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7 deadly reads
Sitdown Sunday: How the Disney Company carefully created millions of lifelong consumers
Settle down in a comfy chair with some of the week’s best longreads.
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 some of the week’s best reads for you to savour.
1. The ‘Disney Adult’ complex
So-called “Disney Adults” are those who have loved everything Disney for their whole lives.
While some have questioned and even mocked grown ups enjoying a franchise aimed at children, in this fascinating piece by Amelia Tait, we see that this type of lifelong fan is something that has been carefully created by the corporation.
(The New Statesman, approx 18 mins reading time)
Rachul grew up in the 1990s, during the so-called “Disney Renaissance”, when Disney debuted a string of critically successful films and re-released its earlier classics on VHS. Merchandising reached new heights: 7,000 products were released to promote 1997’s Hercules alone. It was, Rachul says, “almost like you couldn’t avoid having [Disney] as part of your childhood”. She wept when she saw Goofy in the parks because the anthropomorphic dog was her late grandfather’s favourite character, and her grandfather was her best friend. For Rachul, hugging Goofy was like having “this little piece of my grandpa back”.
Over the past 100 years, the Walt Disney Company has entwined itself with our families, memories and personal histories. In many ways, Disney is a religion that one is born into, the same way a 15th-century English baby was predestined to be baptised Catholic. Choice doesn’t necessarily come into it – we see Mickey Mouse around us like our ancestors saw the cross; a symbol that both 18-month-olds and 80-year-olds recognise. But if we accept that Disney adults were created, rather than spontaneously generated, then why are we scrutinising the congregation instead of the church?
2. North Korea’s forced labour program
An investigation carried out by Ian Urbina and a team of researchers, using leaked government documents, satellite imagery and secret interviews, into how North Korean people are sent by their government to work in factories in China, where they endure captivity, violence and sexual abuse.
(The New Yorker, approx 26 mins reading time)
In late 2023, an investigator hired by my team visited a Chinese plant called Donggang Xinxin Foodstuff. He found hundreds of North Korean women working under a red banner that read, in Korean, “Let’s carry out the resolution of the 8th Congress of the Workers’ Party.” (The company did not respond to requests for comment.) Soon afterward, the investigator visited a nearby plant called Donggang Haimeng Foodstuff, and found a North Korean manager sitting at a wooden desk with two miniature flags, one Chinese and one North Korean. The walls around the desk were mostly bare except for two portraits of the past North Korean leaders Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. The manager took our investigator to the workers’ cafeteria to eat a North Korean cold-noodle dish called naengmyeon, and then gave him a tour of the processing floor. Several hundred North Korean women dressed in red uniforms, plastic aprons, and white rubber boots stood shoulder to shoulder at long metal tables under harsh lights, hunched over plastic baskets of seafood, slicing and sorting products by hand. “They work hard,” the manager said. The factory has exported thousands of tons of fish to companies that supply major U.S. retailers, including Walmart and ShopRite. (A spokesperson for Donggang Haimeng said that it does not hire North Korean workers.)
3. Do you speak whale?
We’re getting closer to being able to communicate in language with animals – and sperm whales could be first, writes Ross Andersen. But what should we say?
(The Atlantic, approx 14 mins reading time)
To engage the whales in a more extensive dialogue will be a challenge of a different order. Its difficulty has long been understood: Even when Jonah was in the whale’s belly, he did not address his captor directly. He beseeched the Lord to speak on his behalf. Project CETI is beseeching AI.
The software’s first task will be to pick codas out from the noise of the ocean and all the other sounds that sperm whales emit: the trumpeting that likely charges their echolocation chambers; the buzzes and bursts they make when they socialize; the squeals and chirps that Rendell compared to “rather intense farts.” Males sometimes fill the ocean with a mega-metronome of loud clicks that hit every six seconds. “Sailors used to tell a story about Davy Jones being stuck at the bottom of the sea and how they could hear him knocking,” Rendell said. “I’d bet money that they were hearing a male sperm whale.”
