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.
Brenna Ehrlich explains how people’s remains were stolen and sold after being donated to Harvard Medical School for science, and speaks to the families who may have been affected.
(Rolling Stone, approx 18 mins reading time)
On June 14, nearly a year after that summer night they had scattered their mother’s ashes, MacTaggart turned on the TV. Harvard was splashed all over the local news. Cedric Lodge, the manager of a morgue at Harvard Medical School, had been indicted by a federal grand jury in Pennsylvania — along with several others — on charges of conspiracy and interstate transport of stolen goods. The broadcast went on to explain that those so-called goods were body parts from corpses donated to the Anatomical Gift Program — the very same program to which Mazzone had proudly donated her body. “I was having a heart attack,” MacTaggart says. “I had no idea what was going on.” Her first instinct was to call the university, but it was nighttime. When she returned home from work the next day, there was a certified letter in her mailbox that confirmed her worst fears. “We cannot rule out the potential that Adele Mazzone’s remains may have been impacted,” the printed letter read. “We are deeply sorry for the pain and uncertainty caused by this troubling news.”
An interview with the US pop superstar who was named Time’s Person of the Year after smashed industry records this year with both her tour and its accompanying film.
(Time, approx 31 mins reading time)
Her epic career-retrospective tour recounting her artistic “eras,” which played 66 dates across the Americas this year, is projected to become the biggest of all time and the first to gross over a billion dollars; analysts talked about the “Taylor effect,” as politicians from Thailand, Hungary, and Chile implored her to play their countries. Cities, stadiums, and streets were renamed for her. Every time she came to a new place, a mini economic boom took place as hotels and restaurants saw a surge of visitors. In releasing her concert movie, Swift bypassed studios and streamers, instead forging an unusual pact with AMC, giving the theater chain its highest single-day ticket sales in history.
There are at least 10 college classes devoted to her, including one at Harvard; the professor, Stephanie Burt, tells TIME she plans to compare Swift’s work to that of the poet William Wordsworth. Friendship bracelets traded by her fans at concerts became a hot accessory, with one line in a song causing as much as a 500% increase in sales at craft stores. When Swift started dating Travis Kelce, the Kansas City Chief and two-time Super Bowl champion, his games saw a massive increase in viewership. (Yes, she somehow made one of America’s most popular things—football—even more popular.) And then there’s her critically hailed songbook—a catalog so beloved that as she rereleases it, she’s often breaking chart records she herself set. She’s the last monoculture left in our stratified world.
Last December, seven chimpanzees escaped from their enclosure at Furuvik Zoo in Sweden. In this gripping but heartbreaking read, Imogen West-Knights brilliantly recounts the 72 hours that followed.
(The Guardian, approx 34 mins reading time)
Seven chimpanzees on the loose require a very different approach. Chimpanzees are big and smart, they are adept climbers and can move at up to 25mph. For the humans catching the chimps, the experience can be emotionally challenging, even existentially confusing, in a way that returning an escaped cobra to its cage is not. Great apes, the name given to large primates like chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas, are so like us. They hold hands, embrace and kiss one another, and the meanings of these gestures seem to be the same as when we do it. They express fear, delight, surprise, affection. And yet they are not us. The Dutch zoologist Frans de Waal, who has more than 50 years of experience with chimpanzees, suggests in his seminal book Chimpanzee Politics that we cannot help but feel a sense of unease around the animal. How should we relate to them, these creatures we know to be wild, but who look like we do? Last month, I stood with a zookeeper at a zoo in the south of England, watching a group of chimpanzees sun themselves in their enclosure. “I find them terrifying,” she admitted. “They’re so human. Who is looking at who?”
What’s the weirdest crisp flavour you’ve ever tried? Amelia Tait investigates the decisions behind creating a crisp flavour, and who decides which country gets which crisps.
