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.
1. Netflix’s power clash behind its crash
As Netflix loses subscribers for the first time in its history, The Hollywood Reporter looks at the internal power struggle that lead to the drop in subscribers
(The Hollywood Reporter, 7 minutes reading time)
Several important Netflix creators voice a very consistent theory about what’s gone wrong with the streamer’s culture. They see a link between Netflix’s problems and the 2020 fall of Cindy Holland, who played a key role in launching the service’s originals — brilliantly and often expensively — with House of Cards, Orange Is the New Black and Stranger Things, among others.
2. The search for a Syrian war criminal
Following a rookie militiaman watching a video of a massacre in Damascus and leaking it to academics, a researcher undertakes a second personality to lure in the war criminal who carried out the mass killing.
(The Guardian, 13 minute reading time)
It is the story of a war crime, captured in real time, by one of the Syrian regime’s most notorious enforcers, branch 227 of the country’s military intelligence service that also details the painstaking efforts to turn the tables on its perpetrators – including how two researchers in Amsterdam duped one of the most infamous security officers in Syria through an online alter ego and seduced him into spilling the sinister secrets of Assad’s war.
3. The rise of Shein: The Chinese fast-fashion juggernaut
Cheap clothing isn’t a new phenomenon, but the growth of online-only retailers has lead to a boom in so-called “ultrafast-fashion”, with one relatively new Chinese company, Shein, retailing over 1.3 million new clothing items every year.
(Wired, 26 minute reading time)
What made this more than random internet arcana is that Shein has stealthily become an enormous business. “Shein emerged very quickly,” says Sheng Lu, a professor at the University of Delaware who studies the global textile and apparel industry. “Two years ago, three years ago, nobody had ever heard of them.” Earlier this year, the investment firm Piper Sandler surveyed 7,000 American teens about their favorite ecommerce sites and found that while Amazon was the clear winner, Shein came in second. The company claims the largest slice—28 percent—of the US fast-fashion market.
The story of the underground Black historians who detail the violent past of Philadelphia, Mississippi where three civil-rights workers were murdered in 1964.
(The Atlantic, 12 minute reading time)
Now my stepfather is one of a handful of Black folks around town who give informal tours of Philadelphia’s civil-rights history. The pandemic put these tours on hold for a while, but even before COVID, they were irregular, and could be found only by word of mouth. Guides like Obbie don’t have websites, or even Facebook pages. Yet people from all over have managed to reach them—Obbie estimates that he’s given more than 100 tours. Their popularity is understandable in a town where official sources, such as the local museum, are still reluctant to tell the story. Even in this boom time of national memorialization of Black civil-rights history, in Philadelphia, tours like Obbie Riley’s are the only real way to connect to the dark truth of our past.
5. How Putin’s invasion returned NATO to the centre stage
An analysis of how NATO has been thrust back into the spotlight amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the history of the organisation and how it has changed since it first came into existence.
(The Guardian, 20 minutes reading time)
Nato’s return to the spotlight has been accompanied by a renewed debate about its history. Every interested party has a different story to tell. For Moscow, Nato has long been a project to subjugate Russia and reduce its influence to a memory. For Washington, Nato began as a way of protecting western Europeans from themselves and from the Soviet Union, but in the 90s it became a forward operating vehicle for democracy, human rights and capital. For eastern Europeans, Nato is the sacred pledge to keep Russian tanks at bay. For most western European states, Nato has provided a bargain-price American nuclear umbrella that allowed them to fund social welfare rather than armies, when they were not using their Nato obligations to justify austerity. For the rest of the world, Nato was once an Atlantic-based, defensive alliance that quickly transformed into an ever-farther-afield, offensive one.
6. The true cost of Chinese investment
As European countries sign up to investment deals with China, some governments are beginning to weigh up the risks and rewards of Chinese investments.
(BBC, 10 minutes reading time)
Across Europe, as governments worry about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine post-pandemic, Beijing is powering on – expanding its portfolio. Running European ports and mines – building roads and bridges – investing where others won’t.
But countries are having to weigh up the rewards – and risks – of signing deals with China. Many governments are increasingly wary of so-called “debt traps”, where lenders – such as the Chinese state – can extract economic or political concessions if the country receiving investment cannot repay.
…AND ONE FROM THE ARCHIVES…
Did humans reach the moon… or is it all a big ruse?
(The Guardian, 10 mins reading time)
Despite the extraordinary volume of evidence (including 382kg of moon rock collected across six missions; corroboration from Russia, Japan and China; and images from the Nasa Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter showing the tracks made by the astronauts in the moondust), belief in the moon-hoax conspiracy has blossomed since 1969. Among 9/11 truthers, anti-vaxxers, chemtrailers, flat-Earthers, Holocaust deniers and Sandy Hook conspiracists, the idea that the moon landings were faked isn’t even a source of anger any more – it is just a given fact.
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