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.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the secret police agency destroyed as many documents as they could. This piece looks at how archivists have spent the last three decades piecing them back together by hand, and how automation could play a role in speeding up the process.
(The New Yorker, approx 38 mins reading time)
The Stasi files offer an astonishingly granular picture of life in a dictatorship—how ordinary people act under suspicious eyes. Nearly three hundred thousand East Germans were working for the Stasi by the time the Wall fell, in 1989, including some two hundred thousand inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, or unofficial collaborators, like Genin. In a population of sixteen million, that was one spy for every fifty to sixty people. In the years since the files were made public, their revelations have derailed political campaigns, tarnished artistic legacies, and exonerated countless citizens who were wrongly accused or imprisoned. Yet some of the files that the Stasi most wanted to hide were never released. In the weeks before the Wall fell, agents destroyed as many documents as they could. Many were pulped, shredded, or burned, and lost forever. But between forty and fifty-five million pages were just torn up, and later stuffed in paper sacks.
Novak Djokovic is a polarising figure in tennis, and has never received the same love from fans of the game as Roger Federer or Rafael Nadal. But the Serbian world number one’s talent is undeniable, even for those who dislike him, as Scott Stossel writes.
(The Atlantic, approx 21 mins reading time)
I’ve tried to like Djokovic. I appreciate his style of play: He is arguably the best service returner in the history of the game, and one of the best overall defensive retrievers, stretching for impossible shots with his boneless Gumby limbs. And those 89 (or more) reasons to hate him notwithstanding, maybe he’s not a bad guy. Other men and women on the pro tour say they like him. Even Kyrgios, the Aussie who professed a few years ago to find him insufferable, has come around to say that he and Djokovic now have a “bromance.” He has advocated for more money for lower-ranked players. He was the only player Naomi Osaka thanked by name for supporting her when she controversially refused, on mental-health grounds, to do press conferences at the French Open in 2021. He is smart, speaks multiple languages, and is an uncanny mimic.
But rooting interests in sports can be irrational and ill-founded, the arbitrariness of their application bearing no relation to their intensity. Maybe my inability to like Djokovic reflects badly on me. That I prefer Roger Federer, all effortless elegance and Swiss-watch precision, perhaps suggests an aesthetic (even an aristocratic) prejudice against the grittier, sweatier, try-hard style that Djokovic brings to the game. But no one is sweatier or grittier than Rafael Nadal, a Tasmanian devil in a cloud of red clay, and I adore him not only for his brute baseline grinding and the nuclear intensity of his game but for his manifest sweetness of soul: He is proof that an adamantine will to win can coexist with sportsmanship and humility.
How politicians in India are actively using AI deepfakes of themselves as part of their campaigns during the country’s general election.
(WIRED, approx 17 mins reading time)
He’ll spend 15 minutes here talking to the camera about some of the key election issues, while Jadoun prompts him with questions. But it doesn’t really matter what he says. All Jadoun needs is Rathore’s voice. Once that’s done, Jadoun will use the data to generate videos and calls that will go directly to voters’ phones. In lieu of a knock at their door or a quick handshake at a rally, they’ll see or hear Rathore address them by name and talk with eerie specificity about the issues that matter most to them and ask them to vote for the BJP. If they ask questions, the AI should respond—in a clear and calm voice that’s almost better than the real Rathore’s rapid drawl. Less tech-savvy voters may not even realize they’ve been talking to a machine. Even Rathore admits he doesn’t know much about AI. But he understands psychology. “Such calls can help with swing voters.”
Reporters give an insight into what it was like to cover the trial of the former US president – who was found guilty of multiple felonies on Thursday – inside the courtroom over the last six weeks.
(Politico, approx 8 mins reading time)
With tight security around the main courtroom, reporters have had to wait for a designated break in the trial proceedings to even use the bathroom. But it turned out that time was often far more valuable for other activities. Security officers frown on people lingering in the hallway, so a chaotic scene unfolds in the bathrooms during the brief breaks in the trial: Journalists charging laptop batteries, using cellphones that are forbidden in the courtroom or even chowing down on a quick snack. Eating is not allowed in the courtrooms, and the trial hours are long and exhausting. So out of view of the officers, national political columnists and tabloid reporters shoved granola bars and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches into their faces before racing back to business.
Rolling Stone’s six month investigation into Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs, who is facing multiple lawsuits from women accusing him of sex trafficking and abuse, and who recently apologised after footage emerged of him beating his then-girlfriend Cassie.
(Rolling Stone, approx 51 mins reading time)
Those who did speak about Combs describe a complicated man with opposing personas. Outwardly, they see a tastemaker who is unapologetically driven, generous, and jovial, even silly at times. He can be the same privately, but associates who got close enough to him discovered something darker behind the facade: a menacing figure who desperately wants to be accepted and admired, who uses public declarations of devotion, splashy donations, and boasts that he is “Brother Love” to hide an undercurrent of alleged abuse and violence that — in one previously unreported allegation — traces back to before his career even started. Combs wielded his growing power to bend people to his will, sources claim, sending staffers to win back onetime girlfriend Jennifer Lopez, beating a label executive bloody after he became romantically involved with Combs’ ex-partner Kim Porter, and allegedly trying to solicit sex from a woman on his payroll.
Joy Press writes about the legal and ethical issues that arise when TV shows that are billed as true stories are challenged by those portrayed in them, as we have recently seen with Baby Reindeer.
(Vanity Fair, approx 9 mins reading time)
It’s a delicate balancing act for the writers trying to wrangle unruly human experience into a svelte storyline that holds the viewer’s attention. “Hollywood executives want a heightened sense of drama—the OMG-crazy version of the story—and a clear progression of events,” says the showrunner of a successful true-crime series. “Most of the time, our lives are not structured like a screenplay, and sometimes there’s stuff that’s internal.” But TV execs demand big external events, the showrunner says, even if reality didn’t actually unfold that way. “In a classic fictional mystery story, there are red herrings and alternative suspects. In real life there is only one person who committed the murder and if you suggest that other people might have been involved or done it and you cannot back that up, you are defaming them.” Sometimes executives might push for a clear villain, but the showrunner says, “it can be really tricky, because people often don’t do things for a single motive.”
It was announced this week that the last Ross O’Carroll-Kelly book will be published in August. Here’s a review of the series from 2021.
(Stinging Fly, approx 22 mins reading time)
Operating (so I felt) as an interloper or spy, I attended parties in houses with built-in steam rooms, or landscaped gardens, or libraries. At these parties, people frowned when I told them the name of the village in south-west Dublin where I’d grown up. “Rathcoole,” one girl said. “Oh, yeah. I think we drive past there on the way to the stables.” One of my college girlfriends (Loreto Foxrock) referred casually to growing up in “a normal six-bedroom family house.” A Gonzaga grad I knew referred casually to his school’s tennis courts and theatre. A female friend (Muckross) once complained: “Our school had no money. We had to fix our hockey sticks with gaffer tape.” We betray our class by the things we say.
To another college girlfriend (Holy Child), I explained that hanging out with all these private-school kids had afforded me the stupidest, and also the most indispensable, of political epiphanies: These people are rich and they’ll grow up to run the country. “I have to write about this,” I said. “Oh,” she said. “You should read Ross O’Carroll-Kelly.”
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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