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sitdown sunday
Sitdown Sunday: 7 deadly reads
The very best of the week’s writing from around the web.
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.
Deena Guzder meets the spouses of the long-term incarcerated, like Eshawn Page, whose husband is in his 18th year of a sentence for a murder he says he did not commit.
(Al Jazeera – approx 25 minutes reading time, 5156 words)
The moment was bittersweet, though. At first Eshawn didn’t know whether to accept Jermaine’s offer. “My family and friends were like, ‘Are you kidding me? You’re going to marry someone who’s in prison for life?’” she says. “But my father told me if I truly love this man and I can be content, then I should go through with my decision and live with the consequences.”
Svati Kirsten Nurala meets Otis Chandler, who set up Goodreads, which is a social network for bookworms. Now it has more than 25 million users, and Chandler sheds light on why he thinks it’s so popular.
(The Atlantic – approx 12 minutes reading time, 2504 words)
But if there was an epiphany moment, it was when I was in my friend’s room, and he had a bookshelf of all the books he’d ever read, and I just kind of grilled him: “Well, what did you think of this book, what did you think of that book?” And I came away with a long list of five or 10 books I was excited to read. Putting my social networking hat [on], I thought, if I could only get my all friends to put their bookshelves online and say what they thought of them.
Henry Molaison. Pic: Wikimedia Commons
Suzanna Corkin writes about meeting Henry Molaison, who was left with permanent amnesia after an operation for epilepsy went wrong in 1957. What was a tragedy for him ended up being a ‘gift’ to science.
(Business Insider – approx 10 minutes reading time, 2170 words)
But occasionally, his memory was surprisingly intact.In the Eighties, when he was still allowed to smoke, the staff noted, “Henry, at times, seems to exhibit a selective memory. He has absolutely no trouble remembering when and how many cigarettes he’s had and can at times recall staff names.” During the same period, he was troubled by false memories.
Andy Wright wanted to discover what it was like to be a hermit – living alone, self-sufficiently, away from society. So he… emailed one.
(Modern Farmer – approx 22 minutes reading time, 4533 words)
We exchanged a few more emails and after I admitted I knew absolutely nothing about visiting a hermitage, she proposed a phone call. (Hermits have phones!). I was uncharacteristically nervous about the call. Would Michaela sniff me out for the un-spiritual fraud that I was? I have, after all, no religious affiliation. I rarely spend time alone. I once balanced my laptop on the toilet in case I needed to Gchat about work during a shower.
Jennifer Mendelsohn investigates the story of Amanda, known on Twitter as @trappedatmydesk, who tweeted about her impending death from a malignant brain tumour. But was she a real person - or a fake?
( Medium – approx 19 minutes reading time, 3842 words)
So how exactly do you track down an Internet ghost? First stop: the obituaries. Searching legacy.com turns up not a single Amanda who died in Canada in the last year who might be her. Nor is there an obituary for an Amanda with a brother named James. Perhaps she used a pseudonym. Except that there are no matching obits from Canada for a young woman dying of cancer on April 14 or April 15 of 2013.
McKay Coppins goes on a trip with Donald Trump, who has contemplated running for president - or governor of New York. But is this just a pipe dream?
(Buzzfeed – approx 30 minutes reading time, 6186 words)
The notion that he is simply too big — too presidential — for a measly job in the Albany Statehouse has temporarily quelled his insecurity. But after this morning, Trump can no longer escape the fact that his political “career” — a long con that the blustery billionaire has perpetrated on the country for 25 years by repeatedly pretending to consider various runs for office, only to bail out after generating hundreds of headlines — finally appears to be on the brink of collapse.
...AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES...
Eustace Conway in 2013 Pic: AP Photo/Allen Breed
Eustace Conway believed he could do anything he set his mind to, and as Elizabeth Gilbert found out in 1998, that included saving America.
(GQ, approx 34 minutes reading time, 6850 words)
Eustace Conway moved into the woods for good when he was 17 years old. This was in 1978, which was around the same time Star Wars was released. He lived in a tepee, made fire by rubbing two sticks together, and bathed in icy streams. At this point in his biography, you might deduce that Eustace is a survivalist or a hippie or a hermit, but he's not any of these things. He's not storing guns for the imminent race war; he's not cultivating excellent weed; he's not hiding from us. Eustace Conway is in the woods because he belongs in the woods.
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