a room full of people worn thin from strange, debilitating illnesses. A mother said her 8-year-old daughter was losing her hearing and fluids were leaking from her ears. Several women said they experienced fainting spells, including while driving on the highway. Others said they were wracked by debilitating vertigo and nausea, waking up in the middle of the night mid-vomit. None of them knew what, exactly, was causing these symptoms. But they all shared a singular grievance: a dull aural hum had crept into their lives, which growled or roared depending on the time of day, rattling their windows and rendering them unable to sleep. The hum, local law enforcement had learned, was emanating from a Bitcoin mining facility that had recently moved into the area—and was exceeding legal noise ordinances on a daily basis.
Yes, you read that right. Breeder Svalinn sells a crossbreed of German, Dutch and Belgian shepherds touted as military-grade protection dogs – and rich people are snapping them up.
(Intelligencer, approx 12 mins reading time)
In general, Greene prefers smaller, more discreet animals. Her dogs are typically listed at about 60 pounds. “Some of our would-be competitors breed 120-pound German shepherds,” she says. “That might be a deterrent, but it’s not going in the car with you. And it sheds everywhere. And it drools.” After a few minutes of commando-type activity, the dogs are summoned to a row of podiums, which they mount one by one. This has the awkwardness of a beauty pageant, but it is impossible not to be impressed by the disciplined, alert calmness of Pappy, Niall, and Pua. Not only is there no drooling; the dogs seem locked in on the salient thing in the room, the single aspect of their environment that has changed, the outsider that their human handlers are focused on. Me.
It’s been 20 years since Lost, the TV series about a group of plane-crash survivors who end up marooned on a tropical island, took the world by storm. Here, the writer gives his thoughts on what got so many people hooked.
(Vanity Fair, approx 11 mins reading time)
Die Hard only works because we want put-upon flatfoot John McClane to foil a terrorist plot so he can put his marriage back together. Moonlighting only works because the anarchic, form-breaking writing supported the genre-defining chemistry between David Addison and Maddie Hayes. ER only succeeds because it worked documentary-style, you-are-there televisual magic in the service of Michael Crichton’s unwavering belief in doctors as heroes. Lost attracted an audience because it had a thrilling, high-budget, high-concept pilot that described an irresistible mystery. That audience came back and stayed because even if the series that followed didn’t always offer satisfying solutions to those mysteries, it most certainly delivered on the promise of a cast of fleshed-out characters whose lives were shot through with compelling incidents, difficult situations, tear-jerking agonies, and shocking destinies.
In this extract from her memoir, Emily Witt reflects on the summer of 2020 and the end of a relationship.
(The New Yorker, approx 36 mins reading time)
I had been aware that the past few years of going to clubs and raves might be a phase of my life, and that one day, even if I didn’t start a family, it would end. I was approaching forty. Like a lot of people in New York, I daydreamed about a less enervating life in a less expensive city. I knew that my most transcendent drug experiences were probably behind me. I still had a year, maybe two, to try to have a child. People dropped out of the scene all the time. Someone would be there reliably for years, and then all of a sudden you never saw them again. At other times, I had thought that the scene would die out of its own accord, as most things did in New York, usually for reasons having to do with rent. Now, with thousands of New Yorkers getting sick and dying of covid-19, the scene disappeared overnight.
Have you noticed that no matter what song you listen to on Spotify, the app keeps recommending that you listen to Sabrina Carpenter’s ‘Espresso’ next? If you have, you’re not alone. Rebecca Jennings explains what’s going on.
(Vox, approx 16 mins reading time)
There’s no hard evidence to suggest that labels are directly paying Spotify to boost certain artists and songs, according to the music industry scholars and insiders I interviewed. Yet it’s almost impossible to prove that it’s not happening: Deals between record labels and streaming platforms are confidential and algorithms are intentionally designed as black boxes. (Spotify would not agree to an interview, but said in a statement that “The remarkable growth of fan bases for artists like Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, and Tommy Richman on Spotify is a testament to their hard work and artistry.”) While the most likely explanation is the most boring — that certain songs take off on music discovery algorithms because listeners seem to like them — the question of why users keep getting served Sabrina Carpenter is far more complex than that. No wonder so many of us think something shady is going on, even if we can’t quite put our fingers on what.
John Branch writes about the pioneering woman who fought for the inclusion of female athletes in the Olympics, and how she’s finally being recognised for her efforts.
(The New York Times, approx 8 mins reading time)
The 1924 Paris Games had a smattering of female athletes — 135 women out of 3,089 competitors — but the Olympics hardly welcomed their participation beyond just a few events, such as swimming and tennis. There were no women’s competitions in most sports, including track and field, soccer, rowing, cycling and even gymnastics. Pierre de Coubertin, the founder and leader of the modern Olympics, made his attitude known repeatedly over the years. Having women in the Olympics, he said in 1912, “is impractical, uninteresting, ungainly and, I do not hesitate to add, improper.”
By 1928, his thoughts had not evolved. “As to the admission of women to the Games, I remain strongly against it,” he said that year. He died in 1937 and has been heralded as a visionary of sport. But in the end — well, 2024 — Milliat won the fight over gender. This summer’s Olympics are expected to be the first with as many female athletes as male ones.
A classic longread from 2001 about a drifter who stole someone’s identity and enrolled in Princeton University.
(The New Yorker, approx 45 mins reading time)
In fact, the thief was someone he knew quite well. For the previous few summers, Tesch had worked as an instructor at Jim Davis’s Vail Cross-Training Camp, which offered people the chance to enjoy a week in Vail, Colorado, training with athletes like the distance runner Frank Shorter, and the champion triathlete Scott (the Terminator) Molina. The instructors also included a young man named James Hogue, a miler who, according to the camp’s promotional literature, had earned a Ph.D. in bioengineering from Stanford University, where he was a professor. With his diffident manner and his youthful face, though, he looked less like a professor than like an undergraduate. His training methods were unorthodox. He drank a mixture of mustard and Perrier during races; he lit a cigarette after crossing the finish line, as the other runners looked on in horror. In the summer of ’87, Hogue started showing up in San Marcos, sleeping in his truck, helping Tesch out around the shop, and otherwise leading a life that might have seemed atypical for a Stanford professor.
The theft remained unsolved until the following March, when a bicycle enthusiast from Utah named Bruce Stucky stopped by to visit Dave Tesch at his shop. One of his friends had recently been at a party in St. George, Utah, where an acquaintance named Jim Hogue had whipped out a Mitutoyo metric dial caliper engraved with Tesch’s name.
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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