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WE’VE HAD TWELVE months of compiling excellent longreads every week for Sitdown Sunday – and now it’s time to pick the best of the bunch.
Here were the highlights from across 2024, month by month.
Hvaldimir the beluga whale was at the centre of a dispute over his welfare after he popped up off the coast of Hammerfest, Norway. Ferris Jabr writes about the ethical debate around whether humans should intervene in rehabilitating a trained whale.
(The New York Times, approx 27 mins reading time)
The military conscription of a beluga whale might sound like a conceit plucked from less-than-convincing spy fiction, but it is actually a well-documented practice. Since the 1960s, Russia and the United States have trained dolphins, seals and other marine mammals to assist their naval forces by tagging enemy divers, detecting mines and recovering items from the seafloor. Satellite photos of Russian naval bases near Murmansk, not far from the spot where Norwegian fishermen first found Hvaldimir, reveal the type of sea pens often used to hold belugas. Audun Rikardsen, a professor of marine biology at the Arctic University of Norway, told me that international contacts have since confirmed that Hvaldimir belonged to the navy.
Beatriz Flamini spent almost a year and a half in a Spanish cave to break a world record. Despite joking about the experience when she emerged, this profile explores the psychological impact of spending 500 days underground in isolation.
(The New Yorker, approx 33 mins reading time)
After graduating, Flamini taught aerobics in Madrid. She was admired for her charisma and commitment. “Everyone wanted me for their classes,” she says. “They fought over me.” By the time she turned forty, in 2013, she had a partner, a car, and a house. But she felt unsatisfied. She didn’t really care about financial stability, and, unlike most people she knew, she didn’t want children. She experienced an existential crisis. “You know you’re going to die—today, tomorrow, within fifty years,” Flamini told herself. “What is it that you want to do with your life before that happens?” The immediate answer, she remembers, was to “grab my knapsack and go and live in the mountains.”
This gripping piece about a teenager who fell to his death from a fifth-floor apartment in London and was discovered to have been posing as the son of a Russian oligarch will grip you from start to finish.
(The New Yorker, approx 65 mins reading time)
The morning Zac’s body was identified, the private investigator the Brettlers had hired, Clive Strong, visited Sharma at Riverwalk. Sharma, who was short, sharp-featured, and physically fit, liked to box, and told Strong that he’d just returned from a sparring session. According to Strong’s notes, Sharma said that Zac had presented himself as someone whose “father was an oligarch,” and had claimed that he’d clashed so much with his mother—who lived in Dubai, along with four of his siblings—that she’d barred him from their various luxury properties in London. He was therefore homeless, despite being fantastically rich. “I felt sorry for the young man,” Sharma told Strong. “I said that he could stay in my flat”—the Riverwalk apartment.
A fascinating tale of corruption, greed and those who enable it, centering on two Irish businessmen, a multi-million dollar gas deal in Nigeria, and the vulnerabilities of international arbitration.
(The New York Times, approx 24 mins reading time)
In June, Quinn opened his morning paper to an unwelcome twist. The oil-drilling company that Nigeria had promised would supply the wet gas had decided to keep it; the gas turned out to be useful for maintaining pressure inside the wells. Quinn might have picked up the phone and protested to his friends inside the government, but most of them were gone. A new president had recently come into office. Lukman had been replaced. In February 2011, Hitchcock sent a text message that suggested the company was in dire straits. “In view of the rapidly deteriorating situation here, I see no option but to liquidate some P.&I.D. assets,” he wrote. “With your approval, I propose to sell the Honda Civic.” Quinn emailed the new president, Goodluck Jonathan, but his appeal went nowhere.
In this piece, Sarah Zhang writes about how at-home DNA tests are revealing that “incest is more common than many think”.
(The Atlantic, approx 10 mins reading time)
He could not know the exact circumstances of his conception, and his DNA test alone could not determine whether her older brother or her father was responsible. But Steve could not imagine a consensual scenario, given her age. The bespectacled 14-year-old girl who disappeared from the hospital had remained frozen in time in his mind, even as he himself grew older, got married, became a stepdad. He felt protective of that young girl.
Opus Dei was designed to help ordinary Catholics become holy through everyday work, but in practice, women gave their lives to the organisation as domestic workers. By weaving together three women’s stories, Antonia Cundy investigates the order.
(Financial Times, approx 37 mins reading time)
Anne Marie moved towards a wood-panelled door in the corner. Inside, hardly larger than a coat cupboard, was a confessional, a small kneeler facing a lattice screen. Forty-six years earlier, this was where a priest first suggested that Anne Marie join Opus Dei. She was 15 and had come to Ballyglunin to take a catering course. But within a few months, she would commit to years of unpaid domestic service for one of the most powerful organisations in the Catholic Church.
An artificial intelligence programme that generates targets for assassination with little human oversight and an error rate of 10% is being used by the Israeli army in Gaza. Yuval Abraham reports on ‘Lavender’ as part of a joint investigation by Tel Aviv magazine +972 and Hebrew-language news site Local Call.
(+972 Magazine, approx 36 mins reading time)
During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.
The daughter of the man who created the iconic car that appeared in Back to the Future wants to build a modern version. But someone else has trademarked the name.
