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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 some of the week’s best reads for you to savour.
In 2023, a journalist received an envelope containing a flash drive with tens of thousands of secret files. It came from John Williams, a vigilante who had spent two years infiltrating the highest ranks of prominent right-wing militias in the US.
In this fascinating read, Josh Kaplan reports what Williams uncovered.
(ProPublica, approx 40 mins reading time)
Williams had recently made a secret purchase of a small black device off Amazon. It looked like a USB drive. The on-off switch and microphone holes revealed what it really was: a bug. As the two men chatted over cups of cannoli-flavored coffee, Williams didn’t notice when Kinch’s dog snatched the bug from his bag. The night before, Williams had slept in the guest room. The house was cluttered with semiautomatic rifles. He had risked photographing three plaques on the walls inscribed with the same Ernest Hemingway line. “There is no hunting like the hunting of man,” they read. “Those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else.” They spotted the dog at the same time. The bug was attached to a charging device. The animal was running around with it like it was a tennis ball. As Kinch went to retrieve it, Williams felt panic grip his chest. Could anyone talk their way out of this? He’d learned enough about Kinch to be terrified of his rage. Looking around, Williams eyed his host’s handgun on the kitchen counter.
Are dogs really communicating with their owners using ‘talking buttons’?
(The New York Times, approx 17 mins reading time)
Bunny was advanced in her use of the buttons, a star student. But there was also an endless video stream of other dogs — also cats, pigs, horses and cows — making equally clever and entertaining statements. I would open the apps and see a mini Aussiedoodle with a taste for dirt demanding to go OUTSIDE for a SNACK. A French cat being denied a treat and complaining, with apparent disdain, PAS CONTENT. These pets weren’t just standing by to serve their human owners. They were companions with voices of their own. I looked over at Ellie, lying in the far corner of the room. Her eyes were dark, her feelings mysterious. What was buried inside that impenetrable dog skull? If I could teach her to use these buttons, she would tell me. Or so I imagined.
An unpublished author is suing a bestselling ‘romantasy’ – that’s romance and fantasy – writer, accusing her of plagiarising her work. Katy Waldman examines whether theft can be proved in a genre that relies heavily on standardised tropes.
(The New Yorker, approx 29 mins reading time)
Freeman immediately spotted similarities to her own unpublished book. The main character was named Grace, not Anna, and her love interest was a vampire, not a werewolf, but in both stories the heroine moves from San Diego to Alaska after members of her family are killed in an accident. She lives with the only two relatives she believes she has left, both of whom are witches. A female rival slips her drugs. There’s an intimate moment under the northern lights. In a climactic scene, an evil vampire kidnaps her, and she ends up accidentally freeing a different vampire, whose return is said to herald the end of the world. (In Freeman’s planned sequel and Wolff’s actual ones, this vampire replaces the previous hero as the main character’s primary love interest.)
A look at why fire hydrants in Los Angeles ran dry as firefighters battled California’s deadly fires this week.
(Los Angeles Times, approx 8 mins reading time)
When a wildfire erupts, L.A. fire crews often turn to using aircraft to drop water and fire retardant. But while the flames were spreading rapidly on Tuesday and Wednesday, officials temporarily grounded water-dropping helicopters because of the extraordinarily strong Santa Ana winds, making crews more dependent on the limited water systems on the ground. To help, city officials sent tanker trucks to supply water for crews in areas where supplies were limited.
The firefighting efforts put the area’s water system under tremendous strain and “pushed the system to the extreme,” with four times the usual water demand for 15 hours, said Janisse Quiñones, DWP’s chief executive and chief engineer. She said the hydrants rely on three large water tanks with about 1 million gallons each. Hydrants functioned at lower elevations, but in hillier areas like the Palisades Highlands — where the storage tanks hold water that flows by gravity to communities below — they ran dry.
In this essay, historian Timothy Ryback gives a step-by-step account of how Adolf Hitler used Germany’s constitution to dismantled the country’s democratic structures and processes in less than two months.
(The Atlantic, approx 21 mins reading time)
Hitler opened the meeting by boasting that millions of Germans had welcomed his chancellorship with “jubilation,” then outlined his plans for expunging key government officials and filling their positions with loyalists. At this point he turned to his main agenda item: the empowering law that, he argued, would give him the time (four years, according to the stipulations laid out in the draft of the law) and the authority necessary to make good on his campaign promises to revive the economy, reduce unemployment, increase military spending, withdraw from international treaty obligations, purge the country of foreigners he claimed were “poisoning” the blood of the nation, and exact revenge on political opponents. “Heads will roll in the sand,” Hitler had vowed at one rally.
In 1993, two biologists were searching for endangered tortoises in the Mojave Desert when they found human bones.
(Outside, approx 34 mins reading time)
Shortly after noon that day, Sally made an odd discovery: a wad of cash that appeared to be stained with dried blood. She unrolled the paper. Thirty-eight dollars. They smelled decaying flesh. Partly covered by sand, wrapped in some sort of bedspread, was—something. “At first we thought it was dead dogs,” Craig said, noting that locals sometimes buried their pets there. Then Craig found a clump of long blond hair. The coyotes had discovered the body first. Craig pulled back the quilt to reveal human bones and a woman’s clothing. “There were two spent shotgun shells,” he told me. It was clear that the woman had been dead for some time, so the trio finished their survey. Then they trekked back to the car, drove to a pay phone, and led the police back to the site. The cops located a skull not far from the quilt. “She’d been shot through the temple,” Craig said.
A longread from 2015 about Ken Dornstein, whose brother David was killed in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing in 1988, and his search for the truth.
(The New Yorker, approx 45 mins reading time)
For years, Dornstein said little to his friends or family about Lockerbie or about his brother. But he began applying the same quiet compulsiveness that he had channelled into the Dave Archives to the larger riddle of the bombing. He clipped articles, pored over archival footage, and sought out people who had known David. One day, at Penn Station in Manhattan, he spotted Kathryn Geismar, who had dated David for two years. They ended up on the same train, stayed in touch, and eventually fell in love. Initially, Ken hid the romance from his family, fearful that they might consider it an “unholy way to grieve.” But the relationship didn’t revolve around David; part of what comforted Ken about being with Geismar was that he didn’t need to talk with her about his loss. She already knew. After college, Dornstein moved to Los Angeles and took a job at a detective agency. His colleagues knew nothing of his brother, but he privately took solace from accumulating investigative skills. “I was interested in the tradecraft of how you find people,” he recalled. He wondered about the shadowy culprits behind the Lockerbie bombing. “I wasn’t a worldly person, I hadn’t travelled,” he told me. “But I kept thinking, These guys are out there.”
Note: The Journal generally selects stories that are not paywalled, but some might not be accessible if you have exceeded your free article limit on the site in question.
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