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.
What happened when Marlene Engelhorn, an Austrian heiress to a pharmaceutical fortune, recruited 50 strangers in a lottery to redistribute €25 million from her inheritance.
(The New Yorker, approx 26 mins reading time)
Erna, who is eighty and long retired from her job as a waitress in a corporate cafeteria, ripped up the letter and threw it in the trash. She lives on a state pension of four hundred and fifty euros a month. What do I know about distributing millions? she thought. The next morning, however, she came across a newspaper article on the Good Council. Engelhorn, an activist and an heir to a pharmaceutical fortune, had announced its creation at a press conference in Vienna. She told journalists, “If politicians don’t do their job and redistribute, then I have to redistribute my wealth myself.” Erna recalled the handful of euros she often gave a homeless man she passed in town, and the neighbor she’d accompanied to a shelter for victims of domestic abuse. She fished the scraps of paper from the trash, ironed them flat, and dialled the number included in the letter. Two days later, she received a call from a Good Council representative who asked her a series of questions about her income and education. By the end of the month, she had been selected as one of the council’s fifty members.
Tyler Austin Harper reports on the secretive and dangerous world of ‘wetsuiters’, who swim at night in the dark in search of striped bass, and why he is one himself.
(The Atlantic, approx 19 mins reading time)
I manage to keep hold of my fishing rod, and I’m reeling in lost line and treading water and trying to forget all the stories I’ve heard about sharks as a second large wave begins sucking me up its face. By the time the third crashes over me, I’ve abandoned any pretense of swimming back to our original perch. Sputtering and coughing, I make my way toward another rock closer to shore. A last wave pushes me onto it, and I get my feet under me. Thirty yards in front of me, having held on to that sloping rock through the entire set, Brandon Sausele makes a long, arcing cast into the pounding surf. Sausele is 27 years old. Shaggy-haired, tattooed, and muscular, he is a devoted practitioner of an extreme sport known as “wetsuiting,” which is both easy to describe and impossible for the uninitiated to understand. When I was first getting into the sport a few years ago, the advice I received from another fisherman was simply: Don’t.
A profile of Michael Keaton, who talks about reprising the role of Beetlejuice 35 years after the original film, playing Batman and what he’s learned from five decades in Hollywood.
(GQ, approx 11 mins reading time)
In the first movie, Beetlejuice gets a whopping total of 17 minutes of screen time, which is pretty wild when you realize what a knockout presence he was. “Keaton is like an exploding head,” wrote film critic Pauline Kael, reviewing Beetlejuice in The New Yorker. “He isn’t onscreen nearly enough—when he is, he shoots the film sky high.” Part of the deal was, if Keaton were to come back, he didn’t want to take up more space. “The idea was, no, no, no, you can’t load it up with Beetlejuice, that’ll kill it,” Keaton says. “I think the Beetlejuice character doesn’t drive the story as much as he did in the first one. He’s more part of the storyline in this one as opposed to the first one, which is a case of, this thing comes in and drives the movie a little bit.”
A fun read about how New Yorkers are earning big bucks for reporting polluting vehicles for idling thanks to a new program, and how the city is now trying to stop them.
(Curbed, approx 29 mins reading time)
Back in 2019, after Wu finished his master’s degree in engineering management at Dartmouth, he dreamed of ascending to the storied, cushy heights of product management. But those aspirations got derailed by the pandemic and his father’s death, and he settled for an indifferent marketing job at a tech start-up. Then, in March 2022, he came across an article about a man who had cleared about $64,000 in a year by submitting idling complaints. Wu began running his own numbers: How many videos could he count on recording if he spent, say, six hours a day at it? And how much of the submission process could he automate or outsource? If he did this full time, he realized, his annual take could eventually reach the mid–six figures.
A compelling essay by science fiction author Ted Chiang who argues that despite its capabilities, AI will never be able to replace human creativity and make art.
(The New Yorker, approx 16 mins reading time)
It’s harder to imagine a program that, over many sessions, helps you write a good novel. This hypothetical writing program might require you to enter a hundred thousand words of prompts in order for it to generate an entirely different hundred thousand words that make up the novel you’re envisioning. It’s not clear to me what such a program would look like. Theoretically, if such a program existed, the user could perhaps deserve to be called the author. But, again, I don’t think companies like OpenAI want to create versions of ChatGPT that require just as much effort from users as writing a novel from scratch. The selling point of generative A.I. is that these programs generate vastly more than you put into them, and that is precisely what prevents them from being effective tools for artists.
How new fossil discoveries and technological advances are helping scientists learn how the prehistoric creatures that once roamed the earth perceived the world around them.
(Scientific American, approx 15 mins reading time)
Where did T. rex fall on the intelligence spectrum between dim-witted Stegosaurus and tool-using ravens? In a high-profile paper published last fall, neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel of Vanderbilt University suggested that a T. rex was about as smart as a baboon—a startling conclusion because primates, with their large brains, are some of the cleverest animals around. Having spent long hours pondering the way brain volume scales with body size and what this relation means for brain function in extinct dinosaurs and birds, we were intrigued to see the headlines about this study. Superficially, the brain of the tyrant lizard king looks fairly puny compared with its body size. Weighing in at less than a pound, the brain of this six-ton dinosaur is diminutive next to the 11-pound brain of the African elephant, which, despite being the largest living terrestrial mammal has a smaller body than T. rex.
Following the publication of the damning report on the Grenfell Tower fire this week, here’s a longread from 2022 about the four-year inquiry into the west London tower block blaze.
(The Guardian, approx 28 mins reading time)
Betty Mendy, sister of Mary Mendy, who died with her daughter, the artist Khadija Saye, wept as a statement was read out from a cousin: “I hate night-time because night brings silence, and silence brings tears of sadness, because that’s when I start to remember the blaze of fire.” On the second day, 20 or more survivors left the room as a video about the deaths of six members of the Choucair family showed traumatic images of the tower on fire and residents trapped behind windows. Watching the video, an audience member collapsed.
On 4 June 2018, the inquiry moved to a new venue, a room in a neo-Gothic Victorian building in London’s legal district, Holborn. Counsellors were present in case survivors needed support, but they were far outnumbered by the lawyers for the companies and organisations under investigation. “We hope,” said Millett in his opening statement, “that core participants resist the temptation to indulge in a merry-go-round of buck-passing.”
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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