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 the week’s best reads for you to savour.
Irish writer Megan Nolan pens a moving and candid piece about her father, and how the support and love he gives her has enabled her to move through struggles in her life.
(Medium, approx 11 minutes reading time, 2223 words)
If one of my parents was five minutes late to meet me, I had already imagined the entire trajectory of the car crash — the sickening thud of skull against plastic, the white arm flung at a terrible, unnatural angle through shattered glass, the mobile phone ringing uselessly underneath debris as I gasped to hear it answered. It felt like living with a curse, these persistent visual punishments seizing me at inopportune moments.
If you have a fitness app of some description on your phone, you have an ally in David Sedaris, who tracks his physical activity with Fit Bit… and becomes slightly obsessed.
(New Yorker, approx 14 minutes reading time, 2984 words)
To people like Dawn and me, people who are obsessive to begin with, the Fitbit is a digital trainer, perpetually egging us on. During the first few weeks that I had it, I’d return to my hotel at the end of the day, and when I discovered that I’d taken a total of, say, twelve thousand steps, I’d go out for another three thousand.
Marc Collins-Rector was a digital pioneer who became embroiled in a sex scandal involving the alleged abuse of teenage boys. Buzzfeed writers look at how Collins-Rector managed to disappear, and who he believed was trying to destroy him.
(Buzzfeed, approx 25 minutes reading time, 5171 words)
In the course of his long unraveling, Collins-Rector pleaded guilty in a U.S. District Court to transporting minors across state lines for the purpose of sex, was allegedly tortured in a Spanish prison, and self-published the first chapter of a science fiction novel that follows the adventures of a beautiful teenage boy charged with leading humanity to its next evolutionary stage.
Summertime is when we expect the big blockbusters to hit our screens, but are they a bit self-loathing this year? Alex Pappedemas looks at Transformers and 22 Jump Street and says… yes.
(Grantland, approx 11 minutes reading time, 2192 words)
The season’s highest-grossing comedy is 22 Jump Street, a cash-grab sequel whose premise is that cash-grab sequels are embarrassing and lame, a movie that exists because everyone involved is both too cool to make a sequel and too weak (or too contractually obligated) to say no to one.
5. The problem with Justin Bieber
When Vanessa Grigoriadis first met Justin Bieber, he struck her as a “precocious kid”. In the wake of the racism allegations and criticised behaviour, she looks at what has changed.
(Vulture, approx 26 minutes reading time, 5216 words)
For the rest of us, it’s a show, vaudeville, and we’re still watching, captivated by who may emerge or simply irritated enough that we keep looking in that stuck-in-traffic-after-a-car-crash way. He’s little Mr. Big Man, the innocent boy turned de-virginator, master swordsman at a Brazilian brothel, double-sleeve-tattooed thug, gold-chain-bedecked hood. He sees himself as Brando, McQueen, Dean.
Animals in zoos can suffer from a range of unexpected afflictions, from depression to OCD. Alex Halberstadt meets an expert who treats animals suffering.
(New York Times, approx 35 minutes reading time, 7158 words)
Often, the animals suffer from afflictions that haven’t been documented in the wild and appear uncomfortably close to our own: He has treated severely depressed snow leopards, brown bears with obsessive-compulsive disorder and phobic zebras. “Scientists often say that we don’t know what animals feel because they can’t speak to us and can’t report their inner states,” Virga told me. “But the thing is, they are reporting their inner states. We’re just not listening.”
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
Edna Buchanan is a crime reporter for the Miami Herald and mystery writer. In 2003, Calvin Trillin wrote about her heyday at the paper.
(New Yorker, approx 40 minutes reading time, 8175 words)
It’s an old-fashioned name. Whoever picks up the phone at homicide when Edna Buchanan calls probably doesn’t know any Ednas he might confuse her with. Edna is, as it happens, a rather old-fashioned person. “She should have been working in the twenties or thirties,” a detective who has known her for years told me. “She’d have been happy if she had a little press card in her hat.” She sometimes says the same sort of thing about herself.
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