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 nine paintings vanished from a Massachusetts mansion in 1978, the police investigation went nowhere for 43 years, until an amateur sleuth was put on the case.
(Vanity Fair, approx 40 mins reading time)
A collector and art lover, Schorer is above all a dedicated investigator. He compares the way his mind works to those wall-mounted corkboards in classic crime shows, the kind with thumbtacked photos of suspects and murder scenes and corroborating evidence, all linked together by pieces of string. Instead of a Sherlock Holmes–style magnifying glass, he uses precision binocular headband magnifiers, large benchtop microscopes, reverse-image searches in online databases, and high-tech tactics, such as MA-XRF spectroscopy or dendrochronology, that apply laboratory analytics to decode a painting’s makeup and approximate age. As cutting-edge as his forensics may be, however, Schorer—upon receiving that envelope in April 2021—found himself getting pulled into a strangely old-fashioned cold case.
An excellent read by Shaun Walker about the mystery surrounding Pablo González, a Spanish journalist accused of being a spy for Moscow.
(The Guardian, approx 30 mins reading time)
Then, in August 2024, the biggest prisoner exchange between Russia and the west since the end of the cold war got under way at Ankara airport in Turkey. Russia freed a group of political prisoners, as well as several high-profile foreign detainees held in Russian jails, including the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. In return, a number of Russians detained in the west headed back home. A government plane picked them up in Ankara, and television crews were standing by when the plane landed in Moscow. On the tarmac, Putin was waiting. A guard of honour stood either side of a red carpet, for the returnees’ first steps back on Russian soil.
Out came Vadim Krasikov, convicted of murdering a Chechen dissident in a Berlin park. Then came a husband and wife illegal team arrested in Slovenia, who had spent more than a decade abroad posing as Argentinians. They walked down the steps towards Putin with their two young children, who had only just found out they were actually Russians. Next came a tall, bald and bearded man wearing a Star Wars T-shirt emblazoned with “Your Empire Needs You”. It was Pablo González.
While the country has long been thought of as a tidy, minimalistic haven, the real Japan is cluttered. Matt Alt explores its love of curated, magical mess.
(Aeon, approx 25 mins reading time)
The story of the world’s fascination with Japanese stuff is in many ways not about Japan at all. It is the story of our own changing desires, our social anxieties, our urges to consume and accumulate, and our realisation that possessing more things doesn’t necessarily translate into more happiness. In Japan, we believe we have found solutions to our problems. The grass may seem neater on the other side, but Japan’s clutter tells a different story. It’s one that reveals a far more complex and nuanced relationship with stuff, one that suggests minimalism and clutter aren’t opposites, but two sides of the same coin. For the nation of Japan is filled with spaces that are as meticulously cluttered as minimalist ones are meticulously simplified. These packed places, which are every bit as charming as the emptied ones, force us to question our assumptions and worldviews. What if we’ve all been wrong about clutter?
Dating apps appear to be on the decline, but the companies are coming up with new ideas to keep people swiping – the ‘new ideas’ being holding in-person events so people can meet face-to-face. Magdalene Taylor went along to one to see what it was like.
(Slate, approx 11 mins reading time)
As I tried to pay my bill and call a car toward the end of the night, there was, quite literally, a line of men waiting to speak with me. It was honestly the ego boost of the season, something that does not often happen to me at parties or bars. To some, it may resemble the experience of swiping on the apps—there can be dozens, perhaps hundreds, of men virtually queuing up for a shot at one woman, some even going so far as to pay to send a digital rose that goes unnoticed. It’s easy to complain about this imbalanced heterosexual dynamic online, but it was hauntingly earnest to witness in person. Their hopefulness—conveyed not in still images or bland DMs but in growing smiles and flirtatious tones—was deeply affecting. I was touched that they’d willingly submitted themselves to hours of attempted human connection, then tried their chances, at the end of a long night, with me. It was impressive that they’d garnered bravery to confront me. I think in those moments, we seemed real to one another in a way that’s nearly impossible to replicate online.
An essay on how our homes shape us.
(The Common Reader, approx 25 mins reading time)
When I was a kid, my mom was home to me. Now home is my husband, whether I like it or not, and whatever dog we have at the moment. Also a few dear friends, a few hangouts from grad school days, and oddly enough, London. Which is not my favorite city, yet I felt instantly at home there. One cannot steer the homing instinct; it finds affinity wherever it chooses. Often home is where the old people are—grandparents and porch-rocking neighbors who stayed put their whole lives, ballast to keep everyone else’s voyage stable. Without people who stay there, a place is soulless. Home orients every cell in our bodies. Some species cannot survive even a few yards from their tiny ecosystem, their unique habitat. I am more of a crow: as long as I have my creature comforts, I am willing to pick at any city’s cuisine. Do those of us who are adaptable and a little shallow—not in values, necessarily, but in how sentiment inscribes itself—suffer from our lack of rootedness?
40 years after it was released, did The Terminator get anything right about machine intelligence?
(BBC, approx 9 mins reading time)
The philosopher Nick Bostrom, whose 2014 book Superintelligence popularised the existential risk of “unaligned AI” (AI that is not aligned with human values and wellbeing) admitted that his wife “teases me about the Terminator and the robot army”. In his book The Road to Conscious Machines, AI researcher Michael Woolridge frames an entire chapter with a complaint about “the Terminator narrative of AI”. There are more recent, and more plausible, influential films about AI, including Ex Machina and Her, but when it comes to the dangers of the technology, The Terminator reigns supreme 40 years after its release. “It’s almost, in a funny way, more germane now than it was when it came out,” Cameron told The Ringer about the film and its 1991 sequel, “because AI is now a real thing that we have to deal with, and then it was a fantasy.”
Gideon Lewis-Kraus explores how and why the US government started taking UFOs seriously.
(The New Yorker, approx 59 mins reading time)
Leslie Kean, an independent investigative journalist and a novice U.F.O. researcher who had worked with Greer, watched the proceedings with unease. She had recently published an article in the Boston Globe about a new omnibus of compelling evidence concerning U.F.O.s, and she couldn’t understand why a speaker would make an unsupported assertion about alien cadavers when he could be talking about hard data. To Kean, the corpus of genuinely baffling reports deserved scientific scrutiny, regardless of how you felt about aliens. “There were some good people at that conference, but some of them were making outrageous, grandiose claims,” Kean told me. “I knew then that I had to walk away.” Greer had hoped that members of the media would cover the event, and they did, with frolicsome derision. He also hoped that Congress would hold hearings. By all accounts, it did not.
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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