Take some time this weekend to delve a bit deeper and enjoy these long reads.
David Mitchell: goodbye lonely nerd – Hadley Freeman (The Guardian)
Defiantly untrendy, eternally single, a ‘useless loner who eats ready meals in the dark’. This is the David Mitchell we’ve come to know. But now he’s a very different man: engaged, in love and ready to shout about it.
My 6,128 favorite books – Joe Queenan (Wall Street Journal)
Winston Churchill supposedly read a book every day of his life, even while he was saving Western Civilization from the Nazis. This is quite an accomplishment, because by some accounts Winston Churchill spent all of World War II completely hammered.
Have you ever tried to sell a diamond? – Edward Jay Epstein (The Atlantic)
The diamond invention is far more than a monopoly for fixing diamond prices; it is a mechanism for converting tiny crystals of carbon into universally recognized tokens of wealth, power, and romance. To achieve this goal, De Beers had to control demand as well as supply.
The choice (The New Yorker’s endorsement of Barack Obama)
The choice is clear. The Romney-Ryan ticket represents a constricted and backward-looking vision of America: the privatization of the public good. In contrast, the sort of public investment championed by Obama—and exemplified by both the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the Affordable Care Act—takes to heart the old civil-rights motto “Lifting as we climb”.
This is not a revolution – Hussein Agha and Robert Malley (The New York Review of Books)
Darkness descends upon the Arab world. Waste, death, and destruction attend a fight for a better life. Outsiders compete for influence and settle accounts. The peaceful demonstrations with which this began, the lofty values that inspired them, become distant memories.
Fade to light – Dave Cameron (The Walrus)
While most people associate Alzheimer’s with memory loss, its effects on reasoning and behaviour are no less defining, and arguably more problematic. The doctor scans his notes from their last visit and asks if their nights are still “disturbed.” Once or twice a week, Julie explains, Lowell has been getting up in the middle of the night to pull all of the bedding onto the floor. He will build a pile, move it back and forth between bed and floor, and then cruise the condo, amassing blankets, towels, sofa throws, any covering he might suitably add to the lot.
Inside the mansion—and mind— of Kim Dotcom, the most wanted man on the net – Charles Graeber (Wired)
Until just two months ago, Kim couldn’t live in his own home, as a condition of his house arrest following a month of jail time. For three months he was confined to the guesthouse, a prison of black lacquer and black leather, black Versace tables and wall-sized LCD flatscreens. The walls are adorned with poster-sized photographs of Kim and his beautiful 24-year-old wife, Mona, but mostly just Kim: Kim in front of a helicopter, Kim on the bow of a luxury yacht, Kim reeling in a great fish or in front of a European castle holding a shotgun and a limp duck, or straddling a mountaintop, eyes pinned on the distant future. The effect is more Kim Jong-Il than Kim Dotcom.
Solitary in Iran nearly broke me. Then I went inside America’s prisons – Shane Bauer (Mother Jones)
California is just one of many states where inmates can be thrown into solitary confinement on sketchy grounds—though just how many is hard to know. A survey conducted by Mother Jones found that most states had some kind of gang validation process, but implementation varied widely, and a number of states would not disclose their policies at all. Seventeen states said they don’t house inmates in “single-celled segregation” indeterminately. (No state officially uses the term “solitary.”)
The voter-fraud myth – Jane Mayer (The New Yorker)
According to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal nonprofit institute at N.Y.U. Law School, eleven per cent of the voting-age population lacks the kind of I.D. cards required by the strictest states. Eighteen per cent of Americans over the age of sixty-five do not have such documentation; among African-Americans the figure is twenty-five per cent.
The hunt for “Geronimo” – Mark Bowden (Vanity Fair)
President Obama saw it as a “50–50” proposition. Admiral Bill McRaven, mission commander, knew something would go wrong. So how did the raid that killed bin Laden get green-lighted? In an adaptation from his new book, Mark Bowden weaves together accounts from Obama and top decision-makers for the full story behind the daring operation.
Thomas Quick: the Swedish serial killer who never was – Elizabeth Day (The Guardian)
It reads like a real-life Scandinavian crime novel. In the 1990s, Thomas Quick confessed to more than 30 murders, making him Sweden’s most notorious serial killer. Then, he changed his name and revealed his confessions were all faked.
How Hilary Mantel revitalized historical fiction – Larissa Macfarquhar (The New Yorker)
The first novel that Hilary Mantel wrote was about the French Revolution. It did not start out as a novel, exactly, nor did she start out as a novelist. It was 1975, and she was twenty-three, living in Manchester and selling dresses in a department store.
The innocent man, Part one – Pamela Colloff (Texas Monthly)
On August 13, 1986, Michael Morton came home from work to discover that his wife had been brutally murdered in their bed. His nightmare had only begun.
Lost in space – Mike Albo (Narratively)
Way back in 2002, I already felt behind the curve when I was finally brave enough (and finally had an Internet connection with enough bandwidth) to go online and try to hook up. At the time, straight people had begun to tiptoe into the world of online soul mate searches on sites like Match.com, a trend that would gradually devolve into the realm of the real-time booty call apps witnessed above. But even before iPhones existed, gay men had already pioneered the use of the web for casual sexual encounters.
This is my brain on Chantix – Derek De Koff (New York Magazine)
I’d heard it was the most effective stop-smoking drug yet. So I took it. Then those reports of suicidal ideation began washing in.
The truck stop killer – Vanessa Veselka (GQ)
He was methodical, he rode the highways, and he preyed on teenage girls. Girls who’d run away. Girls no one would miss. In the summer of 1985, the author was such a girl. One night on I-95, she hitched a ride from a stranger and endured the most terrifying moments of her life. Now, years later, she returns to the scenes of her fugitive youth looking for clues to that terror—and the girls who lost their lives to it
Obama and the road ahead: the Rolling Stone interview – Douglas Brinkley (Rolling Stone)
In an Oval Office conversation with a leading historian, the president discusses what he would do with a second term – and his opponent’s embrace of ‘the most extreme positions in the Republican Party’.
The stressful life of Middle Eastern game developers and reality of their craft – Tracey Lien (Polygon)
In the world of video games and entertainment any kind of publicity is often seen as a boon. But it was publicity that ultimately prevented New York-based game developer Navid Khonsari from returning to his homeland.
