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.
If you’ve seen the Beatles documentary Get Back on Disney+, you’ll have noticed artist and musician Yoko Ono sitting next to her partner John Lennon. The public opinion of Yoko has evolved over the years, but there are still those who blame her for the breakup of the Fab Four. Here, Amanda Hess takes an interesting viewpoint on Yoko’s omnipresence as the band recorded Get Back.
(The New York Times, approx 9 mins reading time)
At first I found Ono’s omnipresence in the documentary bizarre, even unnerving. The vast set only emphasizes the ludicrousness of her proximity. Why is she there? I pleaded with my television set. But as the hours passed, and Ono remained — painting at an easel, chewing a pastry, paging through a Lennon fan magazine — I found myself impressed by her stamina, then entranced by the provocation of her existence and ultimately dazzled by her performance. My attention kept drifting toward her corner of the frame.
What we know about the latest variant.
(The Atlantic, approx 8 mins reading time)
The Africa Health Research Institute published a small, rapid, preliminary study that found a huge drop in neutralizing antibodies against Omicron, relative to previous variants, among people with two shots of the Pfizer vaccine. This suggests—but does not prove—that two doses of the vaccine may be less likely to protect against Omicron infection. But the study also found that people with hybrid immunity—prior infection, plus vaccination—were much better protected. That might be good news for people with booster shots.
3. The worst eating experience
Geraldine Deruiter writes about her trip to a Michelin-starred restaurant which turned into a disaster.
(Everywhereist, approx 10 mins reading time)
I’ve tried to come up with hypotheses for what happened. Maybe the staff just ran out of food that night. Maybe they confused our table with that of their ex-lover’s. Maybe they were drunk. But we got twelve kinds of foam, something that I can only describe as “an oyster loaf that tasted like Newark airport”, and a teaspoon of savory ice cream that was olive flavored.
Mardi Fuller’s uncle died in mysterious circumstances, which ended up influencing the fact she grew up taking swimming lessons and on swim teams.
(Outside, approx 15 mins reading time)
Almost everything I know about what happened next comes from collective memory, snippets of a story shared by my mother over the course of my childhood, and from brief, sad conversations with aunts, uncles, and cousins. On the morning of June 14, 1964, a Sunday, my Aunt Grace was getting dressed for church when she heard a knock. She opened the door and saw two solemn service members, there to deliver the tragic news that Easter had died the night before. They said he was off duty and drowned while swimming in a lake near the base. That’s all the detail anyone remembers getting. My grandparents neither received nor sought more information.
Merritt Tierce writes about getting pregnant at 19 and not considering an abortion due to her personal circumstances.
(New York Times, approx 33 mins reading time)
But it’s not accurate to say my son gave me this, when what I mean is: Facing an unplanned pregnancy when I was 19 led to a grappling with identity that forced me to choose between acknowledging complexity, failure and systemic injustice or living inauthentically, turned away from truth. A paradox here is that much of what informed my parents’ conviction that I should not have an abortion — though we never even talked about it — was rooted in religion, and yet having a baby when I did, the way I did, led directly to my departure from religion, and far more swiftly than anything else could have.
This interview has been MUCH talked about this week – a profile of Jeremy Strong, who plays Kendall Roy on Succession.
(New Yorker, approx 30 mins reading time)
This fall, Strong was shooting James Gray’s film “Armageddon Time,” playing a plumber based on the director’s father. Strong let his hair return to its natural gray—it’s darkened for “Succession”—and sent me videos of himself shadowing a real handyman for research, repeating back terms like “flare nuts” in a honking Queens accent. Costumes and props are like talismans for him. In 2012, he played a possible victim of childhood sexual abuse in Amy Herzog’s “The Great God Pan,” at Playwrights Horizons. “There was a shirt he wore that was really important for him, and for compositional reasons we wanted to try it in a different color,” Herzog told me. “I remember him saying that the shirt he was wearing had functioned as his armor, and this new shirt wasn’t like armor.” They let him keep the shirt.
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
Michael Lewis hangs out with Barack Obama in 2012.
(Vanity Fair, approx 62 mins reading time)
“Hey, Doc,” he shouted to the van holding the medical staff that travels with him wherever he goes. “You got my mouth guard?” The doc had his mouth guard. Obama relaxed back in his seat and said casually that he didn’t want to get his teeth knocked out this time, “since we’re only 100 days away.” From the election, he meant, then he smiled and showed me which teeth, in some previous basketball game, had been knocked out. “Exactly what kind of game is this?” I asked, and he laughed and told me not to worry. He doesn’t. “What happens is, as I get older, the chances I’m going to play well go down. When I was 30 there was, like, a one-in-two chance. By the time I was 40 it was more like one in three or one in four.”
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