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. A year on from the Capitol riots
Journalist Grace Segers, who was evacuated from the Capitol building on 6 January 2021, writes that for those who were present during the attack, it still isn’t over.
(The New Republic, approx 17 mins reading time)
We – senators, reporters, and aides alike – were evacuated from the Senate chamber shortly after 2:30 p.m. We ran through the tunnels underneath the Capitol complex like mice scurrying through a maze, following the directions of Capitol Police officers. As we were jogging through the subterranean labyrinth, we passed a couple of confused maintenance workers, bemused by the sight of dozens of senators fleeing through the halls. They did not know what was happening, that their place of work had been invaded, that their lives were in danger just as surely as the lawmakers’ escaping before them.
Scientists have stepped up their search to find and save the saola, an animal so elusive that it has never been seen by a biologist in the wild, and was only discovered in 1992.
(The Guardian, approx 6 mins reading time)
The discovery was hailed as one of the most spectacular zoological discoveries of the 20th century but less than 30 years later the saola population is believed to have declined massively due to commercial wildlife poaching, which has exploded in Vietnam since 1994. Even though the saola is not directly targeted by poachers, intensive commercial snaring that supplies animals for use in traditional Asian medicine or as bushmeat serves as the primary threat.
Choe Sang-Hun writes about the North Korean ex-gymnast who risked his life in 2020 by crossing the Demilitarized Zone to reach South Korea, only to go back again a year later.
(The New York Times, approx 9 mins reading time)
In South Korea, his life seems to have been a difficult one. He made few friends, officials said. He found work at cleaning services whose employees worked mostly at night in empty office buildings. He apparently never socialized with his neighbors. Since Sunday, when reports first emerged of his return to the North, no one in the South has come forward to say that they knew him personally.
An interview with Denzel Washington about his career, directing his new film A Journal for Jordan and starring as Shakespeare’s king of Scotland in The Tragedy of Macbeth.
(Variety, approx 12 mins reading time)
Washington reveals that he’s never seen a production of “Macbeth,” except for bits of a TV version that he can’t recall. “I didn’t want to see it,” he says. When he was cast in Coen’s film, he purposely did not seek out past performances from Orson Welles or Ian McKellen. McDormand had played Lady Macbeth onstage in San Francisco, and she convinced her husband, Coen, to tackle a movie adaptation. Washington accepted the role because he saw it as a chance to work with “three of the greats” — Coen, McDormand and Shakespeare. “We had the luxury of almost four weeks of rehearsal,” he says of the movie, which started shooting in the winter of 2020; COVID-19 shut down the production midway through. “So we got to rehearse it like a play, which was great.” He adds that the minimalist production design helped ground his performance. “It felt quite comfortable because it felt like a stage. That made it easier, I think.”
5. Saying no to New Year’s resolutions
Faith Hill writes about how setting often uattanable self-improvement goals two years into a pandemic is not the vibe for 2022.
(The Atlantic, approx 5 mins reading time)
You might figure that declaring resolutions doesn’t hurt, even if you don’t complete them. But that’s not necessarily true. The very act of goal setting can undermine results if it feels like homework: One study that directed people to practice flossing, yoga, or origami making found that focusing on the desired result actually predicted lower achievement. If goals are too narrow or too challenging or too many are attempted at once, they can obscure the bigger picture or lead people to focus disproportionately on short-term gains. Getting goals just right is hard.
Ronan McGreevy reflects on what has been called the most important document in Irish history 100 years after it was ratified.
(The Irish Times, approx 7 mins reading time)
County and city councils, chambers of commerce, unions, farmers’ organisations, the Catholic Church and even southern Unionists were all in favour. So too were almost every Sinn Féin comhairle ceantair in the country, the grassroots of the party. Some sharply reminded their TDs of the mood in the country. The north and south Monaghan cumanns told Seán MacEntee, who made a forceful speech opposing the Treaty on the basis that it would do nothing to stop partition, that 99 per cent of the county was in favour of it. MacEntee voted against it anyway.
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
A story from 2017 about Alice Collins Plebuch, a woman who believed she was the daughter of Irish Americans until a DNA test changed everything she thought she knew about her family history.
(The Washington Post, approx 24 min reading time)
About half of Plebuch’s DNA results presented the mixed British Isles bloodline she expected. The other half picked up an unexpected combination of European Jewish, Middle Eastern and Eastern European. Surely someone in the lab had messed up. It was the early days of direct-to-consumer DNA testing, and Ancestry.com’s test was new. She wrote the company a nasty letter informing them they’d made a mistake. But she talked to her sister, and they agreed she should test again. If the information Plebuch was seeing on her computer screen was correct, it posed a fundamental mystery about her very identity. It meant one of her parents wasn’t who he or she was supposed to be — and, by extension, neither was she.
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