(WIRED, approx 23 mins reading time)
One thing she insisted she didn’t want was to start a car company. It was a car company, after all, that had ruined her father. But then something happened that changed her mind. In April 2022, the Texas company that had given Guerra the cold shoulder announced it would soon reveal a new DeLorean. Kat kept her feelings about this to herself only briefly. First she drew attention to Guerra’s design, posting it on Instagram. (“A timeless classic given the treatment it deserves!”) Two days later, she made her feelings explicit: “@deloreanmotorcompany Is not John DeLorean’s Company,” she wrote. “He despised you.”
When a woman moved into an old house in Baltimore in the US state of Maryland, she found 67 love letters in a little black box in the wall. They were 100 years old, all but one were handwritten, addressed to a Mrs R. A. Spaeth and sent by someone named “R.” Untangling the mystery surrounding them revealed a scandal.
(Baltimore Banner, approx 12 mins reading time)
In the newsroom, we spread the letters across the table in a small office. Reporters came and went. Everyone wanted to help decipher juicy turn-of-the-century love letters. Patterns began to appear in the handwriting. He put the tails of his “g’s” on the wrong side, like “p’s.” He used “+” for “and.” What a sweet romance: an esteemed Hopkins scientist, whose research took him away from home, writing love letters back to his wife in Baltimore. Or so it seemed.
Orcas have been attacking sailboats in the Iberian Sea since 2020 and one man is making it his mission to stop them.
(Rolling Stone, approx 25 mins reading time)
He heard a crash. The boat shook, and Drion lost his balance. “What happened?” he shouted up to the others. There was banging on the hull from the outside. The crew looked over the side and saw black fins breaking the glassy surface. Five killer whales, each more than half the length of the boat, their glossy skin shining in the sunlight, were taking turns swimming into the back of the sailboat, ramming the rudder with their heads. With each crash, the boat jolted into a new direction. The crew shut down the electronics and hauled in the mainsail. Speeding off, they thought, could be an invitation to chase. The animals were faster. Better to stay put, quiet and still.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the secret police agency destroyed as many documents as they could. This piece looks at how archivists have spent the last three decades piecing them back together by hand, and how automation could play a role in speeding up the process.
(The New Yorker, approx 38 mins reading time)
The Stasi files offer an astonishingly granular picture of life in a dictatorship—how ordinary people act under suspicious eyes. Nearly three hundred thousand East Germans were working for the Stasi by the time the Wall fell, in 1989, including some two hundred thousand inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, or unofficial collaborators, like Genin. In a population of sixteen million, that was one spy for every fifty to sixty people. In the years since the files were made public, their revelations have derailed political campaigns, tarnished artistic legacies, and exonerated countless citizens who were wrongly accused or imprisoned. Yet some of the files that the Stasi most wanted to hide were never released. In the weeks before the Wall fell, agents destroyed as many documents as they could. Many were pulped, shredded, or burned, and lost forever. But between forty and fifty-five million pages were just torn up, and later stuffed in paper sacks.
John Rosengren writes about how a vigilante murder in the Minnesota town of Grand Marais divided the community. (Details in this may be distressing for some people to read)
(The Atavist, approx 46 mins reading time)
Larry once approached a man named Gary Nesgoda at a gas station and asked if he had kids. When Nesgoda said that he did, Larry showed him pictures of a fairy garden he’d built behind his house. There were miniature staircases and doors, and little figurines set amid tree roots. Larry insisted that Nesgoda, who had recently moved to Grand Marais, should bring his kids over to see it. “Everything he was telling me sounded pretty neat,” Nesgoda told me. Then, in the gas station parking lot, someone who’d overheard the conversation stopped Nesgoda. “Do not bring your children over there,” they warned. This was a common theme. “Larry was the boogeyman,” said Brian Larsen, editor and publisher of the Cook County News Herald, who is a father of four children. “You’d tell your kids to stay the heck away from him.”
In 2013, 20-year-old Emma Carey went skydiving for the first time. She fell 14,000 feet to the ground out of a helicopter after her parachute got tangled. Incredibly, she survived. This details the aftermath of the incident, including learning to walk again.
(ESPN, approx 25 mins reading time)
About 20 minutes in, it was go-time. Emma looks at Jemma, says “I love you” and then jumps out of her side of the helicopter with her instructor. Thirty seconds later, Jemma jumps from the other side. Jemma closes her eyes for the duration of her jump — she hates every second of it. Emma, on the other hand, loves it. She soars for the first half-minute, soaking in her first skydive. About 30 seconds in, she feels a tap on her shoulder, the signal from her instructor to cross her arms to brace for the jolt of her chute going off. She crosses her arms and then … nothing. She’s not slowing down. She feels a tug on her hair, and she tries to see what the instructor is doing behind her. He’s out cold, unconscious from the ropes attached to the chutes. She can see the chutes, giant chunks of red fabric, flailing around in bunched-up bundles. They’re not supposed to be bunched-up bundles.
In this profile of Robert F Kennedy Jr, Joe Hagan speaks to members of the Kennedy family and close friends who shared why they believe he should not have run to be US president.
(Note – this article contains an image of an animal carcass that some may find distressing.)
