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.
Bee Wilson reviews two recent books that tackle the subject of cheap meat and whether it’s good for us and the planet. The answer to that question? It definitely not good for the planet. But what’s to be done?
(London Review of Books, approx 17 minutes reading time, 3448 words)
Vegetarians themselves often argue that they make us feel uncomfortable because their existence is a reminder of the cruelty and carnage that the rest of us refuse to see; there’s probably some truth in this. But I suspect that the root of our hostility is more basic. It isn’t so much that they remind us of the slaughterhouse – meat itself does a pretty effective job there – as that they make a mockery of our unthinking preferences.
Karen Benning writes about her phobia of bears, and how she took a trip to a bear sanctuary in order to cure it.
(Morning News, approx 30 minutes reading time, 6017 words)
What scares us, though, also tends to thrill us. Tempting death can make us feel our own vitality more keenly, but thrill and fear must wash over us in personally specific proportions or the equation doesn’t work. A mountain climbing class I took years ago inspired plenty of fear without the accompanying thrill I had expected.
The BBC looks at how statisticians helped to locate the missing Air France plane two years after it disappeared in 2011, and whether the same techniques could help find the missing Malaysia Airlines flight.
(BBC, approx 9 minutes reading time, 1993 words)
To turn all this information into numbers and probability, Keller and her team from Metron Inc in Virginia, relied on Bayesian statistics named after a British Presbyterian minister called Thomas Bayes. This type of thinking allows you to assess various scenarios at once – even contradictory ones.
Skip Hollandsworth meets Robin Doan, who was 10 when a stranger killed her entire family. But she refuses to let what Levi King did haunt the rest of her life.
(Texas Monthly, approx 10 minutes reading time, 2082 words)
Dressed completely in black and toting an AK-47, King broke through the back door and immediately went to the master bedroom. He first put three bullets into the body of the home’s owner, 31-year-old Brian Conrad. He next fired two shots into Molly, the family’s dog. Then he turned his gun on Conrad’s 35-year-old pregnant wife, Michell, who was screaming. He shot her five times.
Pic: Dominic Lipinski/PA Wire
Ed Catmull looks at the Pixar Braintrust, a working group that meets to improve the work Pixar does. Their success is all down to storytelling and trust.
(Fast Company, approx 16 minutes reading time, 3298 words)
Candor could not be more crucial to our creative process. Why? Because early on, all of our movies suck. That’s a blunt assessment, I know, but I choose that phrasing because saying it in a softer way fails to convey how bad the first versions really are. I’m not trying to be modest or self-effacing. Pixar films are not good at first, and our job is to make them so–to go, as I say, “from suck to not-suck.”
6. Mark Twain and the Mississippi
David Carkeet writes about the long history of the muddy Mississippi, source of inspiration to writer Mark Twain.
(Smithsonian Magazine, approx 31 minutes reading time, 6360 words)
The river has a long history of diggers and salvagers. A few miles up the road, another side trip delivers you to Wickliffe Mounds, site of one of the many Mississippian culture villages along the river. This one dates from circa 1100 to 1350 and was first excavated in the 1930s by a Kentucky lumber magnate and devoted amateur archaeologist, Fain King, who created a tourist attraction that presented the exposed bones of Native Americans as objects of curiosity.
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
In 1963, Gay Talese wrote about the American expatriates in Paris, writers like George Plimpton and Ernest Hemingway, and their return to the USA. These are the founders of the influential Paris Review.
(Longform, approx 24 minutes reading time, 4907 words)
Though much of the editing of The Paris Review was done at sidewalk cafés by editors awaiting their turns on the pin-ball machine, the magazine nonetheless became very successful because the editors had talent, money, and taste, and they avoided using such typical little-magazine words as “Zeitgeist” and “dichotomous,” and published no crusty critiques about Melville or Kafka, but instead printed the poetry and fiction of gifted young writers not yet popular.
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