Today is a day of rest. Maybe you’re in the mood for a quiet room and a comfortable chair.
Here’s a selection of this week’s best reads.
1. What happened to Zach Brettler?
London. alamy stock photo
alamy stock photo
In 2019, London teenager Zach Brettler died after falling from his fifth-floor apartment. His grieving parents later discovered that he had been posing as the son of a Russian oligarch and was associated with a gang.
A masterful piece of journalism that captivates readers from beginning to end, about deceit, desire, wealth, police incompetence, and London’s criminal underworld.
(The New Yorker, approximately 65 minutes to read)
The morning Zack’s body was found, Clive Strong, a private investigator hired by the Brettlers, visited Sharma at the River Walk. Sharma was short, with defined features, and for her physical strength, she liked boxing, and she told Strong that she had just returned from a sparring session. According to Strong’s notes, Sharma claimed that Zak referred to himself as having an “oligarch father” and that there was intense conflict with his mother and four siblings, who lived in Dubai. , barring him from various luxury properties in London. So even though he was fabulously wealthy, he was homeless. “I felt bad for that young man,” Sharma told Strong. “He said he could stay at my apartment, the Riverwalk apartment.”
Sharma, who was the last to see Zac alive, told much the same story as Shamji. Last Thursday night, Zach and Shamji were at the Riverwalk. Sharma’s daughter Dominique also joined them. A few hours later, Shamji and Dominic left. Sharma fell asleep and when she woke up at 8 a.m., Zack was gone. In Sharma’s opinion, Zach was a troubled child who was “on the verge of suicidal thoughts.” Sharma said she was willing to talk to Strong because he was a private investigator, but she didn’t want to talk to police because she had “bad experiences in the past.”
2. Operation Iron Sword
Tom Stevenson assesses the devastation in Gaza.
(The London Review of Books, approximately 18 minutes reading time)
Palestinian men and boys, aged between 12 and 70, are stripped, handcuffed and blindfolded before being loaded into the back of a truck for interrogation. Some people have numbers written on their arms. Hundreds of people detained in the Gaza Strip were transferred to the Qetsiot desert prison near the Egyptian border. Some were probably taken to nearby military bases. Some men captured at Beit Rahiya were stripped naked and transferred to a fenced camp, where they were bound, beaten, and tortured for several days. Others have disappeared. The IDF later announced that 85 to 90 percent of these detainees were civilians. Israeli forces have repeatedly raided United Nations schools and detained men found inside. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights recorded an incident on December 19 when Israeli forces surrounded and invaded a building in Gaza City’s Lemal district. “IDF forces are said to have separated the men from their women and children and then shot dead at least 11 men, mostly in their late 20s and early 30s, in front of their families.”
3. Diamond
diamond ring. alamy stock photo
alamy stock photo
Lab-grown diamonds are becoming increasingly popular, and for good reason. Because they have exactly the same quality as mined diamonds, but at a much more affordable price. Is this a threat to the traditional diamond industry? According to Amanda Mull, no.
(The Atlantic, approximately 14 minutes to read)
One-carat round mined diamonds, the type that underpins the majority of engagement rings in the United States, currently cost between $50 and $1,000 to produce in the rough, depending on where they are mined, Golan said. That’s what it means. In a laboratory environment, the production cost of the same diamond costs him 15-20 dollars. At retail, lab-grown diamonds are typically sold to consumers for less than half (and sometimes much less) the selling price of mined stones with nearly identical properties. Notably, even the Gemological Institute of America (GIA), a highly influential industry group that provides widely accepted diamond grading standards to help determine a stone’s value, refuses to call lab-grown diamonds synthetic. I stopped. they are real. There are no precautions.
4. I got lost on Amazon
A moving story of the race to find four children who survived a plane crash deep in the Colombian Amazon last year.
