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 some of the week’s best reads for you to savour.
John Rosengren writes about how a vigilante murder in the Minnesota town of Grand Marais divided the community. (Details in this may be distressing for some people to read)
(The Atavist, approx 46 mins reading time)
Larry once approached a man named Gary Nesgoda at a gas station and asked if he had kids. When Nesgoda said that he did, Larry showed him pictures of a fairy garden he’d built behind his house. There were miniature staircases and doors, and little figurines set amid tree roots. Larry insisted that Nesgoda, who had recently moved to Grand Marais, should bring his kids over to see it. “Everything he was telling me sounded pretty neat,” Nesgoda told me. Then, in the gas station parking lot, someone who’d overheard the conversation stopped Nesgoda. “Do not bring your children over there,” they warned. This was a common theme. “Larry was the boogeyman,” said Brian Larsen, editor and publisher of the Cook County News Herald, who is a father of four children. “You’d tell your kids to stay the heck away from him.”
How two men made a fortune by exploiting Europe’s carbon emissions trading system, and how their $5 billion scam was laced with betrayal.
(The Guardian, approx 29 mins reading time)
Daphne and other scammers’ pillaging of Europe’s carbon market constitutes what the media have called “the fraud of the century” – billions of euros were stolen in a matter of months. The shadowy scheme attracted established crime rings and amateur hucksters alike, many of whom knew one another. Its web reached the boxing rings of Las Vegas, the offices of Germany’s biggest bank, the caves along the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan where Osama bin Laden was hiding and the gilded restaurants of Paris. It pulled in a playboy demi-celebrity, an Afghan refugee, a flashy street hustler, an immaculate businessman who hobnobbed with the queen of England, the doyenne of Marseille’s underground and a man some people called The Brain. The Brain’s real name is Grégory Zaoui, and he claims that the entire scam was his idea. Daphne, he says, gets far too much credit for his role in ripping off the carbon market.
The demand for the diabetes drug Ozempic has skyrocketed in recent times due to its popular use as a weight loss treatment. But this had led to shortages, and criminals are filling the void.
(Vanity Fair, approx 31 mins reading time)
Following Moore’s detailed instructions, Pinckney sent him documentation and photos, then shipped several samples of the Ozempic to a reference laboratory in Minnesota. Upon initial inspection, the product looked good. It bore an authentic lot number, NAR0074, and came with a detailed inventory trail. On December 18, the Minnesota lab came back with its results: The pen contained the right peptide, semaglutide, for which Novo Nordisk holds the exclusive patent. But there was an oddity: The pens contained more than the specified dose of 1 milligram per injection. Looking closer, Moore and his quality director, Angela Powell, noticed other irregularities: The injection needles looked slightly different. And a small label on each pen was almost imperceptibly askew. Powell realized something was gravely wrong when she scrutinized the boxes in the photos. Each box should have been marked with a unique serial number, but instead they all had the same one: 430834149057. Moore picked up the phone and called Novo Nordisk.
A look at the curious case of Benjamin B. Bolger, who has spent over 30 years attending top US universities and getting academic degrees.
(The New York Times, approx 14 mins reading time)
And there’s something almost anachronistically earnest, even romantic, about the reason he gives for spending the past 30-odd years pursuing college degrees. “I love learning,” he told me over lunch last year, without even a touch of irony. I had been pestering him for the better part of two days, from every angle I could imagine, to offer some deeper explanation for his life as a perpetual student. Every time I tried, and failed, I felt irredeemably 21st-century, like an extra in a historical production who has forgotten to remove his Apple Watch. “I believe that people are like trees,” he said. “I hope I am a sequoia. I want to grow for as long as possible and reach toward the highest level of the sky.”
Forty years after its release, this oral history sees cast and crew look back at the making of the classic 1984 Christmassy comedy horror featuring the mischievous little creatures that famously can’t be fed after midnight.
(The Ringer, approx 49 mins reading time)
Since its release 40 years ago this week, Gremlins has appealed to our base instincts. But what makes it a classic is that there’s far more to it than its core of silly madness. Director Joe Dante threw horror, science fiction, slapstick, satire, family drama, and holiday nostalgia into a blender and pushed the puree button. Amazingly, the swirl of green goop he created congealed and formed a masterpiece—one that’s both madcap and governed by a specific set of rules that people still remember today. “Somebody once said to me that I make movies and the MAD magazine parodies of movies at the same time,” Dante says. “That was a big influence on me, MAD magazine. And so all the movies that I’ve done have a certain absurd take on the material.”
Comedian Howie Mandel, who voices the heroic furball Gizmo, saw an early cut of Gremlins while recording his lines. To him, it was completely unclassifiable. “I kept watching it and I kept thinking—because I didn’t know—‘Is this really a kid’s movie?’” he says. “It’s kind of dark and funny and scary and Christmas-y. It’s like everything. It’s like four different genres at once. And to my surprise, it even was so indescribable that it created its own rating.”
In this atmospheric profile, William Finnegan paddles out with Jock Sutherland, who, in 1969, was voted the best surfer in the world. At the age of 75, he’s still riding waves.
(The New Yorker, approx 39 mins reading time)
A surfer as famous as he was could have made enough money for an easy retirement, I thought, but Sutherland hadn’t cashed in. Surfing was never, to his mind, a job. Even when he was at the apex of the surfing world, he was unimpressed, stubborn. There was no pro tour in those days. “You could work for a board manufacturer, maybe have your own signature-model board,” he told me. “But that meant sell, sell, sell. That was . . . crass. I mean, the banality. It was antithetical to being able to enjoy being out in the water.”
Jock built a different sort of life on his home coast. He’s seemingly everybody’s favorite roofer, a part-time farmer, a revered elder with garrulous tendencies. I’ve heard him called “the mayor of the North Shore.” My old starstruck view of him was pure projection. In truth, he was, from an early age, leading a strange, half-wild, quite complicated existence.
A profile of Bruce Springsteen from 2012.
(The New Yorker, approx 71 mins reading time)
Preparing for a tour is a process far more involved than middle-aged workouts designed to stave off premature infarction. “Think of it this way: performing is like sprinting while screaming for three, four minutes,” Springsteen said. “And then you do it again. And then you do it again. And then you walk a little, shouting the whole time. And so on. Your adrenaline quickly overwhelms your conditioning.” His style in performance is joyously demonic, as close as a white man of Social Security age can get to James Brown circa 1962 without risking a herniated disk or a shattered pelvis. Concerts last in excess of three hours, without a break, and he is constantly dancing, screaming, imploring, mugging, kicking, windmilling, crowd-surfing, climbing a drum riser, jumping on an amp, leaping off Roy Bittan’s piano. The display of energy and its depletion is part of what is expected of him. In return, the crowd participates in a display of communal adoration. Like pilgrims at a gigantic outdoor Mass—think John Paul II at Gdansk—they know their role: when to raise their hands, when to sway, when to sing, when to scream his name, when to bear his body, hand over hand, from the rear of the orchestra to the stage. (Van Zandt: “Messianic? Is that the word you’re looking for?”)
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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