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.
John Knefel writes about the serious heroin issues being experienced in the United States… could the solution be making it easier to do the drug?
(Buzzfeed, approx 30 minutes reading time, 5967 words)
The face of the new crisis is a familiar one: the white, middle-class kid who should never have become a junkie. Whether the story is in Time, any number of local reports from major cities, or small-town Wisconsin, the takeaway is always the same: Heroin use among young, middle-class users in the suburbs and rural areas is increasing.
Ken Belson looks at how fears about brain trauma being caused by American Football has led one school to only allow younger athletes play flag football.
(New York Times, approx 18 minutes reading time, 3536 words)
In less than a decade, hits to the head have gone from an unavoidable (and underreported) byproduct of a tough sport to an injury that has altered the way the game is played. Recent research has indicated that players as young as 7 sustain hits to the head comparable in magnitude to those absorbed by high school and adult players.
Blake J Harris tackles the story of Nintendo, from Donkey Kong the NES. One for the game nerds and casual fans.
(Grantland, approx 26 minutes reading time, 5399 words)
Though the console managed to sell one million units, it ultimately lost money. Nevertheless, Yamauchi remained undeterred. Nintendo continued to put out arcade games (striking out with duds like Monkey Magicand Block Fever) and also continued to release home consoles (like the Color TV-Game 15, which offered fifteen slightly different versions of electronic tennis).
4. An oral history of West Wing
A selection of people involved in the series West Wing sit down to give the real story behind the hugely popular political show.
(Hollywood Reporter, approx 37 minutes reading time, 7448 words)
I joined Warner Bros. in February 1999, and the script had already been written. My introduction to Aaron Sorkin was when I called him and said, “I think this is the most brilliant script I’ve ever read, but you should know that in the history of television, there has never been a successful series set in Washington, D.C., on broadcast television.” To which he said, “Why should I care about that?”
Ken Auletta wrote a profile of New York Times editor Jill Abramson the year she took the job. After being fired from the role, now is a good time to look back at his article.
(New Yorker, approx 26 minutes reading time, 11229 words)
n 2008, she wrote in the Times, “I failed to push hard enough” to publish an article, written by James Risen, the Times national-security reporter, that was skeptical of claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. She also says, “My responsibility as bureau chief is that I did not pay sufficient attention to the stories Judy was writing. Many were based on Iraqi defectors. I wish I had been more skeptical.”
Marie Brenner profiles famed ware photographer Robert Caba, whose haunting photos of D-Day, the huge battle in WWII, captured the world.
(Vanity Fair, approx 28 minutes reading time, words)
As a child Capa wanted to be a writer; his best work has the intimacy of a storyteller’s gaze and passion. He would never cover any war in which he did not love one side and hate the other, noted his biographer Richard Whelan, but his compassion was not partisan. Capa’s special genius was to make himself invisible in the field while becoming conspicuously larger than life off of it. The helmet he carried through the 1943 Italian Campaign was inscribed “Property of Robert Capa, great war correspondent and lover.”
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
Ernest Hemingway was a rather big fan of the rather cruel sport of bullfighting. To him, it was “an art, a tragedy, and a business”. Here’s a 1930 essay he wrote about the industry.
(Fortune, approx 31 minutes reading time, 6333 words)
The Spanish fighting bull is as different from any domestic bull as the wolf is from the dog. He is not merely a vicious form of the same animal, he is a separate and wild strain directly descended from the wild bulls that roamed the Iberian peninsula, and he is closer kin to the Cape buffalo, supposedly the most deadly of African big game, than to the Hereford, Jersey or Durham. The bulls are raised on big ranches where they live as they did in the days when they were a free roaming wild animal.
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