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. The rise and fall of Brangelina
Anne Helen Petersen gives us a good analysis of the current situation with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie – and an insight into how celebrity break-ups work.
(Buzzfeed, approx 14 mins reading time)
They starred in 2015’s By the Sea, a film, based on the life of her mother, that Jolie wrote and directed. It bombed, but they seemed unfazed, as if it were their home movie, not a project worth millions. In May 2016, Jolie was appointed a visiting professor at the London School of Economics; for years, she’s suggested she’ll soon quit acting altogether. Perhaps this was what a contemporary power marriage looked like: growing and expanding your interests, as a pair and apart. Which is part of why news of the divorce came as a shock: There was little indication of trouble in the singular, globe-hopping world the family had built for themselves.
When Michael Hickey’s father died of kidney cancer, he was shocked at how aggressively the disease had taken hold. And after a friend died a year later, Hickey began to wonder if the manufacture of Teflon in their local town could have anything to do with it. Here’s what he found – and how he started fighting for change.
(Fusion, approx 30 mins reading time)
That a toxic substance managed to go unnoticed in the Hoosick Falls water supply for so long is darkly unsurprising to anyone mildly versed in how chemicals are regulated in the United States. Like roughly 80,000 chemicals approved for use in the U.S., PFOA is not currently regulated by the EPA. The agency keeps a short list of “emerging contaminants,” chemicals approved for use but which they suspect may cause some sort of harm, and which have yet to undergo the rigorous and lengthy process to actually verify that suspicion.
Jason Cowley looks back at the early 2000s, when Labour was hip and its young advisors were on the up. What on earth went wrong?
(New Statesman, approx 27 mins reading time)
“Fundamentally there wasn’t a big ideological gulf between Blair and Brown,” Ed Balls says now. “There wasn’t even, really, a big policy divide – in 1997, Tony was the Eurosceptic rather than Gordon. Things changed in terms of how he saw himself as a leader, but I don’t think he ever really wanted to join the single currency. He just really wanted to look like he wanted to join the single currency because he thought that that was important for Britain, and [for] his standing as PM at that time.”
Miles Davis was one of the greats, and this piece explores why – reviewing Don Cheadle’s film about the maestro in the process.
(New York Review of Books, approx 20 mins reading time)
In the late 1960s and early 1970s he was leaner and fitter than ever, eating only a single meal a day, and spending much of his spare time in the gym boxing, which allowed him to hold notes longer and to play higher than he ever had. (He even sounded like a boxer, with a rhythmic attack that suggested jabbing here, thrusting there.) He threw himself into his work with the Second Great Quintet, the band he led from 1964 to 1968 with the tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter, the pianist Herbie Hancock, the drummer Tony Williams, and the bassist Ron Carter.
Amalia Ulman has convinced her Instagram followers that she is many things – a pregnant woman, an office worker, and a pretty teen. But they were all characters the conceptual artist has been playing.
(Elle, approx 15 mins reading time)
“Is this the first Instagram masterpiece?” wondered a 2014 headline in London’s Telegraph, after Ulman appeared to shape-shift on social media from cute girly-girl to narcissistic sugar-baby to wellness-oriented green juicer—an is-she-or-isn’t-she arc that viewers later learned was in fact a performance entitled Excellences & Perfections. (The general gist of the article: Yes.) “Her genius is she can understand, dissect, and embrace extreme polarities,” says James Fuentes, the New York gallerist…
A British woman writes a book about her extreme sensitivity to light, and how it has changed her life. But is her story really true?
(New Yorker, approx 39 mins reading time)
“I don’t know whether now they’d find it,” Lyndsey said. “When I was in complete darkness, that was the time to do it.” Even if a specialist could discover the origins of her mysterious ailment, Lyndsey said, it might be of no use: “There are a lot of things that get diagnosed in the world and that’s all you get—you get a label.”
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
Back in 2004, John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote about his trip to the CrossOver Festival – a festival dedicated to Christian music. Would he be able to fit in?
(GQ, approx 59 mins reading time)
The Evangelical strata were more or less recognizable from my high school days, though everyone, I observed, had gotten better looking. Lots were dressed like skate punks or in last season’s East Village couture (nondenominationals); others were fairly trailer (rural Baptists or Church of God); there were preps (Young Life, Fellowship of Christian Athletes—these were the ones who’d have the pot). You could spot the stricter sectarians right away, their unchanging antifashion and pale glum faces.
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