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.
A gripping yet devastating read about a family with a rare genetic mutation that causes early-onset dementia. Each of them have a 50% chance of inheriting it, and there is no cure.
(The New York Times Magazine, approx 34 mins reading time)
Even now, many in the family struggle with how to explain the impossible situation they’ve found themselves in. An earthquake or hurricane or war comes close — only a strange science-fiction version, something not visible or experienced by anyone but them; a disaster existing only inside their family’s genetic code. There were the facts — it’s inherited, anyone might have it — and there were the deeper questions raised by those facts. How do you feel safe, knowing that it is in your family’s essential nature to be fragile, ephemeral, ever close to expiration? How do you keep living when you know that everything that makes you a conscious person could disappear? If you were going to lose yourself — in a year, or two, or 10 — would you even want to know?
While the movies about the Mattel doll and ‘the father of the atomic bomb’ have been battling it out at the box office, Anthony Lane reviews how the films manage to bring both figures to life. Be warned – it contains spoilers.
(The New Yorker, approx 9 mins reading time)
Like “The Social Network” (2010), “Oppenheimer” is structured around two inquisitions, each of which is designed to load us with information and to trigger significant flashbacks. If, in the process, we feel dumb and dumber, tough. The first is a closed hearing, in 1954, at which Oppenheimer’s security clearance is revoked—an affront from which he never recovers. The revocation (which was not officially voided until last year) turns upon his left-wing sympathies before the war, but it has clearly been engineered by the F.B.I. and by certain figures who have Oppenheimer’s worst interests at heart. The second occasion is a Senate hearing, in 1959, that is held to confirm the appointment of Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.) as President Eisenhower’s Secretary of Commerce. And what does that, you may wonder, have to do with blowing things up?
The 1922 Committee has gotten rid of three UK prime ministers in the last four years. Tanya Gold explores the power behind the Conservative Party backbenchers group, and how likely it is that they will be paying Rishi Sunak a visit.
(New Statesman, approx 18 mins reading time)
The Tories have a taste for theatre and the ’22 is the seat of their internal democracy, one of the backbenchers’ favourite playhouses. Its weekly meeting is held on Wednesday at 5pm in the neo-gothic horror of Committee Room 14 in the Houses of Parliament. The room is vast and high, walled in Augustus Pugin’s poisonous green paper. The carpet is a blinding collection of shapes; the seats of the executive look like a judge’s bench. Paintings of lost Tories line the walls, hung so high you cannot see their faces or read their names. Backbenchers long to be on the ’22 executive: if you are not in government, it is an alternative power base. Two of its former executive committee members – Charles Walker and Bernard Jenkin – sat on the Privileges Committee, whose report ended Boris Johnson’s political career in June. I knew Johnson was finished when Jenkin questioned him with gentle sympathy, as a Soprano might speak to a man he is about to kill.
An informative and deeply personal account of the violence that has engulfed Khartoum and the toll of the destruction on the population, written by Sudanese-born journalist Nesrine Malik.
(The Guardian, approx 21 mins reading time)
There was no fighting around my family home, and my sister and her husband, newly married, who lived there, resolutely refused to leave. Once safe routes had been established to Egypt, I, along with other family members who had left the city, tried to persuade them to flee. Every day I would call them, and every day they would report, with an eerie, jolly tone of reassurance, that things were calm where they were, and so there was no need to leave. I would try gentle persuasion, then frustrated scolding. I would give up, then redouble my efforts, seized with terror that if something happened to them I would forever be haunted with regret that I hadn’t done enough. Their refusal to leave was in part down to denial that the city could unravel so quickly, and in part to fear of leaving their whole lives behind. But their resolve soon crumbled in the face of reality: two weeks into the fighting they fled, making a treacherous journey to a small village in the east of Sudan.
Daniel MacSweeney will oversee the Tuam excavation, Ireland’s first-ever exhumation of a children’s mass grave. He speaks to Alison O’Reilly about the project.
(Irish Examiner, approx 9 mins reading time)
MacSweeney explains how he watched the Tuam tragedy unfold while working with the Red Cross in Lebanon and hoped to be involved in the exhumation. While there is no definite timeline for the recovery of the remains, he promises “full transparency” throughout the process. And he says the establishment of a DNA bank is one of his top priorities, given the ageing population of relatives. The Cork native is in regular contact with the families of the Tuam Babies, but only a small number have come forward so far. “It’s given me plenty of sleepless nights,” said Mr MacSweeney. “But there is a process to this exhumation, and it has been done before all over the world. I do not know how long it will take, and the exhumation can’t happen straight away. I may not even be able to tell you, say, in six months, but I will follow the correct process, and I want to be able to say I did my best and I did it right.”
In an extract from his book, Oliver Franklin-Wallis travels to Ghana to write about the enormous percentage of donated clothes that ends up in vast landfills due to the ever-growing empire of fast fashion.
(GQ, approx 11 mins reading time)
Amid the explosion in online shopping and TikTok trends for fast-fashion hauls, thrift stores—and thrifting apps—have exploded in the last few years. In fact, in small towns like mine, brick and mortar stores have stopped being primarily a place to buy goods, but more often a place to dispose of them. According to one British study, we only wear 44 percent of the clothing we own. And when we need more room, how better to dispose of our old clothes than donate them to charity? Unfortunately, it’s never that simple. Consider: only between 10 and 30 percent of second-hand donations to charity shops are actually resold in store. The rest disappears into a machine you don’t see: a vast sorting apparatus in which donated goods are graded and then resold on to commercial partners, often for export to the Global South.
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
A longread from 2019 about what is causing higher water levels in Venice, and how a solution to the flooding was almost scuppered by a corruption scandal.
(The Guardian, approx 19 mins reading time)
The average sea level rise predicted by the IPCC, the United Nations body for assessing climate change, is 0.43 metres by the end of the 21st century, and it could be as high as a metre or more. In Venice, higher water levels, adding to the effect of subsidence, are creating new, possibly unsustainable, stresses on the lagoon defences and the city. Already, higher water levels cause rising damp in Venice’s ageing walls, crumbling the bricks and rusting the ties that hold up the buildings. The effect of higher water is also aggravated by lagoon erosion. While the tides took between 90 minutes and two hours to enter a century ago, now they enter in an hour. With the lagoon an average of 1.5 metres deep, twice what it was, the tides not only rise higher but also move faster and in greater volume on entering and leaving. The number of acque alte have also been rising since the last century: the number of floods over 1.1 metres have doubled since the 60s, due not only to subsidence and sea level rise, but also to increase in wind, waves and storms related to the climate crisis.
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