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.
1. The misunderstood world of vaping
Finding it hard to separate the fact from fiction and supposition in the great vaping debate? So did the writer of this article, so they went and found out more.
(California Sunday Magazine, approx 40 mins reading time)
No one seemed to know what was happening — whether vaping nicotine or vaping cannabis or the vaporizer device itself was the cause — but there was a sudden demand for someone to do something. President Trump announced a plan to ban flavored electronic cigarettes. School districts, state attorneys general, and private citizens sued Juul Labs, the company that had more than a 70 percent share of the e-cigarette market. China removed Juul from stores. India banned vaping altogether.
There were rumours for many years of a shipwrecked treasure on the Oregon coast. No one found anything… until Cameron La Follette began digging.
(Atavist, approx 35 mins reading time)
A huddle of malnourished sailors were said to have emerged from the water, dragging a heavy chest over the beach toward Neahkahnie. By some accounts, the sailors then murdered an African slave who’d helped carry the chest, dumping the man’s body in a hole with the treasure before covering it with earth. The wreck reverberated for generations, the stories of treasure repeated and retold, rephrased and revised, evolving with each telling: The galleon wrecked in an epic battle with two other ships. The survivors, once ashore, were slaughtered by tribal people.
A writer examines her relationship with Instagram.
(The Guardian, approx 20 mins reading time)
Posting was its own separate pleasure. I would eventually come to post for attention, like everyone else – but early on, when nobody liked my pictures, I still found it gratifying to post. The satisfaction of self-publishing is difficult to describe. To press a button and see your own excrescence appear in the preordained format, minted, can feel like a kind of magic. It can make you feel like you count. But what people saw from me was less important to my mental health than what I saw of them.
4. Search for the mountaineers
During the time of the Cold War, a group of Americans went climbing Peak Lenin in the Soviet Union. Then the storm struck.
(CNN, approx 21 mins reading time)
Williamson broke trail and urged Blum on when she sat, exhausted. On the way down the pair saw Blum’s two teammates and a Bavarian woman friend and entreated them to descend as well; Isenschmid, a 23-year-old photographer and artist whom North calls a “gentle soul,” was to die in the storm the next day despite strenuous rescue efforts from her partners and French, German and American climbers.
After he received a heart transplant, Mike Cohen cycled 1,426 miles to meet the parents of the boy whose organ saved him.
(Bicycling, approx 20 mins reading time)
Under the fluorescent lights, with the rhythmic beeping of life-sustaining machines punctuating the silence, it was time for Christine to finish what James had started on that day 17 years before. It was time to honor the spirit of a man who had switched his major from commerce engineering to pre-med because he wanted to help people. It was time to make her very worst day some stranger’s best one.
6. How far can abused women go to protect themselves?
In the US, some women with strong self-defence claims are finding themselves charged with murder.
(New Yorker, approx 30 mins reading time)
When Chris again dropped off Brittany and Todd, Brittany told him to go see Painter. At the gas station, Chris said, he went “blank.” Then he drove back to Brittany’s house with a registered .22-calibre revolver that he kept in his car. Meanwhile, Brittany had texted her mother. “Mom Todd has tried to kill me literally,” she wrote. “Don’t act like anything is wrong . . . He will kill me if he knows.”
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
Is everything we know about obesity wrong?
(Huffington Post Highline, approx 30 mins reading time)
The emotional costs are incalculable. I have never written a story where so many of my sources cried during interviews, where they double- and triple-checked that I would not reveal their names, where they shook with anger describing their interactions with doctors and strangers and their own families. One remembered kids singing “Baby Beluga” as she boarded the school bus, another said she has tried diets so extreme she has passed out and yet another described the elaborate measures he takes to keep his spouse from seeing him naked in the light.
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