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.
This book extract details how Mark Burnett, one of the producers of The Apprentice, crafted Donald Trump’s persona when he was chosen to star in the reality show, which changed the course of his life – and the United States.
(The New York Times, approx 22 mins reading time)
The place did not exactly buzz with energy either. Fewer than 50 people worked at Trump Organization headquarters in midtown Manhattan. At the office’s spiritual center, Mr. Trump’s own desk bore no evidence of work, no computer screens or piles of contracts and blueprints, just a blanket of news articles focused on one subject: himself. “When you go into the office and you’re hearing ‘billionaire,’ even ‘recovering billionaire,’ you don’t expect to see chipped furniture, you don’t expect to smell carpet that needs to be refreshed in the worst, worst way,” recalled Bill Pruitt, one of the producers of the new NBC show.
After excavations at the Paris cathedral unearthed two lead coffins beneath the church, they set about trying to find out who they were. Archaeologists think they’ve solved the mystery.
(Smithsonian Magazine, approx 5 mins reading time)
Because the two individuals buried at Notre-Dame were laid to rest in such expensive sarcophagi, they must have been high-status members of French society, experts concluded. But who were they? And how did they end up here? The team answered some of the questions surrounding the mysterious burials in December 2022. Using an inscription on one of the coffins, researchers identified its occupant as Antoine de la Porte, a high priest who died in 1710 at age 83. But they knew very little about the other individual, a man in his 30s whom they nicknamed “the horseman”- an allusion to a skeletal deformity that suggested he spent much of his time riding.
Journalist Saša Uhlová went undercover to work as a cleaner in an Irish hotel as part of her Europe-wide series on low-paid jobs. Here, she writes about how the staff are exploited.
(The Guardian, approx 8 mins reading time)
As shifts go, today is terrible, really terrible. Nina is off so I end up working for 11 hours, but it feels like 20. I barely stop for a second, I don’t go to the bathroom, I don’t have time for a drink of water, nothing. Before now, I never would have believed it was possible to create such a hell in which we feel compelled to work as hard as this the entire day, even without a supervisor watching us. From 9 am we are going: cleaning the toilets next to reception, then we each get our bedroom lists. I start on the first of my rooms: clean the bathroom; change the beds; dust the furniture; refill the soap, body wash and shampoos, tea, coffee, milk; wash the cups. Veronika, working on the second floor, keeps texting me on WhatsApp, which we are supposed to monitor all the time: come on, come on, just do it, we have a lot to do. There’s less than 10 minutes for us to eat lunch.
Hint – you’ll need an army of bots.
Kit Chellel writes a fascinating piece about how a group of Russian students invented the world’s best online poker bots and made millions. But what does it mean for the industry?
(Bloomberg, approx 26 mins reading time)
The Omsk students borrowed money from their parents and began staking other friends in return for a cut of their profits. They trained using pieces of dried pasta as chips. The winner got a meal; losers went hungry. A university lecturer came in to give off-books lessons in probability theory; others taught game theory. By a year or two in, about 50 students were coming to the dorm each evening to work the night shift.
The poker sites worked much like they do now. Players registered, deposited funds and joined a digitally rendered green felt table. The software shuffled and dealt. Participants could see their opponents’ decisions—raise, call, fold—but not their cards. Anything from a few dollars to hundreds or thousands could be at stake, depending on the site and whether a tournament was running. Crucially, everyone was identified by only a first name or pseudonym, and normally by a cartoon avatar. That meant hapless Americans logging on after work had no idea they were playing against Russian kids trained in the mathematical dark arts.
Videos of the adorable baby pygmy hippo have gone viral over the last couple of weeks, increasing visits to the Thai zoo where she resides and winning her legions of fans worldwide. A conservation ecologist talks about the endangered species.
(Slate, approx 5 mins reading time)
No one has ever witnessed pygmy hippo baby behavior before, because we hadn’t even seen adult pygmy hippos until last year. (And no one was observing them—it was just a remote camera that captured an image.) But from my experience with common hippos, nothing about Moo Deng strikes me as particularly unique. She just seems like a feisty young hippo. I’ve seen common hippos being born, and I’ve seen them in the wild. They’re playful and feisty—adorable, as everyone knows. For common hippos, the birth that I saw, at least, was in the water, so they’re in the water right away. Everyone knows that common hippos can’t swim, but baby hippos basically use their mom as a raft.
Yes, butlers do still exist, and those aspiring to be one are trained at an elite academy in The Netherlands at a cost of €15,500. Will Coldwell went along to find out what’s on the curriculum, and why the students want to serve.
(The Economist, approx 15 mins reading time)
The suited students – five men and two women, aged from mid-20s to late-50s – primly waddled across the marble floor. Their crosses were removed and each was handed a book and a silver tray loaded with wine glasses. “This is harder for those that are follically challenged,” said Munro (who is bald). “But if the book is in the right position, I can do almost anything.” He performed a pirouette with a copy of Forum Kritische Psychologie, a German psychology journal, perched on his head. As his students tried to emulate him, the sounds of books slapping the floor and wine glasses smashing echoed around the hall.
As soon as they found their balance, Munro started hurling balls the size of grapefruit at them. The students swerved, with varying degrees of success. The aim of the exercise was not only to protect the glassware but maintain a calm demeanour under bombardment; although butlers are never centre stage, they are, ultimately, performers. “We are working for real people, but it’s still a show,” Munro, a former actor, told me. This was something that his students recognised as well. As one academy graduate put it to me later, “We’re only actors. It’s a role we play.”
A longread from 2022 about how the ’340′ cipher created by the Zodiac killer had been unsolved for decades, until three amateurs cracked it.
(Popular Mechanics, approx 17 mins reading time)
The Zodiac’s first cipher, included in the July 31 letter, had been solved within a week by an amateur husband-and-wife team—but it had only revealed more of the killer’s raving. The second, now known as “the 340” due to the number of characters in it, would prove a much more difficult challenge. It came with a letter for the Chronicle, reading in part:
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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