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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.
Lila Shapiro reports on the harrowing allegations of sexual assault against the fantasy writer, his upbringing in Scientology and his relationship with his former wife.
(Note: This story contains allegations of sexual assault that readers may find distressing.)
(Vulture, approx 56 mins reading time)
This past July, a British podcast produced by Tortoise Media broke the news that two women had accused Gaiman of sexual assault. Since then, more women have shared allegations of assault, coercion, and abuse. The podcast, Master, reported by Paul Caruana Galizia and Rachel Johnson, tells the stories of five of them. (Gaiman’s perspective on these relationships, including with Pavlovich, is that they were entirely consensual.) I spoke with four of those women along with four others whose stories share elements with theirs. I also reviewed contemporaneous diary entries, texts and emails with friends, messages between Gaiman and the women, and police correspondence. Most of the women were in their 20s when they met Gaiman. The youngest was 18. Two of them worked for him. Five were his fans. With one exception, an allegation of forcible kissing from 1986, when Gaiman was in his mid-20s, the stories take place when Gaiman was in his 40s or older, a period in which he lived among the U.S., the U.K., and New Zealand. By then, he had a reputation as an outspoken champion of women. “Gaiman insists on telling the stories of people who are traditionally marginalized, missing, or silenced in literature,” wrote Tara Prescott-Johnson in the essay collection Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman. Although his books abounded with stories of men torturing, raping, and murdering women, this was largely perceived as evidence of his empathy.
Ariel Sabar speaks to a man who, along with his childhood friends from northeastern Pennsylvania, pulled off a string of sports memorabilia heists and evaded the FBI and over a dozen police agencies for two decades.
(The Atlantic, approx 32 mins reading time)
Money was becoming tighter, too. Berra’s 16 rings and two MVP plaques—valued at $1.5 million intact—had grossed Trotta’s crew just $10,300 after melting. The more he and his wife fought, the more he wondered how long he could keep it up: the burglaries, the lies, all of it. He thought about day-trading or opening a restaurant. If he could pull one last job—a really big one—he’d have the capital to start an honest business, draw a steadier income, do better as a husband and dad. He was turning 40. It was time. He found an exit the way he’d found everything else: on Google. In 1894, the Russian Empress Alexandra wore a spectacular crown at her wedding to Czar Nicholas II, the same Nicholas, incidentally, whose Fabergé tureen Trotta had stolen from the racing museum in Goshen. Some 1,535 diamonds covered six velvet-draped silver bands, which converged beneath a cross made of six larger diamonds. Trotta believed he could get $5 million in the Diamond District by scrapping the crown’s stones.
It houses around eight million objects from nearly every corner of the globe. But fresh debate about how items were taken during Britain’s colonial past, talk of repatriation and controversy over a purloining employee has raised questions about the British Museum’s future.
(The Guardian, approx 22 mins reading time)
It is a sprawling, chaotic reflection of Britain’s psyche over 300 years: its voracious curiosity and cultural relativism; its pugnacious superiority complex; its restless seafaring and trading; its cruel imperial enrichment; its brilliant scholarship, its brutality, its idealism, its postcolonial anxiety. All of this is expressed through the amassing of objects: a demented accumulation, a mania for hoarding that, in any human, would be regarded as a kind of illness. The museum contains, in total, 8m objects. Or maybe 6m, depending on how you count them. (A collection of 1m cigarette cards bequeathed in 2006 is counted as a single item, for instance.) Either way, the collection is vast and grows every year. Add together everything owned by the Louvre, the National Gallery and the V&A, and you still have fewer than half the objects possessed by the British Museum.
As part of a series on who controls the world’s wealth, this fascinating piece takes a deep dive into Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan – the spy chief of the UAE who controls a $1.5 trillion fortune and wants to turn Abu Dhabi into an AI superpower.
(WIRED, approx 26 mins reading time)
One of their fears is that the intellectual property of the United States could still leak to China. “The Emiratis are the consummate hedgers,” a former senior US security official told me. “The question everyone has: Are they playing both sides?” In a July open letter, US congressman Michael McCaul, the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called for “significantly more robust national security guardrails” to be placed on the UAE before the US exported any sensitive technology to the country. But the other fear is of the UAE itself—a country whose vision of using AI as a mechanism of state control is not all that different from Beijing’s. “The UAE is an authoritarian state with a dismal human rights record and a history of using technology to spy on activists, journalists, and dissidents,” says Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “I don’t think there is any doubt that the UAE would like to influence the course of AI development”—in ways that are optimized not for democracy or any “shared human values,” but for police states.
How do the superstars of yesterday get back into the mainstream and enjoy renewed success? Nicholas Barber shares the secrets and looks at some of the biggest examples.
(BBC, approx 9 mins reading time)
A comeback is even more compelling if the actor’s own experiences are echoed by what’s happening on screen. In The Substance, Moore plays an ex-superstar who has been thrown on the scrapheap – something that she herself knows all about. And such self-referential scenarios crop up again and again in comeback vehicles, from Sunset Boulevard (1950), in which Gloria Swanson played a faded silent film diva, just as she herself was, to the films that revived Bette Davis’s career at two different points, All About Eve (1950) and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962).
If a five-star review feels fake, it probably is, writes Timothy Caulfield.
(The Walrus, approx 9 mins reading time)
Over 70 percent of consumers, one industry survey found, won’t pull the trigger on a purchase unless they’ve read online consumer reviews. We assume ratings, raves, and rants will be there to guide us through the noise. So many of our day-to-day decisions are shaped by them. Online reviews exist for almost every product, service, and human experience. A 2021 survey of 6,000 online consumers found “ratings and reviews have become the most important factor impacting online purchase decisions.” In fact, survey participants placed the value of online reviews above price, free shipping, brand, and recommendations from family and friends. The survey found 94 percent of customers ranked it as the single most important factor, and four out of five said they won’t shop on a website unless it has customer reviews.
A beautiful essay about finding dance later in life and the joy that comes from it.
(Slate, approx 11 mins reading time)
The dance studio had just opened on my corner—I didn’t even have to cross a street to get there. So what I asked myself was just how lazy I would have to be not to try a class. I had fond, if vague, childhood memories of the weekly modern dance classes I took for five or six years at the famous Marjorie Mazia School in Brooklyn, where I grew up. Marjorie was a former Martha Graham dancer and Woody Guthrie’s wife. (I do remember Nora Guthrie as the “big girl” who danced at the front of the studio, so we little girls could follow her, and Arlo as the sullen teenager who would sometimes sit in a corner scowling over a book. I also remember Marjorie’s long green wrap skirt and tambourine and her urging us to move “like the flame of a candle.”) I quit Marjorie’s at 12, when the presumably more mature pleasures of junior high school beckoned (I was wrong, obviously; there were no pleasures, only pain), and I don’t remember missing it, but it had left its mark: The thought of a dance class did not fill me with despair or fury the way a Pilates class or the contemplation of a gym membership would have. Plus, I enjoyed dancing at parties. So maybe this would be fun, I told myself. Maybe I wouldn’t hate it.
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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