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.
Mark Whitaker has written a biography of TV sitcom actor Bill Cosby (if you were a child of the 80s you couldn’t have escaped the excellent series The Cosby Show, in which he starred as Cliff Huxtable). In this extract, we find out about his ‘secret’ life off screen.
(Hollywood Reporter, approx 22 minutes reading time, 4458 words)
Cosby didn’t tell Ebony readers about another step that he had taken to prove that he was serious about cutting back on his womanizing. He told one longtime girlfriend that he wanted to put an end to their relationship, and then he invited the woman and her mother, who had always disapproved of her daughter being involved with a married man, out to dinner. “I’m very happy to be here,” the mother told Cosby, “because I always thought you had more sense than that!”
Meet ‘the last hermit’, a man who lived in secret and became a local myth. Until he got caught breaking the law, writes Michael Finkel.
(GQ, approx 37 minutes reading time, 7514 words)
The officers asked his name. He refused to answer. His skin was strangely pale; his glasses, with chunky plastic frames, were extremely outdated. But he wore a nice Columbia jacket, new Lands’ End blue jeans, and sturdy boots. The officers searched him, and no identification was located.
3. ‘Both my parents are hella dead’
Both of Joel Golby‘s parents are dead – and he’s just 27 years old. As he’s thrust into a parentless world, he looks wryly at what it means to be in this position.
(VICE, approx 9 minutes reading time, 1760 words)
Because here’s the thing people tell you about both your parents dying: nothing. They tell you nothing. And there is loads of stuff to deal with. For example: What monetary value do you put on the gift you send to the neighbour who has a really faraway look in their eyes because they found your mother’s corpse dead in a pile?
Michelle Lyons spent more than 10 years witnessing executions at a Texas jail. What sort of impact did seeing death have on her own life?
(Texas Monthly, approx 47 minutes reading time, 9469 words)
She was flooded with memories from her time inside the Death House: of the conversations she had shared with particular inmates in the hours before they were strapped to the gurney; of the mothers, dressed in their Sunday best, who had turned out to attend their sons’ executions; of the victims’ families, their faces hardened with grief; of the sudden stillness that came over the prisoners soon after the lethal drugs entered their bloodstreams.
Fan of epic TV series The Wire? There’s a new book out about it by film scholar Linda Williams. Noah Berlatsky assesses what it tells us about the critically-acclaimed series.
(LA Review of Books, approx 10 minutes reading time, 1975 words)
In contrast, The Wire is seen as valuable because it is true to life and nuanced. It is not like other television, in part, because it is not artificial. It is authentic. Williams argues that this fundamentally misunderstands melodrama — a genre that she sees as central to the democratic experience and project. Her book is not just about rethinking The Wire, but also about using The Wire to rethink melodrama
This photo-essay shows us the work of photographers who we lost in conflict zones. From Anja Niedringhaus to Tim Hetherington, their work is powerful, and their loss is tragic.
(Buzzfeed, approx 10 minutes reading time)
… AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
It was Madonna’s birthday during the week. So what better way to pay tribute to the pop icon than with this Dazed magazine interview by Jefferson Hack from back in 2008. This is a little bit silly, a little bit sexy, and a little bit revealing. Just how Madge would like it.
(Dazed, approx 15 minutes reading time, 3196 words)
I find that I now use making music as a kind of antidote to things that are more anxiety provoking. Confessions On a Dance Floor was a release for me and in a way that’s how working on this record was. I had set up an editing suite in the basement for the documentary, and would go from sitting there watching hours and hours of footage of people dying, to going to the studio.
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