(Vanity Fair, approx 33 mins reading time)
Last year Robert Kennedy Jr. texted a photograph to a friend. In the photo RFK Jr. was posing, alongside an unidentified woman, with the barbecued remains of what appears to be a dog. Kennedy told the person, who was traveling to Asia, that he might enjoy a restaurant in Korea that served dog on the menu, suggesting Kennedy had sampled dog. The photo was taken in 2010, according to the digital file’s metadata—the same year he was diagnosed with a dead tapeworm in his brain. (A veterinarian who examined the photograph says the carcass is a canine, pointing to the 13 pairs of ribs, which include the tell-tale “floating rib” found in dogs.) The picture’s intent seems to have been comedic—Kennedy and his companion are pantomiming—but for the recipient it was disturbing evidence of Kennedy’s poor judgment and thoughtlessness, simultaneously mocking Korean culture, reveling in animal cruelty, and needlessly risking his reputation and that of his family.
A compelling read about a historian and his team who are risking their lives saving Ukrainian artworks from the frontline.
(The Guardian, approx 27 mins reading time)
Fear is a curious emotion. At times, it arrives without warning or logic, unstoppable and blinding. At others, when its presence might be a useful warning against foolhardiness, it flees altogether. For some, it may become a familiar companion, less and less regarded as time goes on. “Of course I get scared,” Marushchak told me. “Only stupid people don’t get scared.” But he gets less frightened than he used to. On one occasion, describing what it feels like when a shell falls near you, he spoke in almost dreamlike terms: “You almost don’t hear anything, and hardly understand anything. And then you raise your head and you see that the leaves have fallen down from the trees. It is summer, the trees are bare, and you are covered in a blanket of green leaves as you lie there on the ground.”
The start-up Texas crime lab has assisted in thousands of investigations and has been publicly credited with helping to solve nearly 350 cases, including murders, rapes and unidentified bodies. Its method could solve many more cases.
(Texas Monthly, approx 30 mins reading time)
When Beaumont detective Aaron Lewallen received Mittelman’s offer to assist with any unsolved crimes, he immediately thought of the Catherine Edwards murder. “This was Beaumont’s most high-profile homicide,” recalled Lewallen, a laconic 26-year veteran who had developed a specialty in cold cases. “With the original detectives ruling out so many of the people who were close to her in her life, it had really become a whodunit.” At Lewallen’s request, local officials agreed to pay Othram about $10,000 to conduct new DNA testing. A few weeks later, a FedEx courier dropped off a Styrofoam box at the lab’s headquarters. Inside, chilled by an ice pack, was a piece of floral-print fabric from Edwards’s comforter and a vaginal swab from the posthumous rape kit. Unless he was dead or in jail, the man who killed Edwards remained at large. Perhaps he was still in Beaumont. Perhaps he had moved away and started a new life. He had concealed his crime for nearly three decades; surely, he must have thought, the police had given up on the case. There was no way for him to know that in the early 2020s, a small group of detectives and scientists had dedicated themselves to unmasking him.
The Colombian drug lord’s private menagerie was dismantled after his death in 1993, but the hippos were thought too dangerous to move and left behind. They have been multiplying ever since, and officials are struggling to keep them under control.
(The Guardian, approx 20 mins reading time)
The presence of these beasts in the heart of South America, waddling at night down rural paths and staring into the headlights of jeeps and motorcycles, might be comical if it weren’t so deadly. In Africa, hippos are thought to kill about 500 people a year, making them among the most dangerous animals to humans, according to the BBC and other sources. And while, for now, violent encounters in Colombia have been limited, unsettling incidents are increasing. The beasts have attacked farmers and destroyed crops. Last year, a car struck and killed a hippo crossing a highway. (Hippos tend to spend daytime hours in the water and move around land at night, adding to a menacing sense of danger striking in the dark.) This wasn’t long after a hippo lumbered into the yard of a school, sending frightened teachers and children running for cover.
Italian priest Luigi Ciotti, who leads an anti-Mafia organisation, speaks to DT Max about how he gives women in the Mob new identities and helps them to start a new life.
(The New Yorker, approx 39 mins reading time)
Men in the Mob generally insure that they discuss their illegal business activities out of earshot of their families, so women such as L. have often never been direct witnesses to crimes—making them ineligible for the country’s witness-protection program. Because they cannot help the state, the state won’t help them. Yet L. was in imminent peril. Mafia wives who leave their families are considered traitors, and some are assassinated. In 2011, Maria Concetta Cacciola, a thirteen-year-old whose parents were involved with the ’Ndrangheta, was married off to an associate. She eventually fled Calabria for northern Italy, leaving behind her three children. Cacciola’s mother lured her home, using her kids as bait. Less than two weeks later, Cacciola’s parents called her to the basement, where there was a container of acid. Most likely, she was forced to drink it—one of the Mafia’s punishments for being a snitch. Cacciola was pronounced dead at a hospital; her father told the police that she had died by suicide.
The so-called ‘Patriot Wing’ of a jail in Washington DC holds a group of inmates convicted for their involvement in violence at the US Capitol, and they’re running it like a gang. Tess Owen spent a year speaking to one of them, and learned that the group are become more radical in prison.
(Intelligencer, approx 33 mins reading time)
Patriot Wingers tell me that many are in fact leaving the block more committed to the January 6 cause than ever. In August, I spoke with Brandon Fellows, 29, who during the attack had smoked a joint with his feet on the desk of Oregon senator Jeff Merkley. He’d been held in the wing for two years, and he was now living in a luxury apartment building in D.C., paid for in part by American Patriot Relief, one of the many organizations that bankroll the rioters. “The election was stolen,” he said, “and now, looking back, we had a right to overthrow the government. We still do, at this moment. And I wish it would happen, truthfully.” When I talked to Fellows again in early September — he’d just returned from a skydiving trip — he said, “I definitely am so much more for overthrowing the government after what they did to me. I’m totally down. Especially if Trump doesn’t get in. I want it to happen. I wasn’t onboard before, but now — fuck these guys.”
