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7 deadly reads
Sitdown Sunday: 7 deadly reads
The very best of the week’s writing from around the web.
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.
Sue Lloyd Roberts joins Jerry Quinn, a former US soldier who left behind a pregnant girlfriend when he returned to America in 1973 during the Vietnam War. Now, he wants to find his son.
(BBC Magazine, approx 10 minutes reading time, 2155 words)
“I tried to keep in touch,” he says. “I sent her a hundred bucks every month for a year. I never knew whether she got it.” Brandy sent him three photos which, 40 years later, he shows to everyone he meets in the streets of Ho Chi Minh City. There are three pictures. A portrait of Brandy, a tall, beautiful Vietnamese girl in her 20s; a picture of her with their baby boy; and a picture of her standing next to a woman in a white coat.
Charles Siebert asks: should a chimp be able to sue its owner? The Nonhuman Rights Project believes so, and it is acting on behalf of a primate named Tommy.
(New York Times, approx 33 minutes reading time, 67588 words)
“Like humans,” the legal memo reads, “chimpanzees have a concept of their personal past and future . . . they suffer the pain of not being able to fulfill their needs or move around as they wish; [and] they suffer the pain of anticipating never-ending confinement.”
Adam Ferris went to work as a programmer for Microsoft in 1999 – and helped to develop MSN Messenger. He tells the inside story of the ‘chat wars’, when things got dirty.
(Nplusonemag, approx 34 minutes reading time, 6979 words)
AOL tried different tactics. At one point they seemed to be identifying the Microsoft client because it wasn’t downloading a huge chunk of advertising that the AOL client downloaded. So I changed our client to download it all (and then throw it away). They put in mysterious messages that didn’t seem to affect their client but broke ours because we weren’t expecting them. One day, I came in to see this embedded in a message from the AOL server: “HI. –MARK.”
David Peisner looks into why the Tottenham Hotspurs’ nickname (the Yids) is a major source of controversy. Is it anti-semitism, or pro-Jewish? And who should decide?
(Buzzfeed, approx 38 minutes reading time, 7686 words)
As an American Jew, it’s both thrilling and a little unnerving. As one Jewish fan told me, “At first I thought it was like a Nuremberg rally.” How Tottenham — a club formed by Christians, with a fan base that even by the most generous estimates probably isn’t more than 5–10% Jewish (almost certainly no more than local rivals Arsenal) — became, unofficially, at least, the Yids, is a complicated tale filled with as much conjecture as actual fact.
Jennifer Maloney meets Douglas Himmelfarb, who bought what he believes is a 1949 Rothko painted in California… and he’s spent nearly 30 years proving his $319 painting is worth millions.
(Wall Street Journal, approx 15 minutes reading time, 3159 words)
Mr. Himmelfarb’s long struggle highlights a crisis in the obscure but high-stakes world of art authentication. As prices for blue-chip artworks soar—the record for a Rothko is nearly $87 million—authentication is increasingly important because collectors want assurances before they open their wallets.
6. Women and the Confidence Gap
Katty Kay and Claire Shipman look at the idea of a ‘confidence gap’, and whether it affects how women progress throughout their careers.
(The Atlantic, approx 36 minutes reading time, 7222 words)
We know the feeling firsthand. Comparing notes about confidence over dinner one night last year, despite how well we knew each other, was a revelation. Katty got a degree from a top university, speaks several languages, and yet had spent her life convinced that she just wasn’t intelligent enough to compete for the most-prestigious jobs in journalism.
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
In 1981, Gabriel Garcia Marquez was interviewed by Peter H Stone about the transition from journalism to writing novels, how he started writing, and why he doesn’t like recorded interviews.
(Paris Review, approx 43 minutes reading time, 8741 words)
. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago.
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