(The Guardian, approximately 29 minutes to read)
After nine days and hundreds of miles on foot, all CCOES special forces found was an abandoned camp once owned by members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), a notorious rebel group. Dragon4’s leader Ender and his Captain Montiel secretly wondered if HK2803 had sunk in the river. “Every day we asked ourselves a lot of questions,” he said.
Then, in the early morning hours of May 15, Dragon 4 was searching its latest quadrant when Montiel’s deputy, Sergeant Wilmer Miranda, spotted something pink in the leaves. It was a baby bottle. The soldiers took photos and sent them to Sanchez, who forwarded them to Valencia. She immediately noticed the bottle. It was Christine’s. Hours later, Miranda finds a wild fruit with fresh human bite marks. “I was happy to see it,” Miranda said. “There was life.” He looked around for footprints and places where human feet might have left their mark on the soil. But the relentless rain in the forest meant that everything was washed clean.
5. Lily Gladstone
Lily Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). alamy stock photo
alamy stock photo
The star became the first Native American woman to be nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her performance in Killers of the Flower Moon. Here she talks about her historic nomination, her passion for language revitalization, and how she swears in Blackfoot.
(The New Yorker, approximately 24 minutes to read)
I keep saying it’s overdue. We’re in his 96th year of the Academy Awards, and we’re on Native American land. Natives are natural storytellers. Since time immemorial, our stories have been a big part of how we understand ourselves. So it’s quite strange that it took Native Americans almost 100 years to reach this milestone in the major acting categories in the United States. We have Indigenous representation.Yalitza Aparicio and Graham Greene were also there. [“Dances with Wolves”] Supported by Chief Dan George [“Little Big Man”] In support. We are recognized as a global indigenous people. But as you said, it’s spread out.
I’m friends with Starlin Harjo, the co-creator of “Reservation Dogs.” We’re both at the track right now, and we happened to be in the same hotel the other week. He put it really well. “We’re in a position to kick down a door. When you kick down a door, all you have to do is put your foot in the door and stand there,” he said. Kicking a door through means the door closes behind you. Although I am the first Native American woman, I stand on the shoulders of many performers. My being given this first nickname is all due to circumstance, and I am by no means intending to be the last. If I kicked the door in, I’m just standing here trying to hold the door open for someone else.
6. Bedtime
A short history of the quest for quality sleep.
(BBC Future, approximately 8 minutes reading time)
Humans have been making beds for hundreds of thousands of years. In their book, What We Did in Bed: A Horizontal History, anthropologist Brian Fagan and archaeologist Nadia Durrani of the University of California, Santa Barbara chart their development from the very beginning. It is believed that for most of the time our species existed, sleeping spaces consisted of deep mounds of carefully layered leaves, topped with soft, pest-resistant foliage. Then the first bed frames began to appear. The sandstone beds at Skara Brae are among the oldest he has ever discovered, along with a series of traces left in the soil of the settlement of Darrington Walls near Stonehenge. This is the ghostly outline of a long-vanished wooden bed box, and the builder of that monument may have been here. I slept there once.
…and classics from the archives…
Joni Mitchell performs “Both Sides Now” at the 66th Annual Grammy Awards. alamy stock photo
alamy stock photo
This week, Joni Mitchell took to the Grammy Awards stage at the age of 80 to perform her classic song “Both Sides, Now.” It was her first time performing at an award ceremony.
This article from 2017 explores her career and considers how she was often marginalized due to sexism.
(The Ringer, approximately 26 minutes to read)
Why is Joni Mitchell the token female musician that even the most macho rockers are comfortable calling “amazing”? (Jimmy Page is on record as saying her music made him cry; Jimi Hendrix called Mitchell in his diary “a wonderful girl with the words of heaven.”) The very concept of a canon, or Is it “greatness” or even “?” If so, should women throw all those words and ideas out the window and look for new ways to talk about and appreciate the art they make?
Note: Journal typically selects articles that are not protected by paywalls, but some articles may not be accessible if the site in question exceeds the free article limit.