King Abdullah of the Saudi royal family kept four of his daughters imprisoned for years. In this piece, Heidi Blake speaks to a doctor who worked for the family about what he saw, and how he tried to free them.
(The New Yorker, approx 23 mins reading time)
Back at the royal clinic, Burdick reviewed the princesses’ charts and was dismayed to learn that they were being regularly dosed with a combination of Valium, Ativan, Xanax, and Ambien. “They’re chemically immobilizing them,” he recalled thinking. He learned that he would now be required to write the medical orders for these drugs. “I felt between a rock and a hard place,” he wrote. If he refused, he reasoned, he would likely be replaced by someone more pliable, and, even if he could stop the drugs, an abrupt withdrawal after years of chronic use would have dire consequences. “With the intention of buying time to learn more about the difficult situation these young ladies faced, I set aside my ethics,” he wrote.
Nigel Pickford, a self-taught shipwreck researcher based in England, is behind the discovery of dozens of shipwrecks, containing more than €185 million worth of recovered cargoes – and all without going to sea.
(The New Yorker, approx 34 mins reading time)
There is something almost dangerously tantalizing about an undiscovered shipwreck. It exists on the edge of the real, containing death and desire. Lost ships are lost knowledge, waiting to be regained. “It’s like popping the locks on an old suitcase and you lift the lid,” Bound told me. Bound grew up on the Falkland Islands in the nineteen-fifties. In 2022, he found the Endurance, Ernest Shackleton’s polar-exploration ship, under the ice of the Weddell Sea, off Antarctica. “On a shipwreck, everything, in theory, that was there on that ship when it went down is still there,” he said. “It’s all the product of one unpremeditated instant of time.”
Doctors are pushing the limits of science and human biology to save more extremely premature babies than ever before. But when so few survive, Sophie McBain asks ‘are we putting them through needless suffering?’
(The Guardian, approx 26 mins reading time)
Until then, her pregnancy had progressed smoothly. She was 37 years old, healthy and expecting twins: a boy and a girl. A routine ultrasound a few weeks earlier had suggested all was well. Smith and her husband, Jim Clack, had already decided to name their daughter Peggy. For their son they had drawn up a shortlist of names. In the waiting room at Homerton, Smith began to feel an ache in her lower back. When the registrar examined her, she told Smith that she was in labour and already 3cm dilated. The average pregnancy is about 40 weeks long, but Smith was just 23 weeks and four days pregnant. If the babies died, which was the most likely outcome, their deaths would be classified as a miscarriage rather than stillbirths.
Writer Patrick Fealey gives a powerful and harrowing firsthand account of what being homeless in America is like. An important, beautifully written read.
(Esquire, approx 43 mins reading time)
The definition of homeless is we have no home, no place to go. If “I think, therefore I am” is true, we are people who are. We are, and we stand on this ground. If you deny us ground, you are denying us our “I am.” Isn’t that negation of our existence? We are here and we are you and we are yours. Many of you could be where we are—on the street—but for some simple and not uncommon twist of fate. This is part of your rejection, this fear that it could be you. You deny that reality because it is too horrific to contemplate, therefore you must deny us. And the moneyed reject us because they know they create us, that we are a consequence of their impulse to accumulate more than they need, rooted in a fear of life and the death that comes with it. Nothing good comes of fear, only destruction, and America has become a society of fear, much of that fear cultivated to divide and control.
Caitlin Flanagan writes about the impact of Seamus Heaney and his poetry on her as a child.
(The Atlantic, approx 24 mins reading time)
You can’t jump people into Roman Catholicism after the age of reason; they have to “come to God” on their own, or be in some kind of trouble. We didn’t believe any of it, and not just because of what our parents had always told us. It didn’t sound plausible. We lay in our beds at night and fumed. At the baptism, Ellen and I would have to have water poured on our long hair, like a couple of idiots. We would have to say something about believing in God, and we would have to reject the devil and all his pomps. (Pomps : shows of magnificence, splendor. Enough said! Rejected!) We took our final lesson, and a rehearsal was staged. Someone made a fruitcake with marzipan icing. In Ireland, when a woman makes a fruitcake, there’s no turning back. We were fucked. But then—like a dream, like a magic fish bone—word arrived from Belfast that Seamus and Marie Heaney were coming down for the event, and that Seamus would write a poem. That changed everything for me. Anything the Heaneys were cool with, I was cool with. They were my idea of what a dazzling couple ought to be, and they were always, always kind to us, and we needed kindness.
(The Guardian, approx 27 mins reading time)
It was the week of the Italian Open in May, and as we watched a doubles match under the afternoon sun, Bernardes, who speaks softly and has a serene air, told me it had taken him a while to learn not to let the abuse get to him. “If you take all the things that happen on court personally, you cannot survive in this sort of job,” he told me later. “You will go crazy.” It is rare to hear tennis umpires speak so openly. Few roles in professional sport are more secretive. During tournaments, they can be seen up in the chair – but once the match is over, they are not allowed to explain their decisions in press conferences or on social media. Their code of conduct prohibits them from meeting journalists.
