Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.
An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.
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.
The woman who was trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein and settled a sexual assault lawsuit against Prince Andrew died by suicide in April. This article pieces together her final days through photos, texts and diary entries shared by her family.
(The Times, approx 15 mins reading time)
For the first time, Virginia’s family is sharing a diary she kept from the beginning of this year, in which she shares her memories of her marriage as it was breaking down, as well as photos, text messages and legal filings, in which she alleges that Robert was violent, abusive and “emotionally and physically controlling”. Virginia claimed in her diary that her husband’s behaviour worsened as she became the face of the campaign to bring Epstein and others to justice. “The stronger I became, the scarier he became,” she wrote, accusing him of trying to stop her from “advocating for the victims of trafficking” and, in the final months, allegedly preventing her from seeing her children. “What you have to know about Jenna is she was never afraid of any of these people,” Sky said. “She was ready to move on with her life, but she wanted that life to be with her kids.”
An excellent read from Pilita Clark on how climate change could fuel the next market crash, and why the world isn’t doing anything about it.
(Financial Times, approx 19 mins reading time)
The contagion spreads because you need insurance to get a mortgage, so as property coverage fades, so does the presence of banks. In state after state, it becomes impossible to find a bank branch. Some lenders quit the mortgage business completely. A few begin reporting big losses. And the US is not alone. Climate-driven upheaval intensifies abroad, rattling insurers, banks and property markets from southern Australia to northern Italy. In city after city, people find themselves living in homes worth less than what they had paid for them. Each monthly mortgage payment feels like throwing good money after bad. In a disturbing hint of past financial turmoil, mortgage defaults begin to rise, along with foreclosures and credit card delinquencies. But this time, it’s different. Unlike other financial disasters, the underlying cause of this one is not financial, it is physical, and it is not clear how it will ever end.
Oasis is back – although, despite not having performed together since 2009, they never really left. That’s thanks to the impact of their music, as well as Noel and Liam’s legendary bickering, as Chris DeVille writes.
(The New York Times, approx 7 mins reading time)
The brothers saved many of their rudest, funniest put-downs for each other. When Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds released a trippy experimental album in 2017, Liam tweeted, “Psychedelic music by a beige drip is like a vegetarian trying to sell you a kebab.” Noel’s use of a scissors player onstage that year sparked Liam to joke that his own concerts now involved peeling a banana, sharpening a pencil and sticking stickers in a book, all of which “sounds mega with a bit of reverb on.” In a 2019 Wired feature, Noel shut down reunion talk by directing fans to Liam’s solo shows: “If they want to hear old Oasis songs, they’re being played by a fat man in an anorak somewhere.” That year, complaining to The Guardian that interviewers sometimes ask about his mother, Noel quipped, “I liked her until she gave birth to Liam.”
Those are the names of two coyotes that have made New York’s Central Park their home for the last six years. This piece, accompanied by some wonderful photographs by David Lei and Jacqueline Emery, follows their story.
(Smithsonian, approx 11 mins reading time)
Coyotes are monogamous and mate for life. The deep bond between Romeo and Juliet makes us hopeful that they will someday have pups. According to Nagy, coyotes have never been confirmed to breed in Manhattan. This would be a major milestone for the species. When Romeo and Juliet didn’t have pups last spring, we thought it might have simply been too soon after they paired up. This year, we observed them copulating regularly from January through March. We watched carefully for signs that Juliet might be pregnant—her belly did seem to swell and appeared more rounded at times. In April and May, however, she was maintaining her normal activities at a time when a mother coyote would typically tend to her young. We knew then that they hadn’t been successful. But we didn’t know why.
A profile of the 28-year-old Liverpool striker, who tragically died this week alongside his brother in a car crash in Spain.
(The Athletic, approx 7 mins reading time)
Jota was a gifted, versatile attacker with a range of attributes. He was intelligent, a silky dribbler who was difficult to stop, and a poacher in the penalty area. He was nicknamed ‘Jota the Slotter’ by Liverpool fans because of his cool and calm habit of picking the exact spot he wanted the ball to nestle in the net. Yet football was only part of his story. Jota was beloved not just because of his prowess as a striker, but because of his warmth and friendliness as a human being. Darwin Nunez, his fellow Liverpool forward, said he would always remember his “smile, as a good companion on and off the field”, and he wasn’t alone.
Despite going through several rounds of IVF, a couple could not conceive for 18 years. Now, thanks to artificial intelligence, they’re having a baby. So, what is the STAR method and how does the procedure work?
(CNN, approx 8 mins reading time)
When a semen sample is placed on a specially designed chip under a microscope, the STAR system – which stands for Sperm Tracking and Recovery – connects to the microscope through a high-speed camera and high-powered imaging technology to scan the sample, taking more than 8 million images in under an hour to find what it has been trained to identify as a sperm cell. The system instantly isolates that sperm cell into a tiny droplet of media, allowing embryologists to recover cells that they may never have been able to find or identify with their own eyes. “It’s like searching for a needle scattered across a thousand haystacks, completing the search in under an hour and doing it so gently, without any harmful lasers or stains, that the sperm can still be used to fertilize an egg,” Williams said.
Wimbledon is in full swing, this year without human line judges for the very first time. This brilliant, thought-provoking piece by William Ralston goes behind the scenes and looks at what it’s like to be an umpire.
(The Guardian, approx 28 mins reading time)
Knowing how to handle the pressure distinguishes great umpires from good ones. “This is a part of the job that nobody ever teaches you,” Bernardes told me. “We can tell the guys not to look at the internet, but we can’t tell them to not be nervous.” In other words, you need a supreme level of confidence. One chair umpire told me how he’d once been sitting in the stands in Atlanta, watching a match with the retired Năstase. During one discussion about a dubious line call, Năstase turned to him and told him how nervous the umpire seemed, because she was always twirling her hair. “Show any hesitation and the good players will use it,” Čičak told me. “It’s their game and we’re in it.” Sometimes things get heated anyway. To Bernardes, the challenge is how to be both strong and passive at moments like this. “If the player comes to you and says, ‘What the fuck are you doing,’ we can’t say, ‘I am just doing my fucking job.’ Our job is to be the fireman and to put the water on the fire. When you have a situation that is very heated you need to try to calm it down. But you also can’t let the players think you’re fragile.”
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.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say