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.
It’s HBO vs Netflix in the battle of the streaming wars.
(Fast Company, approx 25 mins reading time, 5119 words)
HBO has had Netflix on the brain for years. When it launched HBO Go in February 2010, it touted the app’s 600 hours of programming by imploring users to “Watch something you haven’t watched a million times before.” Courteney Monroe, the former SVP of marketing at HBO who’s now CEO of the National Geographic Channel, admits, “There was some implied digging there, that this was a better alternative” to Netflix.
2. Would Hillary make a good US president?
That’s what this article sets out to discover – or if it even matters.
(NY Mag, approx 53 mins reading time, 10651 words)
There was her strangely vapid Foggy Bottom memoir, Hard Choices, which racked up middling sales, and her obvious rust in the interviews she did to promote it. There was her continued buck-raking on the paid-speaking circuit, which seemed tone-deaf, if not downright greedy, for someone about to embark on a presidential campaign.
This US musician once played a 16-minute long set in Whelan’s, to a completely packed out venue. She’s no stranger to controversy.
(Billboard, approx 17mins reading time, 3462 words)
Here’s what people do tend to know about Banks: a) Her self-released first single, 2011′s graphic and highly original “212,” shocked and captivated rap fans; b) her sonically adventurous debut album, Broke With Expensive Taste, then sat in limbo until last fall, possibly because … c) Banks cannot stop whipping up controversy on social media and in interviews.
These teen wrestlers built their own drug business, an Oxycontin smuggling empire in Florida. Obviously, a cautionary tale.
(GQ, approx 41 mins reading time, 8237 words)
Standing at the threshold of a luxury condo in Tampa, Florida, Doug Dodd looked on in horror at the spectacle of a drug dealer’s den of iniquity. Dodd was only 19, a student taking business courses at a local community college — when he wasn’t busy being a big-time narcotics trafficker — but he could see the obvious: His best friend was out of control.
5. The NFL player and his terrible crimes
Darren Sharper was a top athlete suspected of raping a woman. As police held off on arresting him, he went on to commit even more sexual crimes.
(Pro Publica, approx 49 mins reading time, 9853 words)
“If his name was John Brown, he would have been in jail,” one criminal justice official with knowledge of the case said. “If a woman says, ‘He’s the guy that raped me,’ and you have corroborating evidence to show they were together and she went to the hospital and she can identify him, that guy goes to jail.”
You’ve never heard of Allison Jones, but if you’ve watched a hit US comedy like Superbad, you have her to thank for the superb casting. A fascinating profile.
(The New Yorker, approx 33 mins reading time, 6624 words)
Jones began her career with the two-beats-and-a-punch-line sitcoms of the nineteen-eighties, but, in working with Feig and the director Judd Apatow, she was required to try something revolutionary: find comedic actors who, more than just delivering jokes, could improvise and riff on their lines, creating something altogether different from what was on the page.
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
This in-depth interview with Irish actress Saoirse Ronan sheds light on how her incredible career has progressed – and how supportive her parents are.
(Dazed, approx 12 mins reading time, 2470 words)
A linguistic chameleon, she’s eerily gifted at mimicking inflections from the clipped vowels of the British upper classes to languorous southern drawls, and will oblige if you ask her nicely. But the most popular subject of conversation where Ronan is concerned is the fact she acted Keira Knightley off the screen as the precocious Briony Tallis, whose single wicked lie unleashes disaster in Joe Wright’s 2007 adaptation of Ian McEwan’s Atonement.More: The best reads from every previous Sitdown Sunday >
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