(VICE, approx 21 mins reading time)
By season four, The Simpsons had entered what many now consider to be its golden age (although, at the time there were already suggestions that it was losing its way). “Marge vs. the Monorail” (S4, E12), with its grand scale, silly asides and abundance of absurdist humour, represented a stark departure from the show’s established formula. While initial reactions were mixed, it’s now widely regarded as one of The Simpsons’ best-ever episodes. With a script by Conan O’Brien – then an energetic young comedy writer – and meticulous yet joyful direction by Rich Moore – who subsequently won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature with Zootopia – the result is a wild ride, as charming conman Lyle Lanley convinces Springfield to spend $3 million on a monorail through the power of song alone. Disaster ensues until Homer saves the day, with the help of Lard Lad Donuts.
(The New Yorker, approx mins reading time)
At first, the U.P.I. sports club assumed that the group had just been held up; there had been reports of a heavy snowstorm in the mountains. But, after several days passed, families of the group began placing frantic phone calls to the university and to the local bureau of the Communist Party, and, on February 20th, a search was launched. There were several search parties: student volunteers from U.P.I., prison guards from the Ivdel camp, Mansi hunters, local police; the military deployed planes and helicopters. On February 25th, the students found ski tracks, and the next day they discovered the skiers’ tent—above the tree line on a remote mountain that Soviet officials referred to as Height 1079 and that the Mansi called Kholat Syakhl, or Dead Mountain. There was no one inside.
(The New York Times, approx 35 mins reading time)
The day Sudan died, everything felt both monumental and ordinary. It was a Monday. Gray sky, light rain. On the horizon, the sun was struggling to make itself seen over the sharp double peaks of Mount Kenya. Little black-faced monkeys came skittering in over the fence to try to steal the morning carrots. Metal gates creaked and clanked. Men spoke in quiet Swahili. Sudan lay still in the dirt, thick legs folded under him, huge head tilted like a capsizing ship. His big front horn was blunt, scarred, worn. His breathing was harsh and ragged. All around him, for miles in every direction, the savannah teemed with life: warthogs, zebras, elephants, giraffes, leopards, lions, baboons — creatures doing what they had been doing for eons, hunting and feeding and scavenging, breathing and going and being. Until recently, Sudan had been a part of this pulse. But now he could hardly move. He was a giant stillness at the center of all the motion.
(The Atlantic, approx 38 mins reading time)
The affidavit related a story from a document titled “The Lost Gold Ingot Treasure,” which had been found in the archives at the Military History Institute, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The tale, in its barest bones, was this: In June 1863, a caravan of Union soldiers transporting a shipment of gold through the mountains became lost. Three men were sent to get help and eventually one returned with a rescue party, which located the group’s abandoned wagons but no men, no gold. Teams from the Pinkerton detective agency scoured the hills. In 1865, two and a half buried ingots were found, and, later, the bones of three to five human skeletons. The rest of the gold remains missing.
(The New Yorker, approx 45 mins reading time)
In fact, the thief was someone he knew quite well. For the previous few summers, Tesch had worked as an instructor at Jim Davis’s Vail Cross-Training Camp, which offered people the chance to enjoy a week in Vail, Colorado, training with athletes like the distance runner Frank Shorter, and the champion triathlete Scott (the Terminator) Molina. The instructors also included a young man named James Hogue, a miler who, according to the camp’s promotional literature, had earned a Ph.D. in bioengineering from Stanford University, where he was a professor. With his diffident manner and his youthful face, though, he looked less like a professor than like an undergraduate. His training methods were unorthodox. He drank a mixture of mustard and Perrier during races; he lit a cigarette after crossing the finish line, as the other runners looked on in horror. In the summer of ’87, Hogue started showing up in San Marcos, sleeping in his truck, helping Tesch out around the shop, and otherwise leading a life that might have seemed atypical for a Stanford professor.
(The New Yorker, approx 28 mins reading time)
An Icelandic shark dish, called hákarl, was the first assault on his stomach. “Eating it was like gnawing on three-week-old cheese from the garbage that had also been pissed on by every dog in the neighborhood,” he said. Next up was durian, a spiky, custard-like fruit from Southeast Asia that “smelled like socks at the bottom of a gym locker, drizzled with paint thinner.” But worst of all was surströmming, a fermented herring that is beloved in northern Sweden. De Meyer said that eating it was like taking a bite out of a corpse.
(Popular Mechanics, approx 17 mins reading time)
The Zodiac’s first cipher, included in the July 31 letter, had been solved within a week by an amateur husband-and-wife team—but it had only revealed more of the killer’s raving. The second, now known as “the 340” due to the number of characters in it, would prove a much more difficult challenge. It came with a letter for the Chronicle, reading in part: PS could you print this new cipher in your frunt page? I get aufully lonely when I am ignored, so lonely I could do my Thing !!!!!!
(ESPN, approx 14 mins reading time)
The low five had been a fixture of African-American culture since at least World War II. It might seem impossible to pinpoint when the low five ratcheted itself upright and evolved into the high five, but there are countless creation myths in circulation. Magic Johnson once suggested that he invented the high five at Michigan State. Others trace it to the women’s volleyball circuit in the 1960s. But the Sleets story quickly shot around the Internet and into local newspapers, displacing, or at least undermining, all other claims. Sleets was budging his way atop the high-five hierarchy.
