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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.
It’s a secret, invite-only exclusive club in Disneyland in California. It took one couple nearly a decade to get in, but then they got kicked out after it was alleged that they were drunk in public. They would not go willingly.
(Vulture, approx 20 mins reading time)
Five days later, Anderson received a letter letting him know that his, along with his wife’s, Club 33 membership had been suspended. A member of Club 33 has to abide by certain rules, and Anderson had been allegedly drunk in public. Game over. It had taken him and his wife nearly a decade to get into the club in the first place, and since then, they’d spent about a third of every year in Disneyland. They celebrated nearly every holiday at the club, their son’s 21st birthday and others, a handful of marriage anniversaries. And so instead of going quietly, the Andersons decided to sue to get back in, claiming breach of contract and slander. Anderson wasn’t drunk, he said — he’d had a vestibular migraine. And furthermore, he was being targeted. The Club 33 he’d joined five years earlier, the very last thing that Walt Disney designed before he had died, had been ruined by expansion, greed, and punitive managers obsessed with waging campaigns against anyone who dared to complain about anything. “Instead of taking the feedback as an opportunity to improve the club,” Anderson says, “they took it as an opportunity to get rid of people.”
In this extract from a book examining how wealthy countries bend rules and regulations to their advantage, Atossa Araxia Abrahamian writes about the 90-year-old former politician who has spent decades being a thorn in the side of Switzerland’s elites.
(The Guardian, approx 17 mins reading time)
Switzerland is landlocked. That is no impediment to its being home to some of the biggest shipping companies in the world, which charter and manage vessels from Geneva while shrouding their beneficial (de facto) owners in layers of corporate secrecy. This way of positioning itself in the world is Geneva’s greatest contribution to the way we all live now: in an age of exceptions, in which the where and when don’t matter as much as who, how much and why. It’s a world where wealth travels in abstract form: numbers on a screen, trades on a terminal. It’s a world in which borders are drawn not just around places but also around people and things. Ziegler saw this early and exposed it often, risking his livelihood (and certainly his popularity with his compatriots) relentlessly.
Ashley and James Schwalm appeared to have the perfect life, but their marriage was not what it seemed. In this engrossing article, Luc Rinaldi writes about Ashley’s killing, and the wider issue of femicide in Canada.
(Toronto Life, approx 29 mins reading time)
He drove a little farther, pulled over to the shoulder and got out of his car. The stench of gasoline and burning rubber filled his nostrils as he walked to the left edge of the roadway and peered over the guardrails. There, in a ditch several metres below the road, was an SUV engulfed in flames. He called 911, and by dawn, Arrowhead Road was blocked off and crawling with emergency responders. Firefighters had tamed the blaze, and now OPP officers were inspecting the crash site. The vehicle, a blackened Mitsubishi Outlander, was wedged into the Canadian Shield. Inside, investigators discovered a ghastly sight: a charred human corpse curled up in the passenger-side footwell.
A look inside the Working Dog Center in Pennsylvania, where canine students graduate from their scent detection studies into fields like cadaver search, explosive and drug detection and even disease detection research.
(Popular Scientist, approx 13 mins reading time)
Almost every dog who enters PVWDC exits into a stable nose-related job, because–unlike more specified training programs for seeing eye or police dogs–the humans at PVWDC try their best to follow the dog’s lead. If a dog proves to be a square peg, then there’s almost certainly a hole to match. “The most important thing is they’re doing what they love,” says Ruth Desiderio, the center’s volunteer and outreach coordinator leading the public tour I’ve joined in on. The dogs, she explains, indicate their interests and aptitude through apparent eagerness and ambivalence, and are allowed to proceed accordingly. If a dog relishes the challenge of sniffing out a hidden human, but reacts with fear to loud, sudden banging sounds–perhaps they’re destined for wilderness over urban search and rescue. If they love to smell and be rewarded, but crave routine, then a long-term post in the lab could be the perfect fit.
Kelefa Sanneh profiles the glamorous, murder mystery franchise’s creator Mike White ahead of the release of the third season.
(The New Yorker, approx 33 mins reading time)
White says that, in some ways, the “White Lotus” character he most resembles is Quinn, the socially maladroit son from Season 1, who doesn’t seem to care about anyone or anything until he joins a sea-canoeing crew of local men. Exalted, he decides not to go home. White now owns two houses on Kauai. Compared with the tourists, he is a local, but compared with the natives he is a wealthy interloper, not entirely different from the “White Lotus” characters he satirized. “Unless I feel somehow personally indicted, it doesn’t feel like I’m doing anything that bold,” he told me. “I have to take these people seriously enough that it isn’t just a satire.” One of Kauai’s most famous part-time residents, Mark Zuckerberg, reportedly owns more than a thousand acres of beachfront property, including an underground bunker. But the difference between his compound and White’s modest pair of houses is merely one of scale. “I can make fun of Mark Zuckerberg—but I am also that person,” White says.
Author and prize-winning poet Muhammad al-Zaqzouq gives his account of the first weeks of Israel’s war in Gaza in this powerful essay.
(The New York Review of Books, approx 23 mins reading time)
That night we tried to sleep, Ula and the kids on the bed and I on the floor. The children dozed off quickly, exhausted after a day of adrenaline, and Ula wasn’t far behind them, but the whine of low-flying reconnaissance craft and the intermittent roar of bombers kept me on edge. Soon after I finally dropped off, a deafening blast woke everybody in the house, this time coming from inside the camp. In the morning we learned that the strike had killed a whole family; a mother and children had been pulled from the rubble in pieces. Their funeral passed our house on its way to the cemetery. It set the pattern for the days that followed: enormous explosions at night, funerals during the day.
The guitarist who saved hundreds of people on a sinking cruise liner.
(BBC, approx 10 mins reading time)
Earlier that day, gale-force winds and heavy rains had delayed sailing for the final leg of the cruise towards Durban several times. But with no sign of conditions improving, the captain eventually decided to lift anchor and the Oceanos, with 581 guests and crew on board, sailed off into 40-knot winds and 9m-high (30ft) waves. Moss and Tracy, both in their 30s, would usually host parties up on the pool deck as the ship sailed away from port. But that day the party had been moved indoors, and Moss braced his body while he played his guitar, trying to keep his balance as the ship pitched and rolled. “The storm just got worse and worse,” Moss says. At dinner, Tracy – who her husband describes as unflappable – decided to go to their cabin to organise an emergency bag, just in case. “Off she went,” Moss says, “and suddenly – boom – all the lights went out.”
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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