Friday 29 November, 2024

Sitdown Sunday 7 deadly reads

The very best of the week’s writing from around the web.

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 this Sunday.

1. On the trail of an intercontinental killer
Nich0las Schmidle on the discovery of bin bags full of human remains in Brooklyn, and what happened next (New York Times).

Another Vinegar Hill resident approached and told him about a second suspicious garbage bag just around the block that was buzzing with bees and flies. Inside that bag Whelan found two arms and a leg. Hours later, a few blocks away, he discovered a third bag containing a torso.

2. What happened to the glamorous spy?
Brett Forrest on Russian agent Anna Chapman’s return to Moscow, and her new life as a celebrity (Capital New York).

I joined Chapman at the Soho Rooms, a Moscow nightclub that is terribly difficult to enter… Chapman handed me a white T-shirt silk-screened with a version of the iconic image of Che Guevara in a beret, with Chapman’s face in the place of Guevara’s. The bottom of the shirt read, “Cha.”

3. Hate on the internet
Meghan Daum on the vitriol unleashed in debates online, and what it says about us (The Believer).

I’ve often imagined tracking down some of my more vehement detractors, knocking on their doors and asking, “Who are you? What has made you so angry? What has happened in your life that you’re reduced to spewing bile at people you know nothing about?”

4. God and his girlfriend
Simon Rich on God’s domestic troubles while creating the Earth (The New Yorker).

On the fourth day, God created stars, to divide the light from the darkness. He was almost finished when He looked at His cell phone and realized that it was almost nine-thirty. “Fuck,” He said. “Kate’s going to kill me.”

5. How riots work now
Bill Wasik on the new phenomenon of the ‘hyper-networked’ riot – sudden, brief, and tightly planned via social media (Wired).

Then, at around 6 pm, as if at some unvoiced command, the street exploded. The crowd hit a Pearsons department store, a Starbucks, an HMV.

6. Fire in New Orleans
Danelle Morton on what happened when flames caught part of the impoverished Ninth Ward in the Louisiana city (Boston Review).

When Byron Pound woke up, the world around him was on fire. He saw flames crawling up the walls, and he could feel heat closing in. Thick smoke obscured the rest of the abandoned warehouse where he and some others were squatting. He called Smokey, his dog, but got no response.

… AND A CLASSIC READ FROM THE ARCHIVES…

Last May, Susan Dominus wrote for the New York Times about conjoined twins Krista and Tatiana Hogan, who each have their own bodies – but may share brain impulses.

Because the thalamus functions as a relay station, the girls’ doctors believe it is entirely possible that the sensory input that one girl receives could somehow cross that bridge into the brain of the other. One girl drinks, another girl feels it.