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 the week’s best reads for you to savour.
1. How fake news turned a small town upside-down
In 2016, during the US election, there were exaggerated reports about a juvenile sex crime in Twin Falls, Idaho. The New York Times details the major effect it had on the town.
(New York Times, approx 30 mins reading time)
About a year earlier, after The Times-News reported that Syrian refugees would very likely be resettled in Twin Falls, Edwards joined a movement to shut the resettlement program down. The group circulated a petition to put the proposal before voters. They failed to get enough signatures to force a referendum, but Brown was struck by how much support around town the movement attracted. In bars after work, he began to overhear conversations about the dangers of Islam. One night, he heard a man joke about dousing the entrance to the local mosque with pig’s blood.
BBc journalists Quentin Sommerville and Riam Dalati bring us into the ruined city of Raqqa, and the battle against Islamic State.
(BBC, approx 25 mins reading time)
It seems that not a single building has escaped the onslaught. Many have been crushed, flattened, or knocked to one side by the Western coalition’s air strikes and artillery.It is a barrage that never ceases. More than two dozen air strikes a day, and hundreds of shells fall on the city.Their target is the last men of the Islamic State. There may be as few as 400 left.
3. The island that fought back
The Hebridean island of Eigg has asserted its independence – but how long can it last?
(The Guardian, approx 25 mins reading time)
Eigg has suffered more than most over the perennial small-island question of ownership. Larger British isles, such as the islands of Shetland and Orkney, or the Isle of Man, have (at least in modern times) avoided the vexation of capricious landlords. Perhaps their remoteness, or the strength of their local culture, militate against individual possession, but it may simply be sheer size.
4. What is going on with Aung San Suu Kyi?
The New Yorker delves into the situation in Myanmar, and asks: What happened to Myanmar’s human rights icon? The question comes in the wake of the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya.
(The New Yorker, approx 27 mins reading time)
Within Myanmar, the Rohingya are uniquely despised by almost all other ethnicities. Nearly ninety per cent of the country is Buddhist, and most people regard the Muslim Rohingya as illegal immigrants; they are not included in Myanmar’s official tally of ethnicities. Suu Kyi has done nothing to combat this prejudice. Her government has denied visas to a United Nations human-rights team charged with investigating the crisis, and international organizations have been prevented from delivering aid.
In this essay, Helena Fitzgerald takes the colour green, and her love for it, and goes exploring.
(Hazlitt, approx 26 mins reading time)
I look for greens, teasing them out of photos, trusting them too much when I find them, giving far too much credit to any place that will offer me the greatest possible abundance of green. Like anything I love, I mistrust the color down to the fingernail-edges of all the feelings it engenders in me. The very fact that I love it so fiercely, that it compels me so again and again toward it, makes it both suspicious and sinister to me.
Here’s a look at the history of the site Snopes, which aims to uncover the truth behind popular rumours, stories and claims.
(Wired, approx 26 mins reading time)
The world kept churning out bizarre rumors. Snopes let the world know that sushi did not cause maggots in a man’s brain and, at the height of tensions over the war in Iraq, debunked a claim that a South Carolina restaurant was turning away service members. And in 2008, as Barack Obama campaigned for the presidency and won, Snopes explained that he was not, in fact, the Antichrist and refuted a fake Kenyan birth certificate circulated in 2009, which, among other signals of inauthenticity, was stamped “Republic of Kenya” before such a country existed.
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
Back in 2008, Emily Gould wrote about what it was like to live her life online. She writes about her time working for the site Gawker.com, how she embraced making personal facts public, and the impact this had on her.
(New York Times, approx 41 mins reading time)
The commenters at Emily Magazine had been like friends. Now, with Gawker’s readers, I was having a different kind of relationship. It wasn’t quite friendship. It was almost something deeper. They were co-workers, sort of, giving me ideas for posts, rewriting my punch lines. They were creeps hitting on me at a bar. They were fans, sycophantically praising even my lamer efforts. They were enemies, articulating my worst fears about my limitations. They were the voices in my head. They could be ignored sometimes. Or, if I let them, they could become my whole world.
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