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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.
This article features two interviews with Donald Trump – one where two reporters called his mobile number – where he discusses his comeback election victory and the way he is now wielding power.
However, as Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer report here, the cracks are beginning to show.
(The Atlantic, approx 54 mins reading time)
Apparently, as word of our meeting spread through Trump’s inner circle, someone had reminded him of some of the things we (specifically Ashley) had said and written that he didn’t like. We still don’t know who it was—but we immediately understood the consequences: no photo shoot, no tour of the newly redecorated Oval Office or the Lincoln Bedroom, and definitely no interview. But we’ve both covered Trump long enough to know that his first word is rarely his final one. So at 10:45 on a Saturday morning in late March, we called him on his cellphone. (Don’t ask how we got his number. All we can say is that the White House staff have imperfect control over Trump’s personal communication devices.) The president was at the country club he owns in Bedminster, New Jersey. The number that flashed on his screen was an unfamiliar one, but he answered anyway. “Who’s calling?” he asked. Despite his attacks on us a few days earlier, the president, evidently feeling buoyed by a week of successes, was eager to talk about his accomplishments. As we spoke, the sounds of another conversation, perhaps from a television, hummed in the background.
This is a horrific, but important read. A team of journalists recount the final months of 27-year-old Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna, who was detained by Russia, tortured and murdered. First-hand testimonies piece together what happened to her, as well as her bravery in reporting on the war.
(The Guardian, approx 12 mins reading time)
Information on the circumstances of her death is limited. Roshchyna was held without charge and without access to a lawyer. During her detention, her only known contact with the outside world was a four-minute phone call to her parents, a full year after she was taken. Preliminary forensics suggest “numerous signs of torture”, according to the prosecutor. Burn marks on her feet from electric shocks, abrasions on the hips and head, and a broken rib. Her hair, which she liked to wear long and tinted blonde at the tips, had been shaved. Sources close to the official investigation have also disclosed that the hyoid bone in her neck was broken. It is the kind of damage that can occur during strangulation. However, the exact cause of death may never be known because when her body was returned during the exchange on 14 February, certain parts were missing, namely the brain, eyes and larynx. A war crimes investigation has been opened with a view to prosecuting those responsible.
The estimated number of people homeless in New York City has grown to its highest level on record. Night after night, Lisa Singh patrols the city’s subway platforms to help vulnerable people showing signs of mental illness. A powerful profile by Ruby Cramer.
(The Washington Post, approx 19 mins reading time)
Since Lisa had taken the job, a woman died after being lit on fire on an F train at Coney Island, a man was pushed into the path of an oncoming train in Manhattan, and other riders were shoved, punched and stabbed in unprovoked attacks. In response, the city had nearly tripled the number of nurses on staff at its agency for the homeless and was sending more clinicians like Lisa into the subways with the power to order involuntary removals of people with mental illness and hospitalize them for up to 72 hours. The protocol was called a 9.58, a shorthand for a section of the state’s mental hygiene law, and Lisa could use it at her discretion to remove mentally ill people who couldn’t meet their basic needs — even if they weren’t acting dangerously toward others. During her shifts from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m., she had seen patients with obvious signs of acute psychosis. But more often, Lisa encountered what she called “the subtle face” of untreated mental illness, with minutes to piece together a clinical picture before a patient walked away or disappeared into a train.
When a young content creator shared her cancer diagnosis online, she received a wave of support on TikTok. Then an anonymous group on Reddit tried to prove that she was lying. This is a story about the worst of social media.
(The New York Times, approx mins reading time)
Ms. Towle’s critics pointed to her long hair and her penchant for travel and fitness as proof that she could not possibly have the illness she claimed. They saw contradictions in her treatment, including that she did not undergo chemotherapy for much of 2024, despite what she described as a grave diagnosis. They created a 28-page timeline of medical details shared by Ms. Towle online, using it to bolster their claims of fakery. They zoomed in on photos showing a large scar on her abdomen to search for signs of photoshopping. When they were unable to see in Ms. Towle’s videos any signs of a port — a medical device implanted in patients to facilitate chemotherapy treatments and ease blood draws — they took it as a certainty she was lying. When she posted a video showing a port implanted not on her upper chest, which is common, but on the underside of her arm, they remained skeptical. They complained that she was too upbeat. “I hate her toxic positivity,” one person posted. “I don’t believe a word she says.”
Finland has come out on top in the UN’s World Happiness Report for the last eight years in a row. But how is this report measured, and why does the Nordic country come first so often? Molly Young spent a week there to find out.
(The New York Times Magazine, approx 19 mins reading time)
Padding down the stairs, I manually shut off my brain and jumped. There was a bitter taste in my mouth, as though I’d been struck by lightning, followed by a sense that my cells were being rearranged. A sauna-goer down the deck clapped. The lone note of approval inflated me with enough pride that I floated a few seconds before climbing back up the ladder. Upon ascending the stairs, I passed a man edging his way down, and we grinned at each other — one person emerging from pointless triumph, one on his way there. I watched the man dunk and gave a clap in turn, then hurried back indoors to the hot sauna, which made my skin feel as though it were outlined in a neon pen. There’s a line in Martin Amis’s novel “London Fields” where the narrator reflects that “we are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being.” So too in a frozen sea. But warmed to the core in the sauna, you relax and have piercing thoughts such as “How wonderful it is to be hot, then cold, then hot, then cold.”
This story from Miranda Green has it all: corruption in the New York Police Department, stolen diamonds and a cryptocurrency scam that duped Kim Kardashian and Floyd Mayweather Jr. But why isn’t the man allegedly responsible in prison?
(Atavist, approx 43 mins reading time)
To uphold his side of the deal, Rechnitz needed a way to pay Seabrook. Rechnitz decided he would pull $60,000 from his own savings, then make himself whole by sending fake invoices to Huberfeld for eight pairs of courtside Knicks tickets. He allegedly routed the ticket transaction through a business acquaintance of his, who was later charged for a Ponzi-style ticket-reselling scheme. Now he just needed to get Seabrook the cash. One day in December 2014, Rechnitz visited the Ferragamo store on Fifth Avenue. Emerging with a new men’s handbag, he stuffed $60,000 cash inside and walked a few blocks to an idling SUV where Seabrook was waiting. Little did the men know that law enforcement was watching everything—and the exchange of money would eventually take everyone down. Everyone, that is, except Jona Rechnitz.
Virginia Woolf’s famous 1927 essay ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’, where she sets out to buy a pencil and describes the pleasure that comes with walking.
(The Yale Review, approx 23 mins reading time)
The hour should be evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful. We are not then taunted as in summer by the longing for shade and solitude and sweet airs from the hayfields. The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow. We are no longer quite ourselves.
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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