(Wired Magazine, approx 27 mins reading time)
Over the past 10 years, four lawsuits have been filed over the Bahia emerald. Fourteen individuals or entities, plus the nation of Brazil, have claimed the rock is theirs. A house burned down. Three people filed for bankruptcy. One man alleges having been kidnapped and held hostage. Many of the men involved say that the emerald is hellspawn but they also can’t let it go. As Brian Brazeal, an anthropologist at California State University Chico, wrote in a paper entitled The Fetish and the Stone: A Moral Economy of Charlatans and Thieves, “Emeralds can take over the lives of well-meaning devotees and lead them down the road to perdition.”
(Wired, approx 27 mins reading time)
Press the cone icon on the screen of the Taylor C602 digital ice cream machine, he explains, then tap the buttons that show a snowflake and a milkshake to set the digits on the screen to 5, then 2, then 3, then 1. After that precise series of no fewer than 16 button presses, a menu magically unlocks. Only with this cheat code can you access the machine’s vital signs: everything from the viscosity setting for its milk and sugar ingredients to the temperature of the glycol flowing through its heating element to the meanings of its many sphinxlike error messages. “No one at McDonald’s or Taylor will explain why there’s a secret, undisclosed menu,” O’Sullivan wrote in one of the first, cryptic text messages I received from him earlier this year.
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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These stories are terrible and assuming that these things were always happening to people how did they deal with it before Merkels invitation? Where dis they go to escape ‘persecution’ for the last 100 years ?
It is naive to think that Europe can accommodate *everyone* that appears with an unverifiable story looking for asylum.
Yeah, except no African country in is the EU.
The World Gives Aid to Africa WRONG Africa Aids the World, Find out Why.
Africa, the receiver of $30 billion in annual monetary handouts, is not only making nothing from the aid it receives but it actually loses $192 billion to the rest of the world within the same time frame.
How, you ask? Research published recently indicates that current practices within the continent tend to favour wealthy countries. These practices include tax dodging, the repatriation of multinational companies’ profits with their unjust trade policies, the costs incurred from climate change and the exodus of skilled workers. This means, basically, that if you take into account the money coming in through aid, investment and remittances ($134 billion), Africa is left with a $58 billion annual loss. To put this into perspective, the money that Africa loses each year is over one and half times the amount of additional money needed to deliver affordable health care to everyone in the whole world!
As you can see, it is Africa that is aiding the rest of the world – not the other way round.
Until this problem is solved and this money is reinvested, creating employment in Africa this problem will prevail..
Watch short film:
http://www.myafricanow.com/aid-to-africa-from-world/
The white mans burden….
disgusting poem…
@ Peter
Look’s like Peter want’s to go back to the good old days of christiandom. Quoting some sick joke of a poem, or maybe I’m reading to much into his comment… Correct me if I’m wrong.
@Pat Africans are stealing from africans, Don’t be fooled,
The notion of “unverifiable stories” is false. Any asylum seeker needs to verify their situation as deserving of refugee status before being granted asylum. There are significant issues with the refugee system in endless appeals etc. The system in many countries is in need of swift and final decisions. Currently it almost encourages spoofers. It seems some seem intent on peddling falsehoods without recognising what the real issue is.
Teene…gimme a break…i dont even troll…my reference was to the colonial period attitude that saw the white sahib as all powerful,all knowing…when the africans looked to their colonial masters for munificence,baksheesh,alms etc…
Which African’s would these be now, and which colonial master’s Peter ?
Frankly, I have no idea what your are saying.
Stop quoting that horrible poem, Thanks, Unless that’s not what your were doing, Great.
Tony..if what you say is true…why did Ireland have 12k asylum seekers – most of whom were successful – from the 7th richest democracy on the planet….most of whom go “home” every year for 4-6 week holidays yet arrived here with no passports?…asylum is a gift and easily obtained..
Hey Peter, I’ve been here since the age of 12 as an asylum seeker with my family of four, I’ve never been back to North african. Have you sources to prove what you are saying?
Peter in order to make this a genuine discussion you’ll have to give actual numbers on granted refugee status. You’ll also have to state over what period and what country of origin you’re referring to.
Teene…slow down…you are well up for an argument….im not…i prefer an exchange of views/opinions…
Right..
I think these problem’s needed to be treated at source at conception, since that didn’t happen, throwing open the gate’s is the worst possible thing, for everyone. I think we agree on this?
Tony…cant do searches/links etc so ill withdraw…i wont waffle you.
You can’t use Google? At least you have the decency to withdraw although I suspect you did search and found that the numbers you presented are in the realm of fantasy.
Real sliabhín answer Fechter… exchange of opinion – argument tomayto – tomahto
Teene….at source at conception…what do you mean?
@ Teene: Your evidence please. Also facts and figures to refute the above film /account. I would be grateful.
The answer to to the third worlds problems would appear to be, according to the liberal left/feminists/and one worlders, is to bring every one who wants to come to Europe here and provide them with housing, education, medical care, social welfare and lots and lots of smiles and goodwill. Then maybe they won’t call us racist. Maybe. We’ll be broke, a welfare state a thing of he past, our cities like downtown Lagos but we won’t be racist and that is the most important thing. Believe every story you ever hear from every migrant or you lack compassion or worse, you’re a racist. Suspend disbelief at every turn or risk being called a racist. If a 25 year old tells you he’s 13, you’d better believe him or you’re a racist. If a Muslim migrant treats his social workers with contempt, don’t judge, it’s cultural imperialism and you’re a racist. Suck it all up because we Europeans are bad people who deserve to be culturally annihilated and pay all the bills too while we self destruct.
