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.
Nine passengers were stranded on the small island of São Tomé and Príncipe when their car broke down and the captain of their cruise ship refused to wait for them.
This piece captures their nightmarish journey to get back to the boat. For those of you who are cruise enthusiasts, this may put you off.
(Curbed, approx 33 mins reading time)
The ocean itself functions as a kind of giant loophole in which no government authority is technically in charge. Cruisers love to say that ships are like small cities; they have jails, morgues, and medical centers. But they’re more like lawless autonomous zones with go-cart tracks and Imax theaters. No one knows exactly how much crime, injury, and death occurs in the loophole. Meanwhile, over the years, cruise passengers have been drugged and raped, drugged and murdered, robbed and assaulted. People regularly slip overboard after a day of partaking in bottomless drink packages. In the aughts, American lawmakers tried to rein in the cruise lines after a particularly high-profile case in which a newlywed groom fell (or was pushed) to his death after partying with a group of men in a Royal Caribbean cruise casino. Afterward, Congress managed to pass the Cruise Vessel Security and Safety Act, which mandated a host of regulations for cruise ships that dock on American soil, including minimum heights for railings and that ships be stocked with rape kits. Cruise companies were also supposed to begin to report crime statistics to the FBI. But advocates say the legislation, passed with heavy input from cruise-industry lobbyists, is essentially toothless. The crime data is self-reported and delayed.
Why do we make them, and why do they so often fail?
(The New Yorker, approx 6 mins reading time)
It turns out that timing is important in determining whether or not we succeed. In May, 2012, Katherine Milkman, a behavioral economist at the University of Pennsylvania, was invited to the PiLab Summit, an annual gathering of social-science researchers convened by Google to discuss ways of making the company more productive. Milkman found herself in a discussion about “nudges”—small environmental interventions that could shift people’s behavior. “In the course of the conversation, someone posed a question, ” Milkman recalled. “When would nudges be the most effective?” Milkman’s research hadn’t focussed on that particular aspect of nudges, but, she said, “I had a strong instinct that they’d be more effective at turning points—moments that feel like a new beginning.”
An excellent piece of reporting – and a must read for fans of spy novels – on how the West identified and tracked down a network of undercover Russian spies who had become embedded in society under new identities.
(The Wall Street Journal, approx 31 mins reading time)
In truth, the Soviet collapse left a network of sleeper agents stranded abroad, still living undercover, awaiting orders from a vanished empire. By the turn of the millennium, Putin was president, reinvigorating the program he’d idolized as a young man. Under his watch, dedicated schools trained an army of new recruits in the languages, history and cultural habits of target countries. Young officers were encouraged to marry fellow agents, for cover and to ward off loneliness. Many studied Spanish and Portuguese to deploy to Latin America, where Russia could exploit patchy birth records and corrupt officials to more quickly secure a new identity. They could be activated at Putin’s direction.
A profile of Brooke Eby, a terminally ill woman who was diagnosed with ALS in 2022 and found a fan base after sharing her story online.
(The New York Times, approx 17 mins reading time)
For most of her life, Eby kept a low profile online, once deleting Instagram from her phone entirely because she didn’t want the distraction. But since being diagnosed with A.L.S., or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, in 2022, Eby has joined a niche group of content creators with terminal illnesses documenting the progression of their diseases on social media. She considers herself more video diarist than influencer: Rather than Eby hawking vitamins or skin creams, most of her posts take viewers along as she shares health updates and otherwise shows the reality of living in a body that no longer functions as it used to. On the rare occasions she has posted paid content, it has been for companies such as a clothing brand that makes styles for people with disabilities and the National Funeral Directors Association. In one video, she joked about mainstream influencers receiving a new line of Louis Vuitton bags, and her receiving a new line of Depends.
Mina Tavakoli popped along to this annual, international gathering of puppeteers and wrote about those dedicated to the old-fashioned art form.
(n+1, approx 38 mins reading time)
It was right then, right as Dicky’s jaw flung open, that his ventriloquist — his father, his frère, his semblable; the standard abbreviation going forward is vent — sneezed. At that second, Dicky did too. The vent trumpeted into his tissue and held it in front of his wooden child, who did the same, loudly and juicily. After I bent back down to kiss Dicky’s cheek, he flapped his arms, murmured “Mother!,” and sank limply to the table. Dicky’s daddy’s hand was shoved somewhere near Dicky’s brain stem. My throat was in my stomach. Their hearts were in vaudeville. But we were all in Kentucky. Side by side by side, we stood near the entrance of the Vent Haven Ventriloquist ConVENTion — the annual international hajj for ventriloquists — where dummies condomed nearly every right arm. Dummies were rising from zippered suitcases, lifted from velvet-lined trunks, coffined on banquettes with protective canvas bags on their heads, like prisoners expecting execution.
We’re 25 years into the new millennium. In this piece full of Y2K nostalgia, Colette Shade reflects on a time capsule letter she wrote in 1999 about what the next decade might hold.
(Slate, approx 20 mins reading time)
The dot-com bubble lasted from 1995 through 2000 (though it really took off around 1997). It fused the techno-optimism of the early internet with record-breaking stock prices. The internet, people thought, would not only connect the entire planet and let us buy kitty litter at home in our pajamas; it would launch stock values into the stratosphere, literally higher than they had ever been since good numbers became available in 1871. All this wealth, it was assumed, would make everybody rich, even though labor protections had been dismantled and inequality had increased throughout the ’80s and ’90s. In the new millennium, we wouldn’t need pensions or unions or labor laws. We could just invest our mutual funds in the stock market, which would, of course, go up forever. Alternatively, we could found or invest in a dot-com startup. The IPOs of Netscape, Amazon, eBay, Google, and PayPal minted a large portion of our current billionaire class, and they were covered by the media in a way that suggested that anyone could take this route and get rich overnight.
Why do so many bikes end up underwater?
(The Guardian, approx 17 mins reading time)
Throwing a bicycle into the water is a specialised sport, which offers its own peculiar satisfactions. On social media reels, videos show pranksters rolling bikes down embankments into lakes, tipping bikes over quayside railings, tossing bikes into rushing whitewater. In one clip, a teenage boy faces the camera holding a weather-beaten blue BMX. “Mike, this is your bike,” he says. “It’s been in my garage, and I don’t really want it. So I’m gonna throw it off the jump in the pond. I hope you don’t mind.” With a running shove, the boy sends the riderless bicycle somersaulting off a wooden plank into the water. Whoops and laughter can be heard in the background as the jittery camera records the bike’s quick demise, the rear wheel bobbing briefly above the surface before vanishing into the gulping pond – a slapstick murder. I won’t lie: it looks fun.
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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