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. Being a Premier League referee
Some of the league’s most famous referees offer a frank insight into the work that goes into the job, the hatred directed at them and the effects of VAR on the role. A must-read whether you are a football fan or not.
(The Guardian, approx 46 mins reading time)
Football refereeing is one of the toughest jobs in sport, and over the years, it takes its toll. “I can’t think of any other job where there’s this much scrutiny over decision-making. Maybe a surgeon?” said Marriner recently. On the pitch, referees are routinely booed, insulted, told to fuck off. Most referees have stories of crowd members throwing coins or bottles at them, of being spat at. At the top level, referees’ family members can become targets. When I asked Marriner about the hardest parts of the job, he told me how Oliver, his son, would be picked on at school whenever he made a contentious decision. In 2021, after Mike Dean sent off a West Ham player, his daughter received death threats online. “They were saying they knew where we lived and they were going to petrol bomb the house,” Dean told the BBC.
Mira Sethi writes about her experiences as a woman in Pakistan, and why an annual march held to observe International Women’s Day still sparks controversy in the country.
(The New Yorker, approx 10 mins reading time)
Are you tempted to ask what I was wearing each time I was harassed? To be a woman in Pakistan is to encounter this question and its subtext everywhere we go. It is to encounter the cultural assumption that sexual assault can be prevented by dressing and behaving “modestly,” no matter that CCTV footage of busy streets in Pakistani cities routinely shows women in burqas being harassed. Seven-year-old Zainab Ansari—victim of one of the most henious cases of rape and murder in Pakistan—was fully clothed as she was led away by her rapist. But to be a woman in Pakistan is to have a slew of alternative facts thrown one’s way, all day, every day—on TV, in sermons, at banks, on the road, in the privacy of one’s bedroom.
The first episode of the show’s final season premieres today. In this interview, Matthew Macfadyen talks about creating the character of Tom Wambsgans, and what to expect from his final outing.
(The Ringer, approx 25 mins reading time)
As the drama’s fourth and final season begins, Tom has transformed himself from a puffy-vest-wearing patsy into a power player. At the end of Season 1, his wife was pushing him into an open marriage on his wedding night, but at the end of Season 3, he’s the one ruthlessly playing both sides and shivving her—a shocking twist that wouldn’t feel believable without Macfadyen’s chameleonic performance. “He has a wonderful way, as an actor, of keeping secrets,” Mylod says. “The genius thing about what he holds back is it’s there, and you are reaching for it behind his eyes, so you can’t take your eyes off him because of that. That’s what always pulled me to the character. There’s this clown on the outside, but what are you hiding?”
A look at the work scientists are doing to build a permanent base on the Moon.
(BBC Future, approx 9 mins reading time)
The crew of the final Apollo mission, Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt, spent the longest on the lunar surface of any astronauts so far: 75 hours in total. Cernan likened it to a camping expedition – they ate and slept, in hammocks, inside the compact lander and put on their spacesuits to head outside. In comparison, the astronauts of Artemis III are scheduled to stay on the Moon for around a week and can expect a few more home comforts – and a lot more space.
A profound conversation between Amanda Petrusich and Nick Cave about grief.
(The New Yorker, approx 27 mins reading time)
Loss becomes the primary condition of living. That doesn’t mean you’re in a hopeless, grief-stricken state all the time; it just means that you carry a deeper understanding of what it is to be human. We suffer as human beings, but out of that can come enormous joys, and genuine happiness, too. It can run in tandem with this ordinary sense of suffering. Otherwise, joy doesn’t resonate fully. Joy seems to leap forth out of suffering. Regardless of your loss, you see how beautiful, how meaningful, how joyful the world can suddenly be. Human beings in general, you know, are fleeting things. That’s something to understand on a fundamental level. That we have value. That we are precious.
Why are numerous Western governments banning the Chinese-owned video sharing app from their work devices, and should we be concerned?
(Politico, approx 7 mins reading time)
Western security officials have warned that ByteDance could be subject to China’s national security legislation, particularly the 2017 National Security Law that requires Chinese companies to “support, assist and cooperate” with national intelligence efforts. This law is a blank check for Chinese spy agencies, they say. TikTok’s user data could also be accessed by the company’s hundreds of Chinese engineers and operations staff, any one of whom could be working for the state, Western officials say. In December 2022, some ByteDance employees in China and the U.S. targeted journalists at Western media outlets using the app (and were later fired).
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
An audio longread from 2019 on the business of shipping priceless artwork. You can read the text version here.
(The Guardian, approx 34 mins listening time/28 mins reading time)
Even if you are an obsessive gallery-goer, it’s possible you haven’t put much thought into how the works on the wall came to be there. The art world prefers it this way: what happens behind the signs reading “No Entry: Installation in Progress” remains a ferociously guarded secret. The only hint that this Song dynasty bronze has arrived from that private collection in Taiwan, for example, is a discreet credit on the wall. It may be that, absorbed in our face-to-face encounter with the artwork – what Walter Benjamin described as its “aura” – many of us prefer not to gaze too deeply into that mystery.
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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