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.
Many people in the US now believe that the country could descend into political violence. Some are joining survivalist communities, canning food, and buying guns in anticipation.
(The New Yorker, approx 37 mins reading time)
According to an analysis of FEMA data, some twenty million Americans are actively preparing for cataclysm—roughly twice as many as in 2017. Political violence, including the spectre of civil war, is one of the reasons. A recent study conducted by researchers at U.C. Davis concluded that one in three adults in the U.S., including up to half of Republicans, feel that violence is “usually or always justified” to advance certain political objectives (say, returning Trump to the White House). In May, Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates, one of the world’s largest hedge funds, told the Financial Times that he believed there was about a thirty-five-per-cent chance of civil war breaking out in America.
On 13 November 2015, 130 people were murdered by Islamist extremists in Paris. Six years later, the trial began. Emmanuel Carrère attended court every day to try to understand the killers’ motivations and hear from those whose lives had been irrevocably changed.
(The Guardian, approx 21 mins reading time)
At 12.25pm a tremor runs through the courtroom. Heavily escorted by gendarmes, the accused enter the bulletproof box. Most of what we see is the reflection in the glass, and not the defendants behind it. We stand up, crane our necks, and wonder: is he there? Yes, he is. Salah Abdeslam is there. He’s the one in the black polo shirt, the furthest from us, the only surviving member of the group of fighters. If he’s at the back of the box it’s not to prevent us from seeing him but because they’re seated in alphabetical order. He’s the first in a long series of A’s: Abdeslam, Abrini, Amri, Attou, Ayari. A bell rings shrilly and a voice says: “All rise.” Everyone stands, as if at mass. The presiding judge and the four assistant judges come in and take their seats. With a hint of a Marseille accent, the presiding judge says: “Please be seated, the court is now in session.” It’s begun.
Nigel Pickford, a self-taught shipwreck researcher based in England, is behind the discovery of dozens of shipwrecks, containing more than €185 million worth of recovered cargoes – and all without going to sea.
(The New Yorker, approx 34 mins reading time)
There is something almost dangerously tantalizing about an undiscovered shipwreck. It exists on the edge of the real, containing death and desire. Lost ships are lost knowledge, waiting to be regained. “It’s like popping the locks on an old suitcase and you lift the lid,” Bound told me. Bound grew up on the Falkland Islands in the nineteen-fifties. In 2022, he found the Endurance, Ernest Shackleton’s polar-exploration ship, under the ice of the Weddell Sea, off Antarctica. “On a shipwreck, everything, in theory, that was there on that ship when it went down is still there,” he said. “It’s all the product of one unpremeditated instant of time.”
Vanity Fair examines the television adaptation of Patrick Radden Keefe’s bestseller Say Nothing, which tells the story of the intersecting lives of two women in 1970s Belfast: an IRA soldier and a mother who’s gone missing. The series will begin on DisneyPlus this week.
(Vanity Fair, approx 9 mins reading time)
To write his best-selling 2018 book, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, Patrick Radden Keefe spent years knocking on doors in Northern Ireland. The Massachusetts native interviewed more than 100 people in Belfast and surrounding communities, reporting on the life of Irish Republican Army soldier Dolours Price and how it intersected with the 1972 disappearance of Jean McConville, accused of spying for the British army. The book reads like a riveting novel about the Troubles told through the eyes of two complex women, intimate tales of parenthood and adolescence paralleled with harrowing instances of violence and betrayal.
From when Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket, to the final days of the campaign, Trump’s victorious run for president featured internal turmoil amongst staffers as they all reached for the White House.
(The Atlantic, approx 29 mins reading time)
For the previous 20 months, he’d been hemmed in by a campaign built on the principles of restraint and competence. The former president’s ugliest impulses were regularly curbed by his top advisers; his most obnoxious allies and most outlandish ideas were sidelined. These guardrails had produced a professional campaign—a campaign that was headed for victory. But now, like a predator toying with its wounded catch, Trump had become bored. It reminded some allies of his havoc-making decisions in the White House. Trump never had much use for calm and quiet. He didn’t appreciate normalcy. Above all, he couldn’t stand being babysat.
“People are calling this the most disciplined campaign they’ve ever seen,” Trump remarked to friends at a fundraiser this summer, according to someone who heard the conversation. He smirked at the compliment. “What’s discipline got to do with winning?”
Israeli college student Rita Murad was 21-years-old when she was arrested over social media posts highlighting issues in Palestine, made immediately after the October 7 attacks in Israel.
(The New York Times, approx 39 mins reading time)
The more time passed, the worse the posts looked for Murad. When the officer pulled them up in late October, on the computer screen at the police station, they didn’t seem innocent or stupid; they seemed like evidence of a crime. It is illegal in Israel to commit “incitement to terrorism” — to say something publicly, or share an image, that might lead someone else to engage in a terrorist act.
“How can you support what’s in these images?” Murad recalls the officer asking. “Do you support Hamas?”
She didn’t, she said. “What made you say that I could possibly support acts that were so violent, so atrocious?” she told him. She didn’t believe in their misogyny and homophobia. As an atheist, she rejected their hard-line religious ideology. “I’m a college student at the Technion,” she told him, as though the words were talismanic.
The officer wasn’t having it. “You know you’ve just ruined your life,” he said.
In the wake of the death of the renowned RTÉ journalist David Davin-Power, Executive Editor of the Daily Mail Group Ireland, John Lee, writes of their friendship over the years while working in Leinster House together.
(Extra.ie, approx 6 mins reading time)
David Davin-Power and I became friends because a floor in Leinster House collapsed. I shared an office with some other political correspondents on the top floor of the old Georgian mansion which was built in 1745. Since our office was actually the former servants’ quarters, they, and now us, were expendable; the floor gave in. This was 2006 and although the press corps was smaller, offices had to be found. Some went to the far reaches of the complex, away from the action – but I was keen to stay close to it. I got a seat in an office alongside some of the more established political correspondents, one of whom was RTÉ’s already legendary reporter, David Davin-Power.
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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