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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.
David D Kirkpatrick does a deep dive into how much Donald Trump – and the rest of his family – are profiting off the US presidency.
(The New Yorker, approx 65 mins reading time)
In March, Forbes, known for ranking the wealth of billionaires, estimated that Trump’s net worth had more than doubled in the previous year, surpassing five billion dollars. In July, the Times put Trump’s wealth at upward of ten billion. Yet both estimates included billions of dollars in paper profits that would almost certainly disintegrate if the Trumps pulled out of certain investments. (What’s Truth Social worth without him?) These estimates also included assets untainted by any obvious exploitation of the Presidency, such as properties that Trump owned before entering office, or fees paid by resort customers who simply want to play golf or book a hotel room.
Although the notion that Trump is making colossal sums off the Presidency has become commonplace, nobody could tell me how much he’s made. Norm Eisen, a government-ethics lawyer and a vocal Trump critic, said, “We don’t know the full amounts.” Robert Weissman, a co-president of the left-leaning advocacy group Public Citizen, said, “We will never really know.” Wertheimer noted that for decades Trump had boasted constantly, and in detail, about how rich he was. “He doesn’t talk about it anymore,” Wertheimer said. “He may be the greatest con artist in American history.”
Despite the United Nations and numerous charities, aid organisations and medical practitioners provide evidence of killing and starvation in Gaza, large cohorts of Israeli society deny it is happening.
(+972 Magazine, approx 10 mins reading time)
In an earlier era of atrocity denial, the claims of staging were at least elaborate. Many still recall the case of Muhammad Al-Durrah, the 12-year-old boy killed in Gaza in September 2000, whose death became a symbol of the Second Intifada. Israelis and their supporters invested enormous effort to try to discredit the footage: hundreds of hours of analysis, reports, and even documentaries, parsing shooting angles, ballistics, and forensic details to argue the entire event had been staged. Today, denial requires no such labor. The intricate conspiracy theories of the past have given way to a cruder form of denialism that scholars call conspiracism — the reflexive dismissal of any evidence that contradicts one’s interests as fabricated. Documentation is simply dismissed with a single word: “Fake.”
A glimpse into the famous political family, which is reeling over Robert F Kennedy Jr’s place in the Trump administration and the damage the Democratic dynasty feel he is doing to their legacy.
(Intelligencer, approx 41 mins reading time)
Ethel never spoke publicly about her son’s campaign, but everyone saw the effect it had. “The one who was brokenhearted — and the family won’t talk about it, but I saw it up close — was Ethel,” a longtime family friend said. She had devoted her life to supporting the Democratic Party, which RFK Jr. was now undermining with his insurgent, conspiracy-riddled, anti-government candidacy. Just a week before Bobby announced his run, President Biden, who had been close to the Kennedys for decades and kept a bust of Ethel’s husband, Robert F. Kennedy Sr., in the Oval Office, had called Ethel from Air Force One to wish her a happy 95th birthday, as he did every year, while flying to Belfast with her grandson Joe Kennedy III, who was serving as his special envoy to Northern Ireland. When Bobby made his candidacy public, Ethel called Biden to apologize for her wayward son. “You don’t have to,” Biden said. “I know about these things.”
Peter Betts died in 2023. He was the EU’s chief climate negotiator who helped to draft the historic Paris Agreement. In his posthumous book – published this month – he wrote about his experiences at the Cop conferences.
(The Guardian, approx 15 mins reading time)
One of the key issues that remained unresolved as we went into the final days was what should be said about 1.5C. This was resisted by both the US and its allies, and even the EU, as well as the emerging economies, tacitly. It was an issue that was absolutely key for many of our closest allies among the vulnerable countries, and yet we knew how challenging it would be to achieve it. We also knew that the emerging economies were giving some tacit support for the vulnerables on it, while being in fact firmly opposed to it, but happy to hide behind developed countries. I must admit that I had some concerns that the poorest countries were pouring their political capital into changing the temperature goal. For me, the biggest issue was the inadequacy of the nationally determined commitments, particularly from the big emerging economies, and I would have preferred it if the poorer countries had focused on pressing for more immediate ambition rather than something I doubted would be agreed. I turned out to be wrong.
A two-parter from Rachel Dodes about how a convicted murderer on death row managed to get one of America’s most prolific serial killers to confess to his crimes.
(Note: This story contains details that some readers might find distressing.)
(Vanity Fair – Part One and Part Two, approx 42 mins reading time)
For more than 60 years, Naso hid in plain sight. He was once a Little League coach and Cub Scout leader, a husband, and a father of two. He worked as a -family photographer and even briefly taught a photography course at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco. But he lived a second reality, the life of a serial killer, raping and murdering young women allegedly beginning in 1965 through at least 1994. He had also been arrested for lesser crimes such as battery, disturbing the peace, unemployment insurance fraud, shoplifting women’s undergarments, and petty theft and grand larceny, which is how he was busted in 2008.
Following a routine probation check in April 2010, he was arrested in Reno, where he was living at the time. The cops were horrified by what they saw: a home bursting with clutter, dirty dishes piled on kitchen counters, and food lying all over, including rotting meat. “The only thing that I could relate it to would be The Silence of the Lambs,” says Wendell Anderson, the detective who executed a search warrant on Naso’s house after probation officers found laminated articles from Yuba County’s hometown newspaper, The Appeal Democrat, about two murders that took place there in the early ’90s. Affixed to the articles were photographs of the victims, posed and wearing lingerie, believed to have been taken by Naso after he had strangled them.
The Ukrainian volunteers near the frontline who are looking for a safe place to send pets whose owners have been killed or left homeless.
(Novaya Gazeta, approx 10 mins reading time)
Despite daily attacks on the city of Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine, a reduction in funding and the fact that half of the staff have left, the municipal Animal Shelter continues to operate. It currently houses about 100 cats and 500 dogs. “Nowhere in the city is safe right now. Every night, and some days, there are drones, glide bombs and ballistic cruise missiles,” says Yulia, the shelter’s director. People made homeless by Russian attacks are placed in dormitories where animals aren’t welcome. Cats and dogs are given away — sometimes temporarily, sometimes forever. Yulia says that close to half of the people forced to give a pet to the shelter come back for them at a later date. One airstrike on a house one night this year killed an entire family. The only survivor was their Alsatian, which hid through the night in an enclosure on the street. The dog was wounded, and suffered shrapnel cuts. The shelter carried out surgery. And though it looked like no one would come for the animal as its family had been killed, relatives of the victims did eventually come and take the Alsatian.
A fascinating read by Mireille Juchau about how people’s dreams change when they live under authoritarianism.
(The New Yorker, approx 8 mins reading time)
Like Svetlana Alexievich’s oral histories of postwar Soviet citizens, Beradt’s work uncovers the effects of authoritarian regimes on the collective unconscious. In 1933, a woman dreams of a mind-reading machine, “a maze of wires” that detects her associating Hitler with the word “devil.” Beradt encountered several dreams about thought control, some of which anticipated the bureaucratic absurdities used by the Nazis to terrorize citizens. In one dream, a twenty-two-year-old woman who believes her curved nose will mark her as Jewish attends the “Bureau of Verification of Aryan Descent”—not a real agency, but close enough to those of the time. In a series of “bureaucratic fairy tales” that evoke the regime’s real-life propaganda, a man dreams of banners, posters, and barracks-yard voices pronouncing a “Regulation Prohibiting Residual Bourgeois Tendencies.” In 1936, a woman dreams of a snowy road strewn with watches and jewellery. Tempted to take a piece, she senses a setup by the “Office for Testing the Honesty of Aliens.”
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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