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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.
Sarah Stillman investigates the deaths of prisoners related to starvation, dehydration, and neglect in county jails across the US, despite private companies being paid millions for their care.
(The New Yorker, approx 51 mins reading time)
Since the seventies, private companies have offered a solution by taking health care out of the counties’ hands. Often, a company like NaphCare signs a contract with a county to provide medical and mental-health care at a capped cost; any additional money expended on care comes out of the corporation’s earnings. The companies often try to control their costs by understaffing, Eric concluded from his research. According to a 2020 examination of jail-death data by Reuters, jails that provided health care through the top five companies in that market—including NaphCare—had death rates that were eighteen to fifty-eight per cent higher than those of jails whose medical services were publicly managed. Of the five companies studied, NaphCare had the highest death rate across a three-year period. Eric spent nights at his laptop, downloading legal filings against NaphCare that alleged horrific deaths from neglect or substandard care. “I kept wondering, why on earth did Pima County hire them?” Eric said.
Sophie Gilbert brilliantly stitches together how the porn industry changed how women are viewed and understood, how it dominated the culture that millenial women grew up with in the 1990s and 2000s, and how they’re still trying to make sense of it.
(The Atlantic, approx 14 mins reading time)
This period of porno chic arrived with an asterisk that insisted it was all a game, a postmodern, sex-positive appropriation of porn’s tropes and aesthetics. But for women, particularly those of us just entering adulthood, the rules of that game were clear: We were the ultimate Millennial commodity, our bodies cheerfully co-opted and replicated as media content within the public domain. If we complained, we were vilified as prudes or scolds. This kind of sexualization was “empowering,” everyone kept insisting. But the form of power we were being allotted wasn’t the sort you accrue over a lifetime, in the manner of education or money or professional experience. It was all about youth, attention, and a willingness to be in on the joke, even when we were the punch line.
Football seems to be about numbers and statistics more than ever these days. But players are being reduced to numbers in a different way: how much they weigh. Sarah Shephard writes about this issue that isn’t really talked about in men’s football.
(The Athletic, approx 14 mins reading time)
Exercise-based ‘punishments’ and publicly shared leaderboards are often used when tracking players’ weight or body fat percentages, which, according to Costello, can create a “culture of fear, where players are judged on their physical appearance rather their football performance. “Sometimes, managers ask for body-fat measurements every week. I’ve even been told that my sole job is to measure body fat, because ‘I want my players to look like athletes’. In many cases, nutrition practitioners are brought in purely to provide body composition assessments. It’s a classic case of Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. “We’ve lost sight of the nuance between body composition and on-pitch performance, because it’s been reduced to a single number.” And that focus on numbers can lead to the individual being slightly forgotten: “Often players aren’t even involved in the decision-making process when it comes to their own bodies,” says Costello.
Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, a US agency tasked with preserving American history has begun to rewrite sections of the country’s past on its website – starting with slavery.
(The Washington Post, approx 11 mins reading time)
The executive order that President Donald Trump issued late last month directing the Smithsonian Institution to eliminate “divisive narratives” stirred fears that the president aimed to whitewash the stories the nation tells about itself. But a Washington Post review of websites operated by the National Park Service — among the key agencies charged with the preservation of American history — found that edits on dozens of pages since Trump’s inauguration have already softened descriptions of some of the most shameful moments of the nation’s past. Some were edited to remove references to slavery. On other pages, statements on the historic struggle of Black Americans for their rights were cut or softened, as were references to present-day echoes of racial division. The Post compared webpages as of late March to earlier versions preserved online by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Changes in images, descriptions and even individual words have subtly reshaped the meaning of notable moments and key figures dating to the nation’s founding — abolitionist John Brown’s doomed raid, the battle at Appomattox and school integration by the Little Rock Nine.
How did the business world and Wall Street misread Donald Trump so badly?
(Financial Times, approx 10 mins reading time)
Few were worried by the edgier elements of Trump’s speech, like his threat to impose reciprocal tariffs on any country he felt treated the US unfairly. “Not a single person mentioned the word recession or depression,” said one attendee connected to Trump at the time. “I think it sends you a very strong signal of the optimism and the realism of business leaders and investors.” Less than eight weeks later, the tables have turned. Those who witnessed Trump’s speech are now in damage-control mode as the trade war he unleashed on April 2 has destabilised financial markets and caused fears of inflation and a looming recession.
But even before then, the finance sector was reeling. Corporate takeovers are down the most in about a decade, elite law firms have come under fire from the White House and consulting giants have lost their government contracts. Companies from Delta to Walmart have scrapped their profit outlooks. Many fear the tariffs will now dramatically slow America’s economic engine. “We didn’t believe him. We assumed that someone in the administration that had an economic background would tell him that global tariffs were a bad idea,” one Wall street executive says. “We are in for a roller-coaster ride.”
Who was the young girl who was found dead in a coastal town in Catalonia in 1990, and what happened to her?
(The Guardian, approx mins reading time)
Carles Porta, a 61-year-old writer and film-maker, is a TV phenomenon in Catalonia. Since 2020, Porta has made a true crime show for Catalonia’s TV3, Crims, which he presents and narrates with the theatrical gravitas of a Spanish Orson Welles. Catalans love it so much that, when I last ate with Porta in a Barcelona restaurant, strangers kept coming up to introduce themselves. Porta sources his stories from a network of old-school crime reporters and, in 2022, Tura Soler – a veteran journalist in northern Catalonia for El Punt Avui – reminded him of the Portbou girl. Three decades after her death, she remained unidentified. Soler had done her best to keep the case alive, writing regular pieces on the anniversary of the girl’s death. “I’m pretty obstinate,” Soler told me. She also sent me links to her articles. “When I heard that they were throwing out old files from the courthouse, I went running over to make sure they saved the Portbou girl documents,” she said in one.
This week, Liverpool Football Club marked the 36th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, which happened on 15 April 1989. This piece from 2021 details how the families of the victims were failed, and the years that they spent campaigning for justice.
(The Guardian, approx 28 mins reading time)
The lies began even as people were dying. The police officer in command, Ch Supt David Duckenfield, failed to take control of the chaos and organise a concerted rescue operation, but he started the false narrative that would form the foundation of enduring injustice. In an episode still profoundly shocking decades on, at 3.15pm Duckenfield lied to the Football Association official, Graham Kelly, telling him that Liverpool supporters had forced open a gate, and rushed into the Leppings Lane end of the ground. That story was given to the media and at 3.25pm, John Motson reported in a live BBC broadcast that a gate was said to have been broken down, and that non-ticket holders had forced their way in. Right away, the victims were being blamed for their own deaths and injuries.
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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