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.
An extract from Mark O’Connell’s book about the double-murderer Malcolm MacArthur, which details the author’s conversation with the notorious killer and his attempts to uncover the psychology behind the brutal crimes, makes for a chilling but terribly interesting read.
(The Guardian, approx 30 mins reading time)
I began to spot him, from time to time, around Dublin. He was a frequent attender of public talks at Trinity; he went to museums and to galleries. I browsed for books in Hodges Figgis one night and, as I was coming out on to Dawson Street, there he was again. On this occasion, he returned my gaze, and held it. I continued home, wondering what it would be like to know that people recognised you, and knew the evil you had done. What a rare and strange form of abjection that must be. With this thought came the realisation that I was going to write about him – and that, to do so, I would need to speak to him. I could piece together a reasonably vivid account of the murders by interviewing the people involved, and sifting through newspaper archives, but this would only affirm and embellish what everyone already believed. I wanted to learn things I could barely imagine.
The controversy surrounding the national broadcaster, Ryan Tubridy and undisclosed payments dominated the headlines this week. Here’s everything you need to know on the scandal so far.
(The Journal, approx 13 mins reading time)
Secret payments totalling €345,000 to Ryan Tubridy between 2017 and March of this year have gone unreported by RTÉ. The broadcaster publishes the annual salaries of its top earners every year (though RTÉ only discloses earnings from two years previously – for example, the most recent release of figures in March of this year related to salaries from 2021). Those figures consistently show that Tubridy is RTÉ’s top earner. According to the latest release in March, the former Late Late host was officially paid €440,000 in 2021. But now it’s emerged that this isn’t the full story. A statement released by RTÉ yesterday revealed that in 2020 and 2021, Tubridy was paid an additional income of €75,000 per year.
Amelie Schonbek speaks to women in the US Merchant Marine who have been victims of sexual misconduct offshore, and their fight to be heard in the maritime world.
(Mother Jones, approx 14 mins reading time)
In recent years, companies have begun actively recruiting women. But while the global number of female mariners almost doubled since 2015, “women are still encountering the exact same stuff that women of my generation had to deal with,” says Ann Sanborn, who became a mariner in the late ’70s before becoming a professor at the USMMA. “Sadly, I think I’m going to be ending my career with some of the same issues I started with.” While reporting this story, I spoke with 20 women who experienced some form of sexual misconduct over the course of their careers offshore, ranging from verbal harassment to rape. “You’re in the middle of the ocean, thousands of miles away from everybody else,” says K. Denise Rucker Krepp, former chief counsel for the Maritime Administration. “You can’t just get in your car and drive to the emergency room and get a rape kit. Even in the military, you see different people on a regular basis. At sea, it’s the same people, and if you report, immediately everybody knows.”
Brandy Schillace writes about learning to find happiness in gardening.
(Eater, approx 12 mins reading time)
When I next approached the garden plot, it wasn’t for food security but succor of a different kind. I am disabled; I am autistic and have a connective tissue disorder that causes problems for my mobility. Gertrude Jekyll, a 19th-century woman who designed more than 400 gardens, once said, “A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust.” I needed just such things, myself, for I couldn’t trust my own body and hadn’t learned to accept new realities. Still, I’d always been a willing student. Maybe I could find my way by investing in the soil — a new way of digging in, different from those sweltering summers when I could still move nimbly between rows of beans and corn. And so I wondered, what would disabled gardening look like? More importantly, how would it feel?
When a young woman was murdered in a sleepy Texas town in 1987, everyone thought they knew who did it. Something which allowed the real culprit to escape justice and continue his crimes for years.
(Texas Monthly, approx 63 mins reading time)
Hensley had a search warrant drawn up. He then accompanied a crew of Indianapolis officers who descended on the house. “They tore it apart and took everything I owned,” Michael says, “with the exception of my guitars, the clothes on my back. They took my cassette tapes, they took my underwear, they took my clothing, they took everything that was mine. Then they found, after their exhaustive search, a marijuana roach in my sister-in-law’s purse. So they arrested me and my brother for that roach, put us in jail, let us out the next day. Never went to court on it.” No charges were pursued. But the arrest got Hensley what he wanted: the prints. On the flight back to Texas, he sensed the noose closing around Michael’s neck. He began drawing up an extradition request. He wasn’t at all prepared for the news he got once he returned to Stephenville and compared the prints. “They didn’t match,” he says. “F—ing. Didn’t. Match.”
The mastermind behind Black Mirror speaks about its latest series, which is just as disturbing as ever.
(GQ, approx 8 mins reading time)
Before we veered into AI, talk began with how on earth Brooker stays optimistic – given that for more than the past decade, he’s been bringing foreboding technological and psychological horrors to life through varying degrees of dark episodes of Black Mirror. “I definitely approached this [forthcoming sixth] season thinking, ‘Whatever my assumptions are about Black Mirror, I’m going to throw them out and do something different’,” he says of the five-episode instalment. Brooker was drawn to including more comedy in the new season, largely because “it feels like the dystopia is lapping onto our shores at the present moment”. But don’t be fooled by this comedic inflection. “I sort of circled back to some classically Black Mirror stories as well,” says Brooker. “So it’s not like it’s a bed of roses this season. They’re certainly some of the bleakest stories we’ve ever done.”
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
A 2018 article about James Martin, the world’s top art forgery detective who utilises his skills to spot fakes for Sotheby’s.
(The Guardian, approx 32 mins reading time)
The works were full of striking, scrupulous detail. On Jerome’s arm, for example, dozens of faint horizontal cracks have appeared; every so often, a clean, vertical split intersects them. In French canvases from the 18th century, cracks in paint tend to develop like spider webs; in Flemish panels, like tree bark. In Italian paintings of the Renaissance, the patterns resemble rows of untidy brickwork. On the Saint Jerome, the cracks match perfectly. Prof David Ekserdjian, one of the few art historians who doubted that the painting was a Parmigianino, said he just didn’t feel the prickle of recognition that scholars claim as their gift: the intimacy with an artist that they liken to our ability to spot a friend in a crowd. “But I have to be frank, I didn’t look at it and say: ‘Oh, that’s a forgery.’”
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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