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.
Rupert Murdoch is trying to change the terms of his family’s irrevocable trust to ensure that his eldest son and chosen successor, Lachlan, remains in charge of his vast collection of television networks and newspapers. His other children are trying to stop him.
(The New York Times, approx 10 mins reading time)
The Murdoch family has been divided before. James and Elisabeth at one point competed with each other and Lachlan to eventually take over the company, and at various times they have clashed with one another and their father. James, who once helped run the company with Lachlan, left it in 2019 and now oversees an investment fund. Elisabeth runs a successful movie studio, Sister, and has for years sought to position herself as the “Switzerland” of the family, maintaining good relations with all. Prudence, Murdoch’s oldest child and the only one from his first marriage, has been the least involved in the family business and has remained the most private of the children.
But given Mr. Murdoch’s advanced age, this battle has all of the makings of a final fight for control of his sprawling media conglomerates, which own Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and major newspapers and television outlets in Australia and Britain. It has already driven a new wedge into the famously fractured family.
While the US spends billions to try and tackle the ongoing fentanyl crisis, this deep dive reveals just how easy it is to make the drug. With just $3,600 (paid mainly in Bitcoin) and a smartphone, the reporters were able to buy everything needed to make $3 million worth of the opioid.
(Reuters, approx 34 mins reading time)
While it was easy to source the goods, it proved far more difficult to identify exactly who sold them. Reuters couldn’t determine whether any of the Chinese suppliers were the actual manufacturers of the chemicals received or simply middlemen. Nor could the news organization determine where the operations were located. Reporters could dig up nothing more than phone numbers for two of the sellers. For the others, corporate websites and Chinese business-registry documents yielded addresses. But when Reuters visited these locations, it found no visible presence of the companies there.
The address listed in a government database for a precursor seller known as Hubei Amarvel Biotech, for example, led to a Wuhan office tower. A visit to the listed room number showed another company occupying that space, while the building’s management told Reuters that the chemical supplier had never rented space there.
In 1985, a couple, their daughter and her twin sons were murdered at their home in Essex. Jeremy Bamber, the couple’s son, has spent 37 years in prison for the crime. In this piece, Heidi Blake revisits the case.
(The New Yorker, approx 73 mins reading time)
Outside, an officer approached the patrol car where Bamber had been told to wait and tapped on the window. “I’m really sorry, Jeremy,” he said. “We’ve found everybody dead.” Bamber closed his eyes and began to cry. Another officer climbed in beside him. “You said everything would be all right,” Bamber said. “I know,” the officer said. “We like to think things will work out.” Seemingly unable to process the news, Bamber begged to speak to his father. When he was reminded that Nevill was dead, he broke down again. “Sheila ought to be in a nuthouse for what she’s done,” he muttered. Shortly afterward, he was seen retching in a field.
Detective Chief Inspector Taff Jones, a bluff, ruddy-faced Welshman, was ordered to lead the police inquiry. He examined the windows and doors, determining that the house had been locked from the inside. The police surgeon and the coroner’s officer examined the bodies and confirmed that Sheila appeared to have slaughtered her family before turning the gun on herself. As more detectives arrived, Jones told them that they were dealing with a clear-cut murder-suicide—a horrific crime, but one with a simple solution.
A compelling read about a historian and his team who are risking their lives saving Ukrainian artworks from the frontline.
(The Guardian, approx 27 mins reading time)
Fear is a curious emotion. At times, it arrives without warning or logic, unstoppable and blinding. At others, when its presence might be a useful warning against foolhardiness, it flees altogether. For some, it may become a familiar companion, less and less regarded as time goes on. “Of course I get scared,” Marushchak told me. “Only stupid people don’t get scared.” But he gets less frightened than he used to. On one occasion, describing what it feels like when a shell falls near you, he spoke in almost dreamlike terms: “You almost don’t hear anything, and hardly understand anything. And then you raise your head and you see that the leaves have fallen down from the trees. It is summer, the trees are bare, and you are covered in a blanket of green leaves as you lie there on the ground.”
When I asked Marushchak’s friend Arif Bagirov whether he had felt it worth the risk to his life to evacuate the Volodymyr Sosiura museum, he said, “I told myself, ‘Listen Arif, these are your last days. You might as well live them brightly. Make your death beautiful.’” And if he’d died for Sosiura’s hat? “That would have been the most beautiful death of all.”
With all eyes on Paris for the Olympics, the surfing competition is taking place 16,000 kilometres away in in the Pacific village of Teahupo’o in Tahiti. But with the competition underway, some islanders are concerned about the long-term damage it may cause.
(The Guardian, approx 6 mins reading time)
Like many people, Afo is pleased with some of the new infrastructure that’s being built but is worried about whether the benefits of hosting the Games outweigh the drawbacks. Léon Estall, 33, a professional fisher, cannot see the economic benefits for the village. “It’s not the local population here who are making much money from this,” he says, while working his side job selling coconuts to tourists on the roadside. “Unfortunately, the money is going elsewhere. We’re a bit heartbroken about that.” Although villagers may not see a huge change in income due to the Games, many rely on the money they make renting out their properties to tourists and surfers to provide for their families. Since the Olympics was announced, there has been a rise in the number of new houses being built, and the number of places available to rent to visitors.
Clive Thompson writes about some of the innovations that form a three-step battle plan to tackle single-use plastic. Or, as he puts it, our “path to a world less littered with deathless plastic waste”.
(WIRED, approx 24 mins reading time)
Standing in her sun-drenched lab in San Leandro, California, Julia Marsh grabbed a small see-through bag and handed it to me. It was shiny like cellophane, the sort of thing a company might use to package a set of earrings or some candies. Bags like this? “They’re absolutely ubiquitous,” Marsh said. As I opened the pouch and turned it over in my hands, I realized it was a little stiffer than I expected. That’s because it was made of seaweed and composed of the plant’s poly-saccharides, long chains of carbohydrate molecules. So, not quite the same performance as a plastic bag, but with a better trade-off: You can throw it on a regular home composting heap, Marsh said, and in a few weeks you’ll find only scraps of it. In six months, it’ll be an organic part of the soil.
Simone Biles made history this week, becoming only the third female gymnast to win two Olympic all-around titles and the first to ever do so in non-consecutive Games.
This piece is from 2016, before she became the most decorated American gymnast of all time.
(The New Yorker, approx 27 mins reading time)
Gymnastics is one of the most popular televised events of the Olympics—some fans tune in for the acrobatics, and others for the tears—but its punishing physicality is better understood in person. When Biles executed a flawless back handspring, followed by a pair of backflips, it sounded as if the beam were about to crack in half. Penny convulsed ecstatically. “The beam is crying for help!” he yelled, throwing his hands into the air.
Two seats away, someone from the Canadian gymnastics federation shrugged and laughed in resigned defeat, which is more or less how the gymnastics world has reacted to Biles since she won her first World Championship, in 2013. “All the girls are like, ‘Simone’s just in her own league. Whoever gets second place, that’s the winner,’ ” Aly Raisman, who was the captain of the 2012 U.S. Olympic gymnastics team, and hopes to return for Rio, has said. Mary Lou Retton, the 1984 Olympic gold medallist, calls Biles the “most talented gymnast I’ve seen in my life.”
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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