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.
When two Canadian men who had very different upbringings learn that they were switched at birth, it forces them to question who they are and what kind of life they could have had. A profound read that raises questions about identity and privilege.
(The New York Times, approx 8 mins reading time)
The mistake occurred 67 years ago inside a rural Canadian hospital where, born hours apart, Mr. Beauvais and Mr. Ambrose say they were sent home with the wrong parents. For 65 years, each led the other’s life — for Mr. Beauvais, a difficult childhood made more traumatic by Canada’s brutal policies toward Indigenous people; for Mr. Ambrose, a happy, carefree upbringing steeped in the Ukrainian Catholic culture of his family and community, yet one divorced from his true heritage. The revelations have forced the men to question who they really are, each trying to piece together a past that could have been his and to understand the implications. “It’s like someone going into a house and stealing something from you,” Mr. Ambrose said. “It makes me feel I’ve been robbed of my identity. My whole past is gone. All I have now is the door I’m opening to my future, which I need to find.”
Rachel Monroe writes about a group of amateur divers who help to solve cold cases on YouTube by searching for missing bodies underwater, until their founder’s past resurfaces. An interesting read that examines the popularity of “true crime” online.
(The New Yorker, approx 30 mins reading time)
On long drives, Leisek would sometimes talk about his rough childhood: how he’d temporarily dropped out of high school to work at the same mill as his father; how he’d briefly been homeless and eaten out of dumpsters; how he’d gone years without speaking to his parents. But, as he told it, the story arc always bent upward, toward triumph. He was still married to his high-school sweetheart; he’d repaired his relationship with his parents; and his work with A.W.P. was bringing him both money and attention. “Now I’m in Rolling Stone, I’m on ‘Dr. Phil,’ I’m a hero to the world,” he told me. Leisek liked to dispense business and relationship advice to his team. “He was always talking about mentorship,” a former employee said. “When people quit, he’d be, like, ‘O.K., but just know, this means you’re not going to receive any more of my mentorship.’ ” Travelling with the group meant adapting to Leisek’s relentless pace and his “no nonsense, no patience” approach, as the employee put it: working on a case during the day, leaving as soon as the vehicle was pulled from the water, and then driving all night to the next site. During a six-week road trip, they might conduct thirty different searches. The rush was either to locate more “loved ones” or to capture more views; the two missions were intertwined.
Jess Casey speaks to four principals of schools in disadvantaged areas across the country who are calling for the current DEIS programme to be redeveloped to meet the needs of vulnerable and disadvantaged pupils.
(The Irish Examiner, approx 14 mins reading time)
On top of the challenges each school day brings, these schools work in areas of concentrated disadvantage where children and their families can also be deeply affected by social issues such as drug use and addiction, alcohol abuse, drug dealing and high crime rates, feuds, high unemployment, and mental health issues. If you had asked Mr Loftus a few years ago what the particular challenges of teaching in his school are, he would have given a completely different answer. Now, in 2023, a lot of the school’s work is focused on trauma and the effect this has on children and their education. “I now view the issues quite differently. A lot of the work that has been done, especially in the States and in the UK, is identifying that poverty can have similar effects on people as be it going to war, witnessing a crime, or being a victim of a crime. It’s wrapped into your mental self and it’s very difficult to break away from that. It’s embedded, the damage that can be done to people when they are young.”
John Herrman examines the three main theories out there concerning how artificial intelligence might affect the news industry in the future.
(Intelligencer, approx 13 mins reading time)
It’s tempting to get stuck on the question of whether AI tools are (or soon will be) capable of producing plausible versions of much of the content already published by these publications. As a strategy, however, the all-in-on-AI approach renders that question irrelevant. If a bot can’t convincingly mass-produce content people want to read, or at least content against which views can be somehow harvested by publishers for ads, then the plan fails. If it can — that is, if G/O can replace a bunch of its content with AI-generated topical blog posts and retain some sort of profitable readership — then it would seem the plan still fails, because if G/O can, then anyone can and will. The cost of a skimmed-and-discarded blog post will approach zero and, like other forms of content that have already been substantially automated (quarterly-earnings summaries, weather reports, basic sports results), will cease to produce much value on its own.
Inside Coober Pedy, an outback town in Australia where 60% of the population live in underground bunkers because of the heat. Could this
(BBC Future, approx 10 mins reading time)
Further along the road to Coober Pedy is the main town. At first glance, it could be mistaken for an ordinary outback settlement – the streets are pink with dust, and there are restaurants, bars, supermarkets and petrol stations. On a ridge overlooking all this is the town’s only tree, a sculpture made of metal. Coober Pedy is eerily empty. The buildings are widely spaced, and something doesn’t quite add up. But below ground, all is explained. Some of Coober Pedy’s “dugouts”, as they are known, are accessed through what look like small ordinary buildings – as you step inside, their underground passages gradually reveal themselves, like stepping through a wardrobe into Narnia. Others are more obvious – at Riba’s, a campsite where people can pitch their tents in niches several metres below ground, the entrance is a dark tunnel.
Helen Lewis writes about review-bombing, the practice that sees a website flooded with overly negative reviews from multiple accounts, and how authors see their books “reviewed” by people who have never read them.
(The Atlantic, approx 10 mins reading time)
The terrible power of Goodreads is an open secret in the publishing industry. The review site, which Amazon bought in 2013, can shape the conversation around a book or an author, both positively and negatively. Today’s ostensible word-of-mouth hits are more usually created online, either via Goodreads or social networks such as Instagram and TikTok. Publishers know how important these dynamics are, and so they send out advance reading copies, or ARCs, not just to independent booksellers who might stock a title, but also to influencers who might make content about it. “There’s an assumption that if you receive an ARC that you will post about it,” Traci Thomas, host of the literary podcast The Stacks, told me—“whether that’s on your Goodreads, on your Instagram, on your TikTok, tell other people in your bookstore, or whatever. And so that’s how it ends up that there’s so many reviews of a book that’s not out yet.”
A 2019 longread about John Barker, a British psychiatrist who began collecting stories of people’s visions, and how his work impacted him.
(The New Yorker, approx 37 mins reading time)
Barker was intrigued. He believed that he had treated at least two men during his career whose extreme agitation had either killed them or hastened their demise. Medicine seemed only partly able to explain what had happened. In 1942, Walter Cannon, the head of physiology at Harvard Medical School, had used the phrase “voodoo death” to describe a potential biological mechanism by which someone could be frightened to death—an overload of the sympathetic nervous system and the adrenal glands.
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