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.
Do you have what it takes to be left alone on an uninhabited island? Well, a travel company has made a business out of custom desert-island experiences – and it’s proving to be very popular.
(Afar, approx 11 mins reading time)
In 2008, Cerezo began trial runs for the company he hoped to found. He sent his friends to islands he’d found while exploring, which didn’t always go smoothly: Fishermen showed up repeatedly, and, in one case, day-tripping tourists interrupted his idyll. Cerezo adapted, seeking new destinations and building relationships with local fixers. Traveling from island to island with a backpack, laptop, and camera, Cerezo created the Docastaway website in 2009—but it wasn’t until October of 2010 that he found a paying customer willing to book with the brand-new company. Since then, he’s sent more than 1,000 people to experience desert islands of their own, in Asia, the Caribbean, and Oceania. Indonesia, which is both vast and accessible, is by far the most popular.
A heartbreaking piece about a freelance true crime producer who worked under immense pressure on some horrific true crime stories, and the toll it took on him.
(The Guardian, approx 23 mins reading time)
As a producer, it was Balson’s job to persuade bereaved families to tell their stories on camera. “The thing about factual TV is that the raw material is just people, and your relationship with those people,” says McKay, who has also worked as a true crime TV producer. “That puts massive stress on the people whose job it is to organise and wrangle them.” Because his contributors were usually based in the US or the UK, Balson routinely worked 18-hour days across three time zones. “You spend all day looking at photos of dead bodies of people who have been murdered in gruesome ways,” says Rosy Milner, 30, a factual TV producer and former colleague of Balson’s from London. “You read about sexual abuse and crimes against children. And then a contributor in the US texts at 10pm, asking for a phone call. You book the Zoom at midnight and keep going.”
Over 35 years since the Hillsborough disaster, Jacob Whitehead reports on the “disturbing” safety issues that remain with the football stadium in Sheffield.
(The Athletic, approx 18 mins reading time)
The Leppings Lane end has changed little since 1989. Built between 1961 and 1965, the stand is the third-oldest in the Championship, the second tier of English football; behind only Fratton Park’s South Stand (1925) in Portsmouth and Elland Road’s John Charles Stand (1957) in Leeds. Any changes in the past 35 years have largely been cosmetic rather than structural. Hillsborough disaster survivors’ groups have long been calling for reform. “That section of the stadium needs to be pulled down and rebuilt,” said Hillsborough Survivors Support Alliance spokesperson Peter Scarfe in March. “It’s a disaster waiting to happen.”
Over two-thirds of emerging diseases in humans have animal origins. In this piece, Rivka Galchen writes about the vets who are monitoring wildlife health in order to containing the spread of these diseases – and prevent the next pandemic.
(The New Yorker, approx 11 mins reading time)
Chronic wasting disease in deer, hemorrhagic disease in rabbits, canine distemper in foxes—these are all indifferent to city limits. Slavinski often collaborates with veterinarians in other parts of the state, such as the wildlife veterinarian for New York’s Wildlife Health Program. Elizabeth Bunting, who had previously worked at zoos and wildlife clinics, helped create and shape the wildlife-veterinarian role in 2010, and held it until last year. When Bunting began, almost no state in the Northeast had such a job; most still don’t. “Wildlife had a management bent, and a conservation bent,” Bunting explained. Biologists in local offices contributed to decisions about things like how many deer could be hunted each year, or how to protect rare salamanders. “But few were looking at disease, really,” she said. “The thinking was that it was natural for a disease to run through wildlife and therefore it was not a concern.”
Some of the world’s biggest environmental groups are supporting the meat and dairy industry’s greenwashing projects, writes Kenny Torrella.
(Vox, approx 47 mins reading time)
Take the World Wildlife Fund, or WWF, a green giant with over $600 million in assets. WWF and McDonald’s are both founding members of the beef roundtable, and later, the two worked together on other beef-related projects. In fact, that inaugural conference in 2010 was officially titled the World Wildlife Fund Global Conference on Sustainable Beef. (WWF has helped to found similar industry roundtables for poultry and soy — most of which is fed to farmed animals — and a certification program for seafood.) For its collaboration, McDonald’s makes sure WWF is well compensated; from 2015 to 2022, the company donated $4.5 to $9 million to WWF-US.
A former IDF soldier writes about Israeli society’s perception of the current conflict in Gaza.
(The Guardian, approx 33 mins reading time)
Of course, the Israeli public long ago became inured to the brutal occupation that has characterised the country for 57 out of the 76 years of its existence. But the scale of what is being perpetrated in Gaza right now by the IDF is as unprecedented as the complete indifference of most Israelis to what is being done in their name. In 1982, hundreds of thousands of Israelis protested against the massacre of the Palestinian population in the refugee camps Sabra and Shatila in western Beirut by Maronite Christian militias, facilitated by the IDF. Today, this kind of response is inconceivable. The way people’s eyes glaze over whenever one mentions the suffering of Palestinian civilians, and the deaths of thousands of children and women and elderly people, is deeply unsettling.
An excerpt from a 2002 book in which Patricia Cornwell presents the theory that a German-British painter may have been the 19th-century serial killer Jack the Ripper.
(Vanity Fair, approx 37 mins reading time)
John Grieve offered to take me on a retrospective tour of the Ripper crime scenes—what was left of them after 113 years. I canceled a trip to Ireland to spend a rainy, freezing morning with the famous Mr. Grieve and Detective Inspector Howard Gosling, walking about Whitechapel and Spitalfields, to Mitre Square, and to Miller’s Court, where Mary Kelly was flayed to the bone by this serial murderer people call the Ripper. “Has anyone ever tried to use modern forensic science to solve these crimes?” I asked.
“No,” John Grieve said, and he gave me a very short list of very weak suspects. “There’s one other interesting chap you might want to check out, as long as you’re going to look into it. An artist named Walter Sickert. He painted some murder pictures. In one of them in particular, a clothed man is sitting on the edge of a bed with the body of the nude prostitute he just murdered. It’s called The Camden Town Murder. I’ve always wondered about him.”
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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