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.
Alison Urbina remembers the day her father went to jail vividly. It was days before her 16th birthday when he came after her and her mother with a knife.
I grabbed my mom and told her to run outside. I ran outside and down the front steps and waited for her to follow me. I turned and saw her running down the steps, but then I saw my dad was just a few steps behind her, a knife in his hand. I had a feeling he was going to throw the knife at her back, so I yelled, “Mom, hurry, run faster!”
(Narratively 7 mins reading time)
Gerald Foos bought a motel in order to watch his guests having sex. He saw a lot more than that. Gay Talese’s examination of Foos is unflinching, but human.
He removed from his pocket a folded piece of stationery and handed it to me. “I hope you’ll not mind reading and signing this,” he said. “It’ll allow me to be completely frank with you, and I’ll have no problem showing you around the motel.”
(The New Yorker, 60 mins reading time)
3. Confessions of a Radical Doula
Giving birth is so associated with happy feelings that the process of giving birth as a medical procedure is largely ignored.
Sometimes they’re bright-eyed, centered, fine, but too often they’re hollowed out, haunted, hurting. When they talk about giving birth, they sigh or shrug or burst into tears. Whatever, they say, shaking it off. My baby is here. My baby is alive. That’s what matters.Bullshit! I never dare say. You matter. What happened to you matters.
(New York Magazine 17 mins reading time)
4. My Life on (Simulated) Mars
While an actual trip to the Red Planet is a long time away, six strangers did simulate the conditions on a volcano in Hawaii. For science.
I am a simulated astronaut, and I shovel shit, when the job calls for it. I came to space to be a doctor, but more often I end up being a plumber, an electrician, and a mechanic. That’s the nature of the game. That’s survival. We survive by recycling everything. On Mars, we can’t even waste our waste. So what do we do? We shovel, and we patch, and we laugh about it. Laughter is a pure, concentrated form of fault-tolerance; a much-needed way out when things go wrong.
(Narratively, 18 mins reading time)
5. Ornery
Legendary country singer Merle Haggard died this week after a battle with pneumonia. Here’s a profile on him from 1990.
Me and Willie Nelson was working at Harrah’s one time, and security called us from downstairs. We were up in that celebrity suite. They called and said, ‘There’s a guy here says he knows you guys. Says his name is So-and-So.’ I go, ‘What does he look like?’ They say, ‘He’s a scroungy-lookin’ son of a bitch.’ I said, ‘I know lots of scroungy-lookin’ sons of bitches.’ They say, ‘Well, he’s dressed like a cowboy, with a big goddam hat, and he seems pretty excited.
(Longform, 100 mins reading time)
The hunt for America’s first serial killer began on New Year’s Eve 1884 in Austin, Texas. Over the course of a year, seven women and a man were killed. But because the victims were black, authorities were largely unworried. That was until Christmas Eve 1885.
By late morning, the newsboys for the Daily Statesman were on Congress Avenue, hawking the Christmas Day edition, which had been reprinted overnight. “Blood! Blood! Blood!” screamed the new front-page headline, the ink scarcely dry on the paper. “The Demons Have Transferred Their Thirst for Blood to White People!”
(Texas Monthly, 20mins reading time)
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
In 2008, the FV Alaska Ranger, a vessel out of Dutch Harbour (from The Deadliest Catch), went down. 47 people would spend hours floating in frigid waters. 42 would be saved. GQ’s Sean Flynn tells the story of how.
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