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3 Midweek Longreads: I lost my iPhone... and became a celebrity in China
Longreads to savour or save.
IF YOU WANT a juicy longread to sink your teeth into, you’ve come to the right place.
Here are three to save for a moment of peace, or devour straight away.
1. Losing my iPhone and becoming a celeb
Matt Stopera, who writes for Buzzfeed, lost his iPhone. Then he discovered that it had been sold to a guy in China. Then people in China got wind of the story, and tried to get the two men to meet…
[Buzzfeed, 29 mins]
For a month, this orange man’s pictures keep on showing up on my phone. I start to get used to the daily photo updates, and it becomes fun for me to check my phone and see this guy’s pictures. It’s mysterious.
The ‘most ferocious lawyer in America’ is defending Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Here’s a profile of Judy Clarke’s incredible career.
[Vanity Fair, 32 mins]
Clarke has taken one notorious death-penalty case after another. There was Ted Kaczynski, the deadly Unabomber, now living out his days in a super-max prison in Colorado, and still furious with his onetime defense attorney (“Judy Clarke is a bitch on wheels and a sicko,” he wrote me
Elena Ferrante is the pseudonymous author of six books, all released since 1992. But who is she, or he? An attempt at discovering the truth.
[N Plus One Mag, 52 mins]
One answer ends in o: the first name of a man. Whether to goad Ferrante out of privacy or because they think it’s true, the Italian newspaper L’Unità has accused the novelist Domenico Starnone of penning her books. If Starnone is behind Ferrante’s work, I would like to meet him. No man I know would write so well and not take credit for it.
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