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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.
A multibillion-dollar HR software company has accused its biggest rival of hiring a mole – an Irish payroll manager – to spy on them. The tech world is transfixed by the juicy battle.
(Bloomberg, approx 19 mins reading time)
O’Brien started at Rippling in 2023, working out of the company’s Dublin office. According to his affidavit, his interest began to wane after a year, leading him to explore opportunities in consulting or a role at another payroll startup. He reached out to Bouaziz, and the two men connected by phone, with O’Brien talking from a conference room at Rippling’s office. “I have an idea,” Bouaziz allegedly told him. He offered to pay O’Brien to stay at Rippling and spy for Deel. To make sure he wasn’t being too subtle, Bouaziz also mentioned James Bond. (Deel claims that the affidavit “is replete with falsehoods and grossly distorts the nature of O’Brien’s interactions with Deel” and that O’Brien gave the testimony “under extreme duress.”)
In late 2024, O’Brien and Deel executives agreed on an arrangement, according to O’Brien’s affidavit: They’d pay him in cryptocurrency worth €5,000 ($5,700) per month in exchange for frequent updates about Rippling. He and Bouaziz quickly settled into a rhythm. Bouaziz messaged O’Brien multiple times a day on the encrypted messaging app Telegram, often opening with “hi boss!” or “hey boss, can you search for…” and texting repeatedly if O’Brien didn’t respond. O’Brien said he took screen recordings of Rippling’s Slack channels and sent them to Bouaziz. If the information was helpful, Bouaziz would reply “this channel is beast” or “these are badass.” But if O’Brien’s information was a dud, he’d say the material was a “headache.”
A deep dive into the life of the young man who tried to assassinate Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania last July, and the questions that remain unanswered.
(The New York Times, approx 13 mins reading time)
Now, nearly a year later, with Mr. Trump in his second presidential term, much of the world has forgotten about the 20-year-old who set out to murder him. Mr. Crooks — who also killed a bystander and wounded two others before being shot dead by the Secret Service — had kept to himself and seemed to leave little behind. His motive was a mystery, and remains the source of many conspiracy theories. A New York Times examination of the last years of the young man’s life found that he went through a gradual and largely hidden transformation, from a meek engineering student critical of political polarization to a focused killer who tried to build bombs. For months he operated in secret, using aliases and encrypted networks, all while showing hints of a mental illness that may have caused his mind to unravel to an extent not previously reported.
The newly-expanded FIFA event kicks off in the US today. But how much pressure is another tournament going to put on exhausted players who are already experiencing an injury crisis, and is it all just for the sake of greed?
(The Ringer, approx 18 mins reading time)
This aggressive expansionism has invited a reckoning. Interest from sponsors, broadcasters, and fans has been tepid. A number of players—many of them just a few weeks removed from the conclusion of their long, grueling club campaigns—and their labor unions are openly hostile to this steroidal tournament. And while the clubs themselves have largely stayed quiet on it—their misgivings soothed by a billion-dollar pot of prize money, with $125 million going to the winners and the rest distributed on a basis of participation and performance in the tournament—there is no tangible momentum or excitement for this thing, in spite of Infantino’s extensive American media tour. More than ever, the world’s most popular sport is on a collision course with its own unchecked capitalism. And a year out from the World Cup proper, the Club World Cup will be a kind of litmus test for global soccer. Is FIFA’s working assumption, that demand for elite soccer is basically infinite, correct? Is the goose that lays the golden eggs really unkillable, no matter how much production you force from it? Or is a bubble about to burst?
A powerful look at Lina Qasem Hassan, a Palestinian doctor who treated victims of Hamas’s 7 October attack. When she condemned the targeting of hospitals and the killing of civilians in Gaza, some of her patients demanded that she be fired.
