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.
Josh is the most highly-paid male escort in London. He brings Will Storr to his Welsh hometown, and tells him his story. (Some adult content)
(Guardian, approx 11 minutes reading time, 2211 words)
Josh sees what he does as a legitimate business and compares himself variously to a doctor, a masseur and an athlete. He has monthly health checks, insists on condoms – even for oral sex – and forbids people from tying him up. He parries any attempt to paint his life as dark or dangerous, insisting his moneyed life in London is preferable to life in the town in which he grew up, where the only thing to do is work in Tesco.
2. Danger in the pacific graveyard
Meet 15 men who risk life and limb to be Columbia River Bar Pilots, guiding cargo ships to safety in a huge shipping lane. It’ll certainly make your own job seem a lot easier.
(Narratively, approx 9 minutes reading time, 1849 words)
There are two ways a bar pilot can board a ship: pilot boat or helicopter. The first involves making the twenty-mile trek to the outer buoy in a boat that is specifically designed to handle these conditions. In the winter the trip can take hours as the craft trudges through pounding waves. “You’re really just holding on to keep from getting thrown against something,” says Riggs.
Dr Rebecca Gomperts is the woman behind Women on Waves, which attempted to bring an ‘abortion ship’ to Ireland. Now, she’s behind Women on Web, which sells tablets online to women who want to end their pregnancy in the first trimester. Emily Bazelon looks at the controversy around this.
(New York Times, approx 38 minutes reading time, 7611 words)
She said she was “interested in finding the blind spots of the law.” She liked upending the system. “I enjoy that,” she said. “If I was interested in money, I’d have a company in the Cayman Islands, getting all the tax deductions I could to get rich.”
4. Could you spend a year offline?
When David Roberts decided he was spending too much time online – practically his entire day, aside from putting his children to bed – he went offline. Here’s how he got on.
(Outsider, approx 36 minutes reading time, 7201 words)
Meanwhile, my mind and body adapted to the pace of digital life, with its ceaseless ping ping ping of notifications and alerts. I got twitchy if I was away from my phone for more than a few seconds. I felt it vibrating in my pocket when it wasn’t there, took it with me to bed, even to the bathroom. (I got pretty good at tweeting while I peed, to my enduring discredit.)
5. What happens when you don’t fact-check books
You might assume that books are rigorously fact-checked before they go to press – but they aren’t always. Kate Newman tells us why.
(The Atlantic, approx 8 minutes reading time, words)
In 1999, anthropologist David Stoll questioned the accuracy of I, Rigoberta Menchú, a memoir that describes the horrors experienced by Menchú during Guatemala’s civil war. That same year, Binjamin Wilkomirski, author of the Holocaust memoir Fragments, was revealed not to be a Holocaust survivor at all. And we all watched Oprah poke a million little holes into James Frey’s story of addiction and recovery.
When Jenny Diski is diagnosed with cancer, she makes a Breaking Bad joke. Here, with wry humour, she looks at life after the diagnosis.
(London Review of Books, approx 21 minutes reading time, 4373 words)
It’s quite hard to rapidly absorb the notion that someone forecasting your fairly imminent death might not be your enemy. More than that, the great weariness combined with the previously mentioned embarrassment, at the idea of asking question B or 2 and thereby setting the expected ball of clichés rolling, was overwhelming. Instead of complying, I imagined I could instead nod a thank-you and take my leave of the doctor and the nurse.
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
Joan Rivers died this week at the age of 81. Here’s an interview the caustic funnywoman did with the inimitable Terry Gross back in 2010 about her life.
(NPR, approx minutes reading time, words)
Age, it’s the one mountain that you can’t overcome. It’s a youth society, and nobody wants you. You’re too old, you’re too old, you’re too old. If one more woman comedian comes up and says to me: You opened the doors for me and you want to say, go (BEEP) yourself. I’m still opening the doors.
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