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A woman walks in an abandoned school gym in Pripyat. Shutterstock/Christopher Moswitzer
evening sitdown
Your evening longread: Why are tourists drawn to Chernobyl?
It’s a coronavirus-free zone as we bring you an interesting longread each evening to take your mind off the news.
EVERY WEEK, WE bring you a round-up of the best longreads of the past seven days in Sitdown Sunday.
For the next few weeks, we’ll be bringing you an evening longread to enjoy. With the news cycle dominated by the coronavirus situation, we know it can be hard to take your mind off what’s happening.
So we want to bring you an interesting read every weekday evening to help transport you somewhere else.
We’ll be keeping an eye on new longreads and digging back into the archives for some classics.
Irish writer Mark O’Connell looks at why tourists travel to Chernobyl – he goes along himself and describes the people he meets and what motivates them.
(New York Times, approx 30 mins reading time)
I was being confronted, I realized, with an exaggerated manifestation of my own disquiet about making this trip in the first place; these unseemly, even pornographic, depictions of the Zone were on a continuum with my own reasons for making this trip. My anxieties about the future — the likely disastrous effects of climate change, our vulnerability to all manner of unthinkable catastrophes — had for some time been channeled into an obsession with the idea of “the apocalypse,” with the various ways people envisioned, and prepared for, civilizational collapse.
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