Marg..very true.
Marg , I think you’ve summed it up pretty well there !
Marg
Like too many people you are playing the way card to play. You are taking sound bites and editorialising them to suit your incorrect statements. We need to look after ourselves and our futures but we also need to look after those less well off than we are. It’s not a matter of all or nothing it takes a little more thought and critical thinking to work towards a solution that suits everyone. Taking the easy route, as you have done, simply ends up in racist rhetoric and creates a discourse of fear in society
@nick. I don’t agree. Poor Africans DO need our compassion. But the boats have to be stopped and Africans have to be encouraged to fix their problem on their home turf now or the migration north will never stop. That’s not good for Europe or Africa. And Africa need good governance and trade, lots of trade. That’s where we need to focus our efforts and resources. Bringing millions to Europe as economic dependants isn’t the answer. Helping them build sound institutions and infrastructure is.
And Marg do you have any idea how much effort is being expended to do exactly what you suggest and bearing in mind how long it took us “to fix (the) problem on (our) home turf” how long will it be before that happens. In the meantime of course the most motivated most determined to get ahead will by hook or by crook overstay visas, travel to a neighbouring country, avoid paying or pay depending on employer taxes or social security to evade deportation, get politicians back home to lobby for them, get sympathetic lawyers to plead their case in court and all the while watch politicians and others mouth off about how illegal immigration is killing the country and we should build walls and exclude people. Yay. I think I just described another group of hardworking immigrants determined to make a better life for themselves. Oh I know they are different, special, contributing members of society, nothing like our lot.
Marg
Africa doesn’t have the ability not resources to fix the problems themselves. They need help and education. They are crippled with debt and corruption. If we do nothing then things won’t change
Nick, firstly it is too easy to generalise about “Africans”. It is a vast continent composed of many different tribes and nationalities. Many African nations do have the resources to manage their own problems but they are so poorly run and administered that they cannot. They are also endemically corrupt on a scale we would find impossible to really imagine. Secondly your proposition while well intentioned is almost colonialist in nature. The poor incompetent Africans must be helped by us. Almost “little black baby” terrorist there Nick. Patronising in the extreme.
We cannot make Africa “good”. They can only do that themselves. Our current policies are damaging and achieve little except to further enrich corrupt African despots. Even those we aid resent us bitterly and oppose modernity, oppress women and persecute minorities and the LGBT community.
It is enough to make one despair. The main purpose of aid appears to be to decrease our colonialist guilt and to “do good” however ineffectual the results. Depressing really.
I meant “little black baby” territory of course. Apologies. Bloody auto correct.
“They are crippled with debt and corruption”.
And you think funnelling aid budgets in their direction is going to rectify that?
@marg I’d love to hear a comprehensive solution from you. One that takes everything on balance. Balance never seems to be a part of your posts, just labeling of “bleeding heart lefties” and pretty much anti immigrant regardless of facts. Even when direct questions are asked as they have been on other threads, you seem to resort to reflection and flaming. Cue “what questions did I not answer?”…. which is just another reflection.
Some words that should never appear in the same sentence: ‘United Nations + Saudi Arabia + Human Right’.
Brian
How about … Human rights are very poor in Saudi Arabia and some people need protection which the United Nations could provide if they were deployed there.
The UN wold never be deployed in Saudi Arabia. Two of the 5 permanent members of the UN security council are Saudi allies.
Phil
I know that, I was just putting the words in the same sentence
Logic and reason do not work with these daily mail readers (there Marg, I do it too, but only to find out what the numpties “think”
The UN won’t provide Saudis with help. They’re the head of the Human Rights commission ffs.
Loving how you lads think UN deployment works. Hilarious stuff.
I think hot bank and Phil should get a room.
Oh grow up, marg.
So everyone who was wronged in Africa should be looked after in Europe. I don’t think so… The main driver of Brexit is immigration and I think many Irish would agree.
That’s really not how it work’s…asylum should be given to anyone that needs it.
think Malala, or the Somalia lady the papal saved.
@Teenenyantoon “asylum should be given to anyone that needs it.” I dont think .Europe cant take anyone in africa who “needs” asylum . What about the rest of the world ?
Many countries have plundered Africa, encouraging corruption. Should we all be expected to open the doors? No, of course not. But there is a historical responsibility that has so far been fed with patronising “aid” that does little except allow many “aid” organisations to sustain themselves far more than actually help.
I’m not saying just EU, Any nation that can should. And please don’t leave it to the religious f*ckwits.
I’m looking at you Italy.
Ireland didn’t colonise a blade of grass or a grain of sand in Africa. We should be exempt. Africa should be grateful for the Irish for all their generosity down through the decades, often when we were poor ourselves.
Without passport ID they can claim to be whatever age they want and have come from whatever country they deem most worthy of Europes sympathy.
Agreed , the photo of the adult male.. sorry I meant the 14 year-old ‘boy’ playing with his school friends springs to mind ..
