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.
Jill Lepore writes about the relationship America has with guns, taking in the Columbine High School shootings and their impact on the country, the huge number of privately-owned firearms, and why some want guns banned.
(New Yorker – approx 40 minutes reading time, 8110 words)
Inside, there’s a shop, a pistol range, a rifle range, a couple of classrooms, a locker room, and a place to clean your gun. The walls are painted police blue up to the wainscoting, and then white to the ceiling, which is painted black. It feels like a clubhouse, except, if you’ve never been to a gun shop before, that part feels not quite licit, like a porn shop.
2. Crowdfunding a family journey
Steven Krutz meets the Harteau family, who undertook a trip around the southernmost tip of South America with the help of crowdfunding. In looking at their story, he examines if it really is justified to get others to pay for your trip – or if crowdfunding is an ingenious way of making dreams come true, while giving back to supporters.
(New York Times – approx 10 minutes reading time, 2139 words)
“We loved the idea of bringing our home with us,” Mr. Harteau said. “We could live in our van and drive to South America, and it would be awesome.” If this was the 1960s and the Harteaus were traveling in a VW van, they might have raised gas money by selling handicrafts or hash oil. In the Internet era, they turned to social media, initiating a Kickstarter campaign.
Pic: AP Photo/Musadeq Sadeq
Mathieu Aikins tells us about the discovery of the bodies of 10 missing Afghan villagers, which were dug up outside a US Special Forces base last spring. US Special Forces had arrived in the area the year before, and were accused by locals of war crimes. But were these accusations true?
(Rolling Stone– approx 41 minutes reading time, 8289 words)
Last winter, tensions peaked and President Karzai ordered an investigation into the allegations. Then on February 16th, a student named Nasratullah was found under a bridge with his throat slit, two days, his family claimed, after he had been picked up by the Green Berets. Mass demonstrations erupted in Wardak, and Karzai demanded that the American Special Forces team leave, and by April, it did. That’s when the locals started finding bodies buried outside the American base in Nerkh, bodies they said belonged to the 10 missing men.
Alex Buono writes a wonderfully in-depth and somewhat nerdy piece about how he created an SNL parody video based on the director Wes Anderson’s work. Film buffs and Anderson fans will delight in all the little details that went into the short trailer.
(Alex Buono– approx 40 minutes reading time, 8111 words)
One thing was immediately clear: there is no way we were going to find a location that would look enough like Wes Anderson’s “World” – we would have to build sets. The script called for a living room, kitchen and bedroom, along with a handful of tableau sets for character introductions (such as “closet full of antique typewriters”) – all of which we could build on stage.
Pic: AP Photo/Wally Santana
Yasmin Nair writes about a subject that no one really wants to read about - but we are all connected with it. It's poo (or sh*t, as she puts it - be warned that this word is used extensively within), and it's time to face up to what happens once it leaves our bodies. Best not to eat while reading this one.
(The Awl – approx 30 minutes reading time, 6092 words)
Some describe, with a smugness that sometimes floats to the surface, the fact that the ritual of going to the toilet was once upon a time a communal experience, with people laughing and chatting away and catching up on gossip as they went about their business.
Emily Bazelon writes about a woman's shocking discovery about what happened to the bodies of political dissidents in Berlin during WWII, and how the study of anatomy has a murky and disturbing history in some quarters.
(Slate – approx 40 minutes reading time, 8111 words)
When informed consent is not the rule, the people whose bodies and tissues go to medicine have been overwhelmingly the poor and the marginalized. In an article in Clinical Anatomy published last year, bioethicist Gareth Jones and anatomist Maja Whitaker, both from New Zealand, called for an international standard of informed consent. “Anatomists should cease using unclaimed bodies,” they write.
...AND ONE FROM THE ARCHIVES...
File: Kelly Flaherty Clark, right, director of animal training at SeaWorld Orlando, works with killer whale Tilikum. Pic: AP Photo/Phelan M Ebenhack
In 2010, Tim Zimmerman wrote about Tilikum, the killer whale who is the subject of the recent film Blackfish. The whale was housed in SeaWorld, and ended up being involved in a number of deaths - including the demise of his trainer. Zimmerman investigates what could have driven the whale to do this.
(Outside – approx 42 minutes reading time, 8580 words)
Eyewitness accounts and the sheriff's investigative report make it clear that Brancheau fought hard. She was a strong swimmer, a dedicated workout enthusiast who ran marathons. But she weighed just 123 pounds and was no match for a 12,000-pound killer whale. She managed to break free and swim toward the surface, but Tilikum slammed into her. She tried again. This time he grabbed her.
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