4. The Tory money machine
An excerpt from Tom Burgis’s new book, in which he writes about how wealthy Conservative Party donors are rewarded with political access and influence.
(The Guardian, approx 20 mins reading time)
“I have just checked with compliance,” a Conservative functionary replies to Amersi’s question, “and you will not actually come on to the Electoral Roll until 1st June, so we cannot accept a donation from you until then”. And therefore: “The donation must please come from Nadia’s account.”Important, this: not being on the roll, Amersi is what you call an “impermissible donor”. Accepting a donation from an impermissible donor could violate electoral law. And yet the email to arrange the payment does not begin “Dear Nadia”. It begins: “Dear Mr Amersi. Thank you so much for the extremely generous donation of £200k from Nadia. Please find below our bank details for the transfer.”
And the bank receipt for the payment is sent not to Nadia Rodicheva, but to Mohamed Amersi. What’s more, if this receipt is supposed to be proof that the money was Nadia’s – as it must be under electoral law, given that it is her name the Conservatives declare as the donor – that’s not what it appears to show. The account is at Union Bancaire Privée (UBP) in Geneva, the bank that has taken over Coutts’ Swiss operation. There are no human beings named, just a string of numbers and letters that identifies the bank’s address. Last year, I emailed Amersi to ask him: “If there is evidence to demonstrate that this is Nadia’s account, please provide it.” He replied: “None of your business.”
5. Surveillance through ads
In an excerpt from his new book, Byron Tau shows how advertising data from phones has been used by the Pentagon to track members of the US military – and even Vladimir Putin’s entourage. He also explains that this data can be bought by almost anyone.
(Wired, approx mins reading time)
They realized they could track world leaders through Locomotive, too. After acquiring a data set on Russia, the team realized they could track phones in the Russian president Vladimir Putin’s entourage. The phones moved everywhere that Putin did. They concluded the devices in question did not actually belong to Putin himself; Russian state security and counterintelligence were better than that. Instead, they believed the devices belonged to the drivers, the security personnel, the political aides, and other support staff around the Russian president; those people’s phones were trackable in the advertising data. As a result, PlanetRisk knew where Putin was going and who was in his entourage.
6. Solar storms
A very good, slightly scary read from Kathryn Schulz who speaks to space-weather forecasters about the impact a severe solar storm could have on our daily technologies.
(The New Yorker, approx 37 mins reading time)
Forecasters like Ken Tegnell watch sunspots for the same reason that regular meteorologists watch low-pressure areas in the tropics: to see if a storm is forming. This happens when one of those twisted magnetic fields suddenly rips apart, then snaps back together again. That rearrangement returns the magnetic field to a more stable, lower-energy state, while releasing the excess energy into space in two different forms. The first is a solar flare: a burst of radiation that can range across the electromagnetic spectrum, from gamma rays and X rays to radio waves and visible light. Solar flares contain a colossal amount of energy—enough, in a large one, to meet our planet’s power needs for the next fifteen or twenty thousand years. The second is a coronal mass ejection: a billion-ton bubble of magnetized plasma that explodes off the surface of the sun. These two phenomena can occur separately, but when large ones occur together they mark the beginning of a major solar storm.
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
Iris Apfel, the interior designer and fashion celebrity famous for her colourful, flamboyant style, has died at the age of 102. Here’s an interview she gave in 2015.
(The Guardian, approx 11 mins reading time)
One of the many interesting things about Apfel (and there are many) is that before she was a fashion plate – or, as she likes to say, a “geriatric starlet” – the former interior designer was 83 years old and over a decade into her retirement. Thanks to a contract that saw her consult on interiors for the White House with her husband, the 100-year-old Carl Apfel, she was a little bit famous, known in New York interior-design circles. But as recalled in Iris, directed by the late Albert Maysles (whose other work includes the documentary Grey Gardens), it was a phone call in 2005 from Harold Koda, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, that would change life as Apfel knew it.
Note: The Journal generally selects stories that are not paywalled, but some might not be accessible if you have exceeded your free article limit on the site in question.
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