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.
The Irish have, of course, always been the coolest people in the world. But artists from our island have played a particularly large role in pop culture in recent years, Nate Jones writes.
(Vulture, approx 9 mins reading time)
When was the moment Ireland became cool? Was it in December 2018, when Derry Girls hit Netflix, introducing a global audience to Northern Ireland’s ’90s pop-culture ephemera? Or was it a few months later, when Sally Rooney’s Normal People arrived in the U.S., occasioning multiple glowing New York Times reviews and spurring the first wave of trend pieces about “the cult of Sally Rooney”?
Either way, by the time The Banshees of Inisherin was released in 2022, a full-on Irish cultural invasion was underway. Call them the Craic Pack: Authors such as Anna Burns and Paul Lynch won major prizes. Actors Colin Farrell and Cillian Murphy and singer-songwriter Hozier stepped back into the spotlight. Barry Keoghan went from art-film weirdo to pop-star boyfriend. Even brands got swept up in it: You couldn’t call yourself an Instagram baker without extolling the virtues of Kerrygold butter.
Charlie Eccleshare looks back at Rafael Nadal’s career, after the 22-time Grand Slam champion bowed out of professional tennis at the Davis Cup last week.
(The Athletic, approx 23 mins reading time)
It was not a fairytale ending for Rafael Nadal, but to understand how he is adored in his home country and beyond, one only had to listen to the noise. More than 10,000 people roared Nadal through point after point of his 6-4, 6-4 defeat to Botic van de Zandschulp at the Palacio de Deportes Jose Maria Martin Carpena in Malaga on Tuesday evening. Tennis rarely provides auspicious endings. Everything that came before was more than Nadal ever dared imagine.
Those emotional scenes in Spain ended a 23-year career that delivered 22 Grand Slams, 92 ATP Tour titles, 2 Olympic gold medals, 1,307 ATP Tour matches, 1,080 wins and a level of unimaginable adulation for one of the greatest tennis players and sportspeople in history.
Doctors are pushing the limits of science and human biology to save more extremely premature babies than ever before. But when so few survive, Sophie McBain asks ‘are we putting them through needless suffering?’
(The Guardian, approx 26 mins reading time)
Alice Smith was five months pregnant when she noticed some discharge one evening, and something felt off. She did an online yoga class and went to bed early, but the next day she felt worried enough to phone the maternity triage line. The midwives invited her in for a checkup at Homerton hospital, near her home in east London. Smith emailed her boss to explain she’d be offline for a few hours and then headed to hospital.
Until then, her pregnancy had progressed smoothly. She was 37 years old, healthy and expecting twins: a boy and a girl. A routine ultrasound a few weeks earlier had suggested all was well. Smith and her husband, Jim Clack, had already decided to name their daughter Peggy. For their son they had drawn up a shortlist of names.
In the waiting room at Homerton, Smith began to feel an ache in her lower back. When the registrar examined her, she told Smith that she was in labour and already 3cm dilated. The average pregnancy is about 40 weeks long, but Smith was just 23 weeks and four days pregnant. If the babies died, which was the most likely outcome, their deaths would be classified as a miscarriage rather than stillbirths.
Jennifer Gonnerman explores how prosecutors in the United States choose jury members in death-penalty trials.
(The New Yorker, approx 36 mins reading time)
One morning this past March, Aimee Solway arrived at her job at the Alameda County district attorney’s office, in Oakland, California, and found about a dozen boxes piled next to her desk. Each was labelled with the name of a defendant, Ernest Dykes, and inside were the files of the prosecutors who had worked on his case. Dykes had committed a murder during the course of a robbery in 1993, when he was twenty years old, and he was convicted and sent to death row. Now fifty-one, he was still fighting his sentence.
In California, death-penalty litigation often takes decades to be resolved, and five years ago Governor Gavin Newsom ordered a moratorium on executions in the state. So last year, in an effort to ease the backlog, a few old cases were referred to a federal judge, Vince Chhabria, of the Northern District of California, for possible settlement — to see if there was a way to resentence the defendants and end their litigation. One of the cases was Dykes’s.
Darrell Hartman explores how the 1955 Le Mans disaster changed motorsport forever.
(Esses, approx 22 mins reading time)
It is often said that the Le Mans 24-hour endurance race is more about stamina than speed, but in the days leading up to the 1955 edition, which would go down as one of the worst tragedies in motorsport history, you couldn’t help but notice how fast the cars were going.
The D-shaped Circuit de la Sarthe, located in the French countryside 120 miles southwest of Paris, consisted of public roads that were still regularly used by horse-drawn hay wagons. In 1950, the quickest lap around it had been done at an average speed of 102.7 mph.
Four years later, a Jaguar and a Ferrari both surpassed 115 mph. In 1955, Ferrari’s Eugenio Castellotti demolished that record during practice, hitting 118.56 mph. The flat-out speeds achieved in practice were equally astonishing, with Juan Manuel Fangio, the driver widely agreed to be the world’s best, getting his Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR up to 181.57 mph on the 3.6-mile Mulsanne Straight.
Two candidates with the same name, and taste in glasses, are running in Dublin Mid-West in the general election, Valerie Flynn writes.
(The Journal, approx 15 mins reading time)
Voters in Dublin Mid-West might think they’re seeing double when they open their ballot paper on 29 November. Two candidates with the same name – and similar taste in snazzy spectacles – are standing in the five-seat constituency.
There’s Sinn Féin’s high profile housing spokesman Eoin Ó Broin – and there’s Independent-turned-Social Democrats councillor for Clondalkin Eoin Ó Broin.
Sinn Féin’s Ó Broin, on his second canvas of the day at teatime on Tuesday in freezing conditions, is taking no chances: every prospective Sinn Féin voter is warned about the Other Eoin.
Back in July 2019, Miriam Annenberg wrote about the fascinating story of Sara-Jayne King’s adoption.
(BBC Stories, approx 16 mins reading time)
In 1980 a baby girl was given up for adoption for being the wrong colour – she was mixed-race, her parents were white, and this was apartheid South Africa. But being brought up by a white couple in the UK left her searching for her place in the world. She only found it when she returned to the country of her birth.
As the plane touched down in Johannesburg, Sara-Jayne King caught her breath. More than 25 years had passed since she had last seen South Africa.
She had no conscious memories of it. She had left Johannesburg as a seven-week-old infant, to be deposited by her biological mother in England. The years in between had not been easy. Sara-Jayne had never come to terms with being abandoned by her birth mother, and had struggled as a biracial child in middle-class Surrey.
Contains reporting by Jane Moore
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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