(The Guardian, approx 18 mins reading time)
Walkers began manufacturing in Britain in 1948; it was acquired by the US crisp company Frito-Lay in 1989, and today Lay’s are available in more than 200 countries, from Argentina to Vietnam. Some varieties require little explanation – Poutine Lay’s are available only in Canada because the gravy-soaked chips are not Brazil’s national dish. Yet the crisp aisles of the world are stacked with mysteries. Why are Salt & Pepper Pringles favoured by Norwegians, and Oven-Roasted Chicken Doritos only available in Korea? Why does Europe love paprika so much? Pringles, like Lay’s, is not even a century old, yet its tubes are available in 80 countries. Both brands have conquered the world. With billions behind them, surely they know untold secrets about our national tastes and temperaments? Peggy says that to understand why, for example, paprika crisps proliferate on German shelves, you have to understand immigration history. But I don’t hear her secrets until the end of my journey.
Twenty years after its release, Jessica M. Goldstein writes about how The Killers’ signature hit became a generation’s anthem.
(The New York Times, approx 7 mins reading time)
The track is the centerpiece of the Killers’ oeuvre and the star of their new greatest hits album, “Rebel Diamonds,” which is full of hits with lyrics that are basically tattooed onto the hippocampuses of even the most casual fans — “All These Things That I’ve Done” (“I’ve got soul but I’m not a soldier”), the synthy-sad “Smile Like You Mean It” and gender-bendy “Somebody Told Me” (“you had a boyfriend who looked like a girlfriend that I had…”). But none of those singles comes close to matching the ongoing ubiquity of “Mr. Brightside.” “We’ve never not played that song live, because it’s stood the test of time and I’m proud of it,” Flowers told Spin in 2015. “I never get bored of singing it.” (A representative for Flowers said he was unable to speak for this article because he was in the studio.)
One detective’s quest to track down an international network of romance fraudsters, brilliantly told by Stuart McGurk.
(New Statesman, approx 30 mins reading time)
After that, the plot thickened: one multinational network would link to another, and another still, each with its own fake persona and modus operandi (many remain under investigation, and cannot be reported). Within months, Mason realised she was looking at the manufacture of infatuation on an industrial scale. The networks even had WhatsApp group chats, where fraudsters sought each other’s advice, like teenage girls perfecting a reply to a boy. Even within this river of illicit money, one bank account stood out: funds from several of the networks seemed to flow through it, a tributary before it split. The account holder: Alan George Baldwin.
To the untrained eye, Baldwin’s account appeared to belong to a criminal. But Mason knew that the accounts of long-term fraud victims can resemble the accounts of the fraudsters themselves. Often, they are the first entry point for funds elicited from other victims before being siphoned elsewhere. Mason’s theory was that Baldwin was being used as the networks’ currency exchange. One payment in particular concerned her: a £1,500 transfer that went out every month, like a mortgage payment, just after Baldwin’s pension had cleared. It didn’t fit any of the payments coming in. This, she realised, was Baldwin’s own money.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jeff Gottlieb details the downfall of a businessman named Steve Carroll, who went from being a powerful executive to robbing banks.
(Medium, approx 32 mins reading time)
The day after the August 2018 robbery, Scott Hamilton, a commercial airline pilot and Air Force Academy graduate living in Texas, answered a phone call from his brother John. “Dude you’re not going to freaking believe this,” John told him as he emailed him a link to one of the photos pinging around the internet. Scott opened the link and agreed it sure looked like Steve, but he offered that maybe it was just someone who resembled him. Another brother, Bob, came on the line and directed them to photos taken from different angles. There was no question: The man robbing the bank was their brother-in-law, their sister’s husband of 36 years. Scott even recognized the Bersa Thunder 380 pistol, which he’d given his sister as a gift. The Foster Grant sunglasses were familiar, too, a present from Scott to Steve the previous Christmas. The revelation left them shocked.
Note: The Journal generally selects stories that are not paywalled, but some might not be accessible if you have exceeded your free article limit on the site in question.
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