As Europeans we are privileged to live in a western world economy with western world benefits. If only we could stop bickering with each other, work together and show some cultural maturity we could potentially do some good for these nations in the world that are less well off. It’s such a pity people are too selfish to look past their own front doors!
@nickallen Your a dreamer . All the money these countries receive in aid runs in the billions every year . If they were given trillions not much would change . Sometimes these people have to take responsibility for there actions and make a life and good society for themselves and stay in their own country . You could also look at it another way that these people pay smugglers alot of many to get here for a better life and its a shortcut . When they should stay and build their own countries up or else the circle countinues .
Robert Preston, a graduate of the Tommy Cooper University of geo-political problem solving: ‘just like that, just like that …’
@neilmcdonough Ah Neil the man with all the solutions NOT . The population of Africa is 1.111 billion . How many of these people would you like to see make it to europe ? How many of the 1.111 billion could europe take before we turn into a third world country or go bust ?
Perhaps if our wealth hadn’t been built on their exploitation, or if we had shared it out more equitably, we wouldn’t be in this mess? I actually agree that we cannot now solve anything by inviting in all the worlds poor but maybe if we don’t start looking for solutions beyond building walls then we are all, rich and poor alike, in very deep trouble. I have yet to hear any solutions, and I fear that maybe there isn’t any due to the atavistic human nature, but one thing is for sure, just closing the door on the worlds poor and reverting to nationalistic insular far-right politics is not amongst those solutions. Sacrifices will have to be made to our privileged comfortable western lifestyles, some kind of compromise is going to have to be made between rich and poor if this world is not going to be destroyed. Whatever we end up doing, we have to start somewhere, and a good place to start would be to recognise our own societies responsibility for creating the situation.
Africans are responsible for their own shitty countries and socities.
Oh so these children decided to come to come into this world to “shitty”Africa by their own accord? Have some shame.
I don’t think this is a case of karma Neil, Generations of Europeans’s have tried to right the wrongs of days past, Africa just need’s to get ride of the human evil that is religion. It is definitely holding people back, Specially women.
Nah, they didn’t decide anything, dude. Their parents, however, did decide to bang them out en masse in the worst places on Earth.
Right…correct me if I am wrong but isn’t it the christians that are promoting this whole “go forth and multiple”? kill/arrest gays? etc etc
Christians may well be doing that, buddy. What does that have to do with the selection of Muslim illegal immigrants presented in this article?
This article is also about a Nigerian child, Bonded in sexual slavery. which is probably what awaits her here. These smugglers are ruthless in what they do, Obviously no nation should tolerate illegal immigrating but it has to be humane, our response to it.
I don’t see how an African being sold into sexual slavery by Africans to Africans is Europe’s problem.
It only serves to make these groups even less desirable as immigrants, illegal or not.
How did Peace a 17 year old girl manage to gather the funds to cross N Africa and the Mediterranean by just fleeing with a shirt on her back? I highly doubt the boat people ferried her to Italy free of charge. Sounds like a cock and bull story.
Lovely to see so much humanitarian concern in the comments section of the journal. I am so glad that this does not represent the vast bulk of decent Irish people but only a fringe of the dysfunctional section of our society… and yes I am part of that fringe.
Hotbank
You and me both. It’s an easy we to get red thumbs. All you have to do is show some semblance of mature thinking or show some compassion and watch the red thumb count rise
And throw some lazy generalisation, poor apologies, mention Merkel and slag off the immigrants and it’s green thumbs aplenty.
As for facts or point out inaccuracies and you’re red thumbed out of it.
These people are small minded Daily Mail reading morons.
You must read the Daily Mail a lot, Phil. You mention it ALL THE TIME!
Phil
As we all know, the revenue model of news media is through the sale of advertising. To maximise revenue from ad sales you need to demonstrate to potential advertisers how valuable your readers are. I think it can be seen from the lack of advertising on here what advertisers think of the quality of the journal’s readers. (Present company excluded)
You are part of that fringe? The dysfunctional fringe?
A German on the radio earlier described the far-right as over-simplificators, offering simple solutions for a complex world too difficult for those who prefer to have their thinking done for them. Much like radical Islam, it offers a black and white world of goodies and baddies. I think this is a sad fact of life and reminds me of the photos and films of laughing and smiling young men on their way to the horror and slaughter of the trenches. We underestimate this at our peril. I once heard that humans profess to love peace and life, but the evidence is that humans love war and death even more. I have young boys, and I’m worried for their future the way things are going. The keyboard warriors here will be the last to assume the responsibility for their hateful rhetoric, but I believe in kharma. You might say that what goes around, comes around, and we’re in a sorry state if so called ‘enlightened’ Europe is still only a short step away from barbarism. Of course, it will be the Muslims fault for the usual suspects.
Of course Marg, did you not know that only nutters are regular contributors to online comments sections. I read about a study to that effect in the Daily Mail just this morning.
Nutters?? Ah you do yourself an injustice there. Now as for Phil……
“A German on the radio earlier described the far-right as over-simplificators, offering simple solutions for a complex world too difficult for those who prefer to have their thinking done for them. ”
Must have read Marg’s comments here. It’s like she’s taking it from Ann and Barry’s big book of geopolitics and diplomacy.
Grow up, Marg.
Grow up, Dain.
I just can’t get my head around what the African union and Arab union get up to all year. My heart breaks for these people. Nobody deserves this as a so called life!
This need’s to stop now.
have your say