(The New Yorker, approx 41 mins reading time)
The clinic at the hotel was a collaborative effort that Qasem Hassan had launched with her peers at Physicians for Human Rights Israel, a nonprofit whose board she chairs. The organization, founded in 1988, produces reports on sometimes contentious subjects; a recent one claimed that Israeli prisons were systematically denying medical care to Palestinian detainees, resulting in a “widespread scabies infection,” among other problems. (The Israel Prison Service did not respond to a request for comment.) The group also provides medical care to people who lack access to it, both in the occupied territories and at a clinic in Jaffa that serves immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees. In fact, at the time of the October 7th attack, Qasem Hassan and other P.H.R.I. members had been planning to visit Gaza the following week. With access to Gaza cut off, Qasem Hassan instead joined an emergency-response team and went to the Dead Sea, for reasons both personal and philosophical. “You can’t divide human pain,” she told Palestinian friends who questioned why she went to the hotel as the bombardment of Gaza intensified. “Whether you are Israeli or Palestinian, it’s the same pain.”
Alan Siegel has written a new book about how the cartoon changed television forever. In this adaptation, he explores how The Simpsons went to war with the Fox censors and won.
(Slate, approx 13 mins reading time)
Simpsons humor was never as blue as Marge’s hair, but there was light cursing and slightly dirty jokes. Like in “Brush With Greatness.” When commissioned to create a portrait of Mr. Burns, Marge depicts the power plant owner as he really is underneath his malevolent exterior: naked, shriveled, and frail. The script ends with the billionaire complimenting the artist. “Your painting is bold but beautiful,” he tells Marge. “And, uh, incidentally, thanks for not making fun of my genitalia.” In response, she says, “I thought I did.” Before the episode aired, Cobern wrote a memo that demanded cutting the word genitalia. “As constituted, the moral point and a very human moment with Mr. Burns is lost in the shock of the specific body part reference,” she wrote. “Calling specific attention to a man’s sex organs in this way would be certain to offend and anger many viewers, especially parents who are watching this show with their children. Although in previous discussions I requested a very general word such as ‘body’ in this scene, the substitution of your original term, ‘equipment,’ would be preferable and would satisfy our concerns in this context.”
Lose yourself in Caity Weaver’s delightful account of her journey to Paris to retrace the American writer’s footsteps.
(The Atlantic, approx 28 mins reading time)
Twain wrote of difficulties procuring Parisian fare by ordering in either French (which he claimed the French could not understand) or English (which robbed him of “the coveted consciousness” that he was “in beautiful France”). I am spared this hardship by my friend’s chic Parisian associates. One of them, who looks like a ’60s pop star, translates the offerings in a voice that drifts through the air like wild bergamot: Poached calf’s brain. Pig-feet croquettes. Pickled quail. Head ragout. Jesus Christ. Whose head? What’s head? No one says. Some items—pig ears; duck—are described as “pressed.” That might be safest; sounds almost like a grilled cheese.
No, confesses the other Parisian, who resembles the miniatures of young dukes in the Louvre; not like a grilled cheese. More like: You take something—the ears of a pig, the carcass of a duck—and mash it inside a special device until it becomes a juice of itself, and then turn that juice into sauce, which you trick people into buying. The members of my party have the gall to request several of these demonic items from the livid waiter. I take one goldfish’s nibble from every plate. Each dish is either colloidal crumbles or the wettest thing I have ever put in my mouth. Halfway through the meal, the waiter yells at us for speaking too loudly, but he does not pay us the courtesy of kicking us out.
This week, it was announced that legendary Beach Boys frontman Brian Wilson had died at the age of 82. Here’s an interview with him from 2015.
(Rolling Stone, approx 14 mins reading time)
Almost any day in L.A., you could find Brian Wilson pretty easily if you wanted to, sitting in a booth by the window at the Beverly Glen Deli, with a bowl of blueberries and a hamburger, or shuffling along the path of a tree-shaded park near his home in Beverly Hills. He does this circuit — deli, park, home — two or three times a day, what he calls “my daily regime,” to keep in shape and to quiet his mind. “I’m anxious, depressed, I get scared a lot,” says Wilson, who turned 73 on June 20th. “It’s been that way for about 42 years. The park helps keep me straight. I show up feeling bad, and I leave feeling good. It blows the bad stuff right out of my brains.” On an 80-degree winter morning, Wilson walks the curving trail, his six-foot-three frame stooped and a little unsteady, but moving fast. “See that bench up there?” he says, breathing hard. “Just under that tree? We’re gonna sit down there. Get ready.”
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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