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Take a Break
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.
Tata was a cocaine dealer – and a formidable one at that. Part of the Sinaloa cartel, he helped carry drugs for the trafficking ring. And, writes Sam Dolnick, he was nearly 90 years old.
(New York Times, approx 32 minutes reading time, 6437 words)
The organization worked with Detroit’s biggest drug dealers, people like Antonio (Pancho) Simmons, a fearsome, one-legged man with a long criminal record. But in some ways, it was the couriers driving across the country’s highways, their cars’ hidden compartments packed with kilos of drugs, who played the most crucial role. And no courier had been more prolific than Tata, the one driving the Lincoln pickup on Oct. 21, 2011.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is the presenter of Cosmos, a series based on the seminal TV show headed by Carl Sagan in 1980. He talks race, space, and celebrity with Rembert Browne.
(Grantland, approx 20 minutes reading time, 4142 words)
Yes, one of the angles of Cosmos is to celebrate the efforts of people who have struggled to bring scientific truths into public awareness. It’s usually some kind of dogma that interferes. Religious dogma, sexual dogma, social dogma, cultural dogma — there’s often some force operating against a person becoming successful. And in some cases it was poverty. If you were poor, you had no hope at all.
Rookie magazine is aimed at teen girls, but it always has something in it for everybody. Like this piece by Charles Aaron that’s asks: What is a boy?
(Rookie, approx 24 minutes reading time, 4982 words)
The goal here is not to be a Noble Selfless Martyr (boring! impossible!), but just to recognize the mechanics of how sexism hurts both girls and boys, which can be tough in the chaos of dealing with classes, jobs, and extracurriculars. By enacting ancient sexist rituals, sometimes without any clue that we’re doing it, we are demeaning and cheating ourselves.
4. Growing up in a broken city
Author Juan Gabriel Vásquez grew up in Bogotá, Colombia, a city rife with violence, where drug lord Pablo Escobar held sway through much of the 1980s and early 1990s. He spoke to me about how his experiences informed his work.
(TheJournal.ie, approx 8 minutes reading time, 1444 words)
I understood how much those years had an impact or left an imprint on us our relationship with fear, with the idea of unpredictable violence, I really hadn’t realised up to what point we lived with the intuition that something bad could happen at any moment of the day. I began to understand some of my own attitudes, my own paranoid feelings sometimes.
Every wonder how recycling works – not just the mechanics of it but all the different elements that combine to make the process possible? Robert W Fieseler brings an aluminium can back to life for us.
(The Big Roundtable, approx 97 minutes reading time, 19,575 words)
The aluminum beverage can is a marvel of industrial design. Everything about it is designed to please you. It’s easy to stack, satisfying to open, easy to grip with your thumb and forefinger, convenient to purchase in quantity. The can never rusts, due to the non-ferrous properties of aluminum, and its byproduct from exposure to air is a protective layer. The can is easy to crush when empty and nearly impossible to crush when sealed.
What links Ireland’s banking crisis and the crash of Air France flight AF447? Stephen Darcy Collins posits that both show that human behaviour can lead to unexpected outcomes.
(Krank.ie, approx 20 minutes reading time, 4100 words)
Realising that a problem is merely a symptom of a bigger one is disconcerting, but it is better than not knowing at all. Brian Lenihan had been Minister for Finance for four months when two bankers visited him in his office on September 28th 2008. They informed him that Anglo Irish Bank had borrowed heavily in previous years in order to make cheap credit available to its customers.
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
Writer Barry Hannah grew up hearing rumours about a leper ‘colony’ in south Louisiana. He went to look for it, and this is what he found.
(Oxford American, approx 29 minutes reading time, 5938 words)
But the victims themselves, the “colony.” I saw a good many of them making their way down the enormous stretch of halls on bicycles and wheelchairs, and with good cheer, almost all of them. Zelda Brown, a black Mississippian in her eighties and legless, came my way cranking an antique vehicle by hand. This seemed a cruel adventure, an atavism beyond outrage, such as you would find only in a work by Samuel Beckett. Yet Zelda was laughing.
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