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.
Anthony Bourdain, the chef and TV presenter, talks about his relationship with money – and it’s particularly fascinating, especially when you consider that he didn’t even have a savings account until he was 44…
(Wealth Simple, approx 15 mins reading time)
Most of the kids at my school got a sports car as soon as they got their permit. Most came from broken homes, but lived in fabulous houses. They had lives unbothered by loving parents, where they were free to watch pornography and do drugs and misbehave. I envied them that. My friends could afford weed and cocaine. That was certainly a motivator, maybe a bad one, but a not unimportant one: my friends could afford drugs, I could not. They would share but, of course, the thing about cocaine is that you can never have enough.
Writer and director Mike Judge is the man behind the film Idiocracy and the show Silicon Valley, where he holds a mirror up to the USA of today.
(New York Times Magazine, approx 24 mins reading time)
Judge has been exploring the contours of American suckiness for his whole career, so it’s no surprise that in what most Americans would consider a difficult year, his vision resonates. But Judge has spent much of his time as a satirist focusing on less self-evidently stupid targets. In “Office Space,” it was the micromanagers who turned a central aspiration of the American dream — white-collar work — into a fluorescent-lit nightmare. Now, on “Silicon Valley,” entering its fourth season on HBO, it is the upward-failing sociopaths of the tech industry, who envelop their monopolistic ardor in homilies about changing the world.
As the French presidential election hots up, the Guardian asks: Is France finally ready to choose Marine Le Pen as president?
(The Guardian, approx 11 mins reading time)
Marine Le Pen, 48, is the closest she has ever been to the French presidency – with a chance of making it to the final runoff in an election that is impossible to predict. In the six years since she took over the party from her father, she has steadily increased her party’s vote in every local and European election. If her ex-paratrooper, Holocaust-denying, provocateur father was content to be a protest vote, Marine Le Pen wants power and political office.
In 1975, Newsweek predicted a new Ice Age – but it never happened. Still, it turns out that the article (and similar ones in other publications predicting new Ice Ages to come very soon) weren’t so far off the mark.
(Longreads, approx 6 mins reading time)
On April 28, 1975, Newsweek published a provocative article, “The Cooling World,” in which writer and science editor Peter Gwynne described a significant chilling of the world’s climate, with evidence accumulating “so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it.” He raised the possibility of shorter growing seasons and poor crop yields, famine, and shipping lanes blocked by ice, perhaps to begin as soon as the mid-1980s. Meteorologists, he wrote, were “almost unanimous” in the opinion that our planet was getting colder.
When an execution takes place in the US, there must be witnesses present. Here, one couple who have witnessed multiple executions explain what the experience is like – and why they do it.
(BBC, approx 10 mins reading time)
On the night of the execution, Teresa, Larry and the other volunteers were picked up by the prison bus and taken to Greensville Correctional Facility in Jarratt, Virginia. After spending some time mingling with reporters in the cafeteria, they were led into a small room. The room was brightly lit, and featured a large viewing window. When the curtains opened they saw the gurney. Then Buchanan entered. When asked if he had any final words, he replied: “Get the ride started. I’m ready to go.”
Anne Helen Peterson looks at the shirtless man in pop culture – taking in masculinity, sexism, and fashion along the way.
(Buzzfeed, approx 47 mins reading time)
It seems obvious that a man without a shirt in a national magazine, a widely distributed film still, or viral image on the internet is sending a message about masculinity. What’s less obvious, however, is how those messages have changed — and in an era seemingly saturated with shirtlessness, how much they communicate about the desperate need for masculinity to forcefully, aggressively, unceasingly reassert itself.
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
In 2010, Alec Wilkinson profiled Gil Scott-Heron, the legendary musician, looking back at how his career began in the late 1960s and bringing us right up to his final years.
(The New Yorker, approx mins reading time)
Sometimes when I spoke to people who used to know Scott-Heron, they told me that they preferred to remember him as he had been. They meant before he had begun avidly smoking crack, which is a withering drug. As a young man, he had a long, narrow, slightly curved face, which seemed framed by hair that bloomed above his forehead like a hedge. The expression in his eyes was baleful, aloof, and slightly suspicious. He was thin then, but now he seems strung together from wires and sinews—he looks like bones wearing clothes.
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