Weekend long reads – 17 Nov

Take some time this weekend to delve a bit deeper and enjoy these long reads.

A brain with a heart – David Wallace-Wells (New York Magazine)

Oliver Sacks has made a literary art of staring into the minds of others. So what does he make of his own?

Why we can’t solve big problems – Jason Pontin (MIT Technology Review)

On July 21, 1969, Buzz Aldrin climbed gingerly out of Eagle, Apollo 11’s lunar module, and joined Neil Armstrong on the Sea of Tranquility. Looking up, he said, “Beautiful, beautiful, magnificent desolation.” They were alone; but their presence on the moon’s silent, gray surface was the culmination of a convulsive collective effort.

Hipster: The dead end of western civilization – Douglas Haddow (Adbusters)

We’ve reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum. So while hipsterdom is the end product of all prior countercultures, it’s been stripped of its subversion and originality.

Get down – Geordie Guy (personal blog)

GetUp! then, and now, provide precisely no utility in the online space. They are literally an outrage engine, which clamps itself to existing qualified sentiment, sucks the donation marrow out of it for consolidated revenue, puts together a quarter-arsed, irrelevant advertising campaign and an invalid web petition, then waits for people with a clue to defeat the problem, even if it takes five years, then claims credit.

Scientology and me, part two: what Scientologists actually believe – Stella Forstner (The Hairpin)

As a child of two Scientologist parents, a child born into a room quieted in preparation for the return of a reincarnated thetan, I grew up fluent in the Church’s specialized vocabulary. As a toddler I accompanied my mother during her training at the Flag Land base in Clearwater, Florida, and at the Los Angeles center, wearing a t-shirt that read “future OT,” a bit of gobbledygook that any Scientologist worth their salt could immediately translate as indicating that I was destined to rid myself of my ‘reactive mind’ and go ‘clear’ before ascending the ‘bridge to total freedom’ to reach the level of ‘OT’ (operating thetan).

‘Weeds are as important as trees’: where now for the Melbourne International Comedy Festival? – Lorin Clarke (Meanjin)

Fast-forward into the festival eleven years and I’m watching a show I’m finding difficult to categorise. Think Mornings with Kerry Ann or Sunrise, only live onstage and hosted by two emotionally stunted plus-size women crammed into too-tight taffeta party frocks.

Playboy interview: Stephen Colbert – Eric Spitznagel (Playboy)

One of the most controversial political attack ads of the year didn’t originate with an actual candidate or political party. It came from Stephen Colbert. Or more accurately, “Stephen Colbert,” his satirical alter ego.

The innocent man, part two – Pamela Colloff (Texas Monthly)

During the 25 years that Michael Morton spent wrongfully imprisoned for murdering his wife, he kept three things in mind: Someday he would prove his innocence to their son. Someday he would find out who had killed her. And someday he would understand how this had happened to him.

The last laughing death – Jo Chandler (The Global Mail)

After 55 years, the final patrol for cases of the mysterious ‘laughing death’ in remote Papua New Guinea has returned from the highlands. From this pursuit came Nobel-winning science, clues to ‘mad cow’ and insights into Alzheimer’s disease. It also revealed a little bit of cannibal hidden in us all.

The problem with the Red Cross – Felix Salmon (Reuters)

One of the best ways to judge charities is by the way in which they learn from their mistakes and constantly improve; by that standard, the Red Cross is positively ostrich-like in the way that it refuses to admit that there was even a problem at all, let alone that it might have reacted better.