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. Inside the Stalinist Truman Show
Heard of Dau? If not, this is a fascinating read – it’s about a film shoot which began in 2005 as a biopic of a Russian scientist, and turned into a mammoth project.
(The Guardian, approx 20 mins reading time)
Khrzhanovsky abandoned the idea of finishing the film to focus exclusively on his replica institute, now also known as Dau. It became less a film set than a parallel world: a functioning mini-state, stuck in the mid-20th century and sealed off from the modern world. Dau was populated with hundreds of extras, or “participants”, who lived as faithfully as possible as Soviet citizens. The period authenticity was obsessive, covering clothes (even down to the underwear), hairstyles, food packaging, cigarette brands. What is more, time moved forwards inside Dau, from 1938 to 1968, so all the period detail was continually updated.
2. The boss who put everyone on 70k
No, that’s not a typo. In 2015, the head of a card payments company in Seattle put all his employees on 70k a year. So how did it work out?
(BBC, approx 10 mins reading time)
After crunching the numbers, he arrived at the figure of $70,000. He realised that he would not only have to slash his salary, but also mortgage his two houses and give up his stocks and savings. He gathered his staff together and gave them the news. He’d expected scenes of celebration, but at first the announcement floated down upon the room in something of an anti-climax, Price says. He had to repeat himself before the enormity of what was happening landed.
3. How a homeless man built a life underground
How and why Dominic Van Allen built himself a bunker under a public park.
(The Guardian, approx 28 mins reading time)
On the whole, Van Allen slept well. Beyond the timber walls there was more concrete, to keep out groundwater, and together with the Hampstead clay, this muffled all but the most extreme-frequency sounds. (On fireworks night he heard the bangs, but not the crackles.) When he first moved down here, Van Allen worried about oversleeping and he sometimes set a morning alarm on his phone. It was never needed. He was decades-trained to be up and on the move before the city’s day shift began, before London became more closely observed by its security guards and park rangers and police officers, any one of whom might inadvertently happen on the latest of his impermanent shelters and blow it.
4. How to work from home without losing your mind
Look, we don’t want to do too much coronavirus coverage, but if you find yourself having to work from home in the near future, this should help.
(Wired, approx 8 mins reading time)
Not to get too personal right off the bat, but put some clothes on. It’s tempting, I know, to roll out of bed and blob over to your laptop in your pajamas. Or maybe not even get out of bed in the first place? It’s a trap. If you’re dressed for sleep, it’s going to be a lot harder to get your brain up to a canter, much less a gallop. (In this metaphor your brain is a horse, go with it.) More important, though, if you don’t get up, take a shower, brush your teeth, get dressed—whatever your morning routine entails when you actually do go into the office—you’re breaking the cardinal rule of working from home: Set boundaries.
5. What it’s really like to be an Irish filmmaker
We spoke to four filmmakers whose work is on show at the Virgin Media Dublin Film Festival about how they make money, what the film industry is really like, and creative challenges.
(TheJournal.ie, approx 15 mins reading time)
What is clear is that when you embark on making a film you’ll be in it for the long haul – particularly if you’re both writing and directing the film – and so you better be certain that it is something that you are very passionate about.
6. The backpack that led to a federal investigation
The iBackpack was supposed to be crammed with amazing features, like wifi and a USB hub. It raised hundreds of thousands of funding online – but then the questions came about where the money was going to.
(The Verge, approx mins reading time)
Thousands of people bought into Monahan’s project, netting him nearly $800,000 to bring the bag to life. He shipped a few beta units, but the vast majority of people never received anything. They haven’t seen the backpack in person. They don’t believe it’s real, and they started a Facebook group to organize ways to recoup their money and get the FTC’s attention. As far as they’re concerned, Monahan’s a grifter, and the FTC lawsuit was long-awaited and necessary. They track the case in the group, too. “Clearly Doug is a snake in the grass and hopefully the Federal Trade Commission hammers him,” one member of the group wrote.
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
Four years before Donald Trump became president, Ta-nehisi Coates wrote this piece, ‘Fear of a Black President’, about how Barack Obama “reveals the false promise and double standard of integration”.
(The Atlantic, approx mins reading time)
The irony of President Barack Obama is best captured in his comments on the death of Trayvon Martin, and the ensuing fray. Obama has pitched his presidency as a monument to moderation. He peppers his speeches with nods to ideas originally held by conservatives. He routinely cites Ronald Reagan. He effusively praises the enduring wisdom of the American people, and believes that the height of insight lies in the town square. Despite his sloganeering for change and progress, Obama is a conservative revolutionary, and nowhere is his conservative character revealed more than in the very sphere where he holds singular gravity—race.
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