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.
Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert, who were rivals on the tennis court and have been friends for over 50 years, speak about supporting each other through their cancer diagnoses in this heartfelt and beautifully written piece.
(Washington Post, approx 41 mins reading time)
Evert recalled the day she phoned Navratilova to tell her she had cancer. “She was one of the very first people I told,” she says. Wait a second. Is Evert saying that the rival who dealt her the deepest professional cuts of her life, whose mere body language on the court once made her seethe, was among the very first people she wanted to talk to when she got cancer? It’s one thing to share a rich history and be neighbors and swap gifts and teasing, but they are those kinds of confidantes? And is the same true for Navratilova, that Evert — whose mere existence meant that no matter how much she won, she could never really win, who at one point dominated her with an infuriating superciliousness — was among the first people she called when she got cancer? Is that what they are saying? Indeed, it is.
2. “An accident waiting to happen”
A fascinating analysis from Ben Taub with interviews, emails and exclusive documents that reveal how numerous warnings about OceanGate’s Titan submersible went unheeded before tragedy struck.
(The New Yorker, approx 33 mins reading time)
In early 2018, McCallum heard that Lochridge had left OceanGate. “I’d be keen to pick your brain if you have a few moments,” McCallum e-mailed him. “I’m keen to get a handle on exactly how bad things are. I do get reports, but I don’t know if they are accurate.” Whatever his differences with Rush, McCallum wanted the venture to succeed; the submersible industry is small, and a single disaster could destroy it. But the only way forward without a catastrophic operational failure—which he had been told was “certain,” he wrote—was for OceanGate to redesign the submersible in coördination with a classification society. “Stockton must be gutted,” McCallum told Lochridge, of his departure. “You were the star player . . . . . and the only one that gave me a hint of confidence.” “I think you are going to [be] even more taken aback when I tell you what’s happening,” Lochridge replied. He added that he was afraid of retaliation from Rush—“We both know he has influence and money”—but would share his assessment with McCallum, in private: “That sub is Not safe to dive.”
Twitter has a new rival courtesy of Meta – but how does Threads work and could it really become more popular than the bird app? The head of Instagram speaks about it.
(The Verge, approx 17 mins reading time)
Meta has been planning to release Threads, its self-described “sanely run” version of Twitter, for a while. The backlash to Musk’s recent limiting of how many tweets people can see per day was a catalyzing event for getting the app out the door this week, according to internal company documents I’ve seen. They also say that Meta expects “tens of millions” of people to try Threads within the first few months of availability. As Mosseri describes it, Threads is a “risky endeavor,” especially since it’s a new app people have to download. Meta has made the onboarding process easier by letting you auto-populate your account info and follow list from your Instagram, which I was able to do quickly after being granted access to Threads earlier today.
An insightful and compassionate look into extreme hoarding and those who live with the condition.
(The Guardian, approx 21 mins reading time)
In the US, Australia and many European countries, as in Britain, authorities tend to intervene only when a hoarder is in crisis. When intervention comes, it often takes the form of dealing with the accumulated physical objects, rather than treating the problems that caused their accumulation. But slowly, new approaches, like the one proposed by the council officer, are emerging. In the last 10 years, hoarding has been identified as a standalone psychological disorder – a move that has brought about a “total shift in perception”, says Nicole Steils, a researcher at King’s College London’s Social Care Workforce Research Unit. The recognition that hoarding is a medical condition has resulted in a growing awareness of its scale and seriousness; in the US alone, there are more than 100 organisations dedicated to tackling the problem, and Britain has dozens of support groups for hoarders. But, it turns out, understanding hoarding is not the same as curing it.
5. What did people do before smartphones?
Can you remember? Ian Bogost writes about how people killed time before the rise of technology.
(The Atlantic, approx 6 mins reading time)
I asked some middle-aged friends to think back to life in the old days, when we still lived together together—and then to tell me what they remembered doing. “What the heck did I do?” one replied. Some fragments of childhood life could be recovered: shooting hoops in the driveway, or passing notes in class, or burning time hunting for friends to burn time with. But the nature of our idle life as adults evaded memory. Even surfing the early web, the precursor to today’s scrolling, was made tedious by slow connections. Other things took longer too: consulting a paper map before driving anywhere, finding and then conversing with a salesperson to select an appliance. Daily non-activities—waiting at the supermarket line, sitting in traffic, walking the dog—took place under different circumstances. Worse ones. A spine-chilling revelation: We couldn’t remember what we did because there was nothing to remember having done.
A fascinating read about the baffling murder case of a rare collector and his daughter, a cast of suspects and four allegedly missing Stradivarius violins.
(Bloomberg, approx 27 mins reading time)
Von Bredow had told friends he possessed at least one Strad, and at the time of his death, his invite-only website, violinen.biz, featured one for sale, according to his sister, Anita. (She wouldn’t grant access to the site.) He’d also boasted that he owned two violins made by Giuseppe Guarneri, a Stradivari contemporary whose instruments are similarly valuable, selling regularly for six or seven figures. Yet friends say von Bredow wasn’t a wealthy man, only an eccentric with a history of financial instability and a susceptibility to all manner of conspiracy theories. He was also a celebrity paleontologist and a polymath, described by many as a genius. “He knew everything,” says one friend, Sascha Wildi. “You could ask him anything, and he’d talk for hours.” In death, he left behind a string of murder suspects and few answers.
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
An article from 2018 about Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja, who was abandoned as a child survived alone in the wild for 15 years living with wolves before being found.
(The Guardian, approx 26 mins reading time)
It is almost impossible to imagine what it would be like to emerge into adulthood without any of the socialisation that the rest of us unconsciously absorb, via a million imperceptible cues and incidents, as children and teenagers. When he left the convent hospital, adjusting to life among humans brought with it a series of shocks. When he first went to the cinema – to see a Western – he ran out of the theatre because he was terrified of the cowboys galloping toward the camera. The first time he ate in a restaurant, he was surprised he had to pay for his food. One day he went into a church, where an acquaintance had told him God lived. He approached the priest at the altar. “They tell me you’re God,” he said. “They tell me you know everything.”
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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