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.
1. An oral history of Ghostbusters
The story of Ghostbusters, from the beginning, from the people that were there.
(Entertainment Weekly, approx 44 mins reading time, 8910 words)
All four of the core creatives—Aykroyd, Reitman, Murray, and Ramis—would go on to better, if not bigger, things, butGhostbusters remains the moment when their brand of humor and our culture crossed streams, and invited all of Hollywood to the other side.
2. Who the hell is Grace Helbig?
Teens love her, but if you don’t know anything about her, this is why she’s so popular.
(Buzzfeed, approx 16 mins reading time, 3388 words)
If you know a teenage girl, chances are she knows about Grace Helbig. With over two million subscribers to her YouTube channel, Helbig is one of the new class of YouTube superstars whose fame has been slowly, and then all at once, spread into the mainstream. Helbig has a book, a movie, and, starting sometime this Spring, a talkshow on E!. Why, then, have many adults never even heard her name?
We’ve all grappled with an Ikea flatpack at some stage. Just why is the Scandinavian store so damn great? Here’s why.
(Fortune, approx 17 mins reading time, 3578 words)
Ikea, it seems, is a genius at selling Ikea—flat packing, transporting, and reassembling its quirky Swedish styling all across the planet. The furniture and furnishings brand is in more countries than Wal-Mart, Carrefour, and Toys “R” Us. China, where Ikea has eight of its 10 biggest stores, is the company’s fastest-growing market.
Karl Ove Knausgaard brings us his second dispatch from the States. And as always with him, it’s raw, honest, and full of detail.
(NY Times, approx 53 mins reading time, 10731 words)
The really remarkable thing about the Vikings therefore wasn’t that they discovered America, but that they left it, almost without a trace. What if Columbus had done the same? I thought: What if the authorities in Europe at the end of the 15th century, when Columbus informed them of what he had seen and experienced, decided to leave America alone? Not to conquer it, not to colonize it, not to exploit it?
5. The otter is back in fashion
Peter Williams wants to see more otters around… so he can kill them and sell their fur. He believes he’s helping restore an ancient culture in doing so.
(The Guardian, approx 29 mins reading time, 5865 words)
Williams is after their fur, which is the densest and softest in the animal kingdom. Russian traders once called it “soft gold”. There is no material like it. The black, silky, lustrous stuff is so instantly comforting that it hardly seems like fur at all. Few human heads have more than 150,000 hairs, but sea otters stay warm with a double layer of never-moulting fur, up to a million hairs per square inch.
A visit to the annual Adult video News Awards shows how much the landscape has changed for the porn industry since the advent of the internet.
(Grantland, approx 54 mins reading time, 10811 words)
A pretty girl whose face I don’t know pulls her spangly champagne sequin dress down to the waist and begins playing pool with a couple of men at the pool table. Her toplessness is treated as a nonfactor. She looks comfortable playing pool topless, because it’s her job to make these guys feel like girls do this sort of thing all the time just for fun.
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
Rithy Panh interviewed the commandant of the Cambodia ‘killing fields’. Here, he remembers the haunting experience.
(Longreads, approx 63 mins reading time, 12741 words)
At least 12,380 people were tortured in that prison. After the victims confessed, they were executed in the “killing field” of Choeung Ek (also under Duch’s command), about ten miles southeast of Phnom Penh. In S-21 no one escaped torture. No one escaped death.
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