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.
1. What is making my daughter ill?
When Alison Motluk’s daughter got a fever, then a strange lump under her ear, the family treated it with medical help, then assumed the worst was over. Little did they know that this was the start of a journey into figuring out what was wrong with their child.
(Hazlitt, approx 46 mins reading time)
The deterioration was rapid. In the weeks since her ear infection, her temperament had changed dramatically. Though she had always been an anxious child, she was also easygoing and forgiving. No longer. The slightest affront—a misplaced comment, the wrong joke, a question about how she was feeling—would set her off. She’d burst into tears, rage, scream, sob, hide. It could take an hour or more for her to recover. We’d never seen anything like it.
Dr E Lee Spence, an underwater archaeologist, has found millions of dollars worth of treasure. He started when he was a child, finding shipwrecks aged just 12. He describes the highs and lows of his career.
(Vice, approx 23 mins reading time)
Today, I have been responsible for the recovery of artifacts with a total value of over a hundred million dollars. But, when doing it on a large scale, treasure salvage can be a very expensive business and governments always take their part, as do investors. Five failed marriages were another high cost I paid, and I have had plenty of very lean times, but I must admit I have lived better than most people in this business. I have owned beautiful homes, eaten in the finest restaurants, partied with famous gangsters, politicians, and movie stars. It’s been an almost unbelievable life.
3. Is Richard Simmons being held against his will?
The flamboyant exercise guru Richard Simmons has long lived an interesting life, but it seems to have taken a strange turn in recent years. There’s talk of him being held against his will in his Hollywood mansion, and telling friends he can’t see them anymore. What’s really going on?
(New York Daily News, approx 27 mins reading time)
Richard Simmons has vanished from public view, and many who know him best say they haven’t had any contact in more than two years. All repeat the same message, some anonymously and some on the record: Simmons stopped returning calls and emails more than two years ago, behavior that is highly out of character, and his housekeeper is blocking access to him at home.
The Zika virus has taken a grip of Brazil, with nearly 600 babies having been born with microcephaly. This investigation goes to Brazil and meets the people affected by what’s happened.
(The Globe and Mail, approx 31 mins reading time)
This is the same as AIDS,” Dr. Melo said one night this past week, slumped in the glow of the ultrasound screen. “It’s just the same.” It is not the same virus, of course. But many people working on the Zika emergency have begun to make the comparison with 1981, when young gay men in the United States started dying. A tiny group of patients – at least at first; terrible, painful ailments that frighten both patients and clinicians; a mystery cause: It’s hauntingly familiar to people who have been in the trenches of epidemiology for a while.
Curtis Duffy is a chef who has worked at some of Chicago’s finest restaurants. Here’s the story of how cooking, and a great teacher, helped him after a turbulent childhood.
(Chicago Tribune, approx 38 mins reading time)
Curtis got an after-school job stocking shelves at the local Kroger supermarket and quickly hatched a scheme for more money: He stashed a case — dozens of cartons — of Marlboro cigarettes in a garbage can and planned to retrieve it after-hours, then sell the cigarettes to friends. An inventory check revealed the missing case, which was easily traced back to one Curtis Lee Duffy. Stealing that many cigarettes was considered a felony, but the store manager decided against pressing charges. If Curtis’ uncle weren’t also a cop who turned a blind eye at his nephew’s indiscretions, Curtis surely would have landed in jail.
This much-shared story is about how Isis keeps sex slaves – and keeps them from getting pregnant by giving them birth control pills, without telling them what they are.
(New York Times, approx 15 mins reading time)
In at least one case, a woman was forced to have an abortion in order to make her available for sex, and others were pressured to do so. Some described how they knew they were about to be sold when they were driven to a hospital to give a urine sample to be tested for the hCG hormone, whose presence indicates pregnancy. They awaited their results with apprehension: A positive test would mean they were carrying their abuser’s child; a negative result would allow Islamic State fighters to continue raping them.
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES….
Getting stuck in a lift is a nightmare scenario – but that’s just what happened to Nicholas White in 1999. Are elevators really safe? Yes, this 2008 essay argues, but they’re still scary.
(New Yorker, approx 41 mins reading time)
Ask a vertical-transportation-industry professional to recall an episode of an elevator in free fall—the cab plummeting in the shaftway, frayed rope ends trailing in the dark—and he will say that he can think of only one. That would be the Empire State Building incident of 1945, in which a B-25 bomber pilot made a wrong turn in the fog and crashed into the seventy-ninth floor, snapping the hoist and safety cables of two elevators. Both of them plunged to the bottom of the shaft.
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