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.
1. How not to get away with murder
A TikTok star and her husband pulled off a murder plot so unusual that one of their lawyers used stupidity as a defence.
(Toronto Life, approx 30 minutes reading time)
They flagged a cab and rode, still covered in blood, back to their condo, where they stripped and put their clothes in a plastic bag. Li was scrolling on her phone when she came across a news item, a worst-case scenario they had not anticipated: Romano had been found—alive. The bullet had pierced her heart, and though she was bleeding profusely, she had regained consciousness. Afraid for her life and the life of her baby, she managed to crawl down to the curb. A few minutes later, a Good Samaritan spotted her on the road. By the time the paramedics and police arrived, Romano was barely breathing. The police, casing the scene, quickly found Pratt’s body along with a keychain bearing a picture of his young son smiling in a hockey uniform.
2. The first face transplant patients
File photo of Isabelle Dinoire. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
25-years-ago Isabelle Dinoire was one of the first people to receive a face transplant after her dog attacked her while she slept. Until her death eleven years later, she lived with physical and mental pain every day.
(The Guardian, approx 13 minutes reading time)
Isabelle never resumed a normal life, never returned to work or good mental health, and from 2013 experienced regular episodes of rejection. In 2010 she contracted cervical cancer, followed by lung cancer. She died in 2016, though her surgeons deny this was connected to immunosuppressant use.
In fact, Isabelle’s face died before she did; after it became necrotic, it was removed and replaced with a graft from her thigh. As she told her family, she “didn’t want to die without a face”.
I also learned from Isabelle’s immediate family member that her wellbeing declined dramatically after her transplant, and that she was in “psychological distress” when consenting for the procedure. “They took her away from us, so we didn’t have the power to dissuade or counsel her.” And after each psychiatric appointment, she would come home “at the lowest, full of guilt and suicidal desires”. More than once, according to her, she attempted suicide after her transplant; this story isn’t part of the record.
3. What US Tech Did to Ireland
Dublin Docklands. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
Aged 16, Jessica Traynor sat in her dad’s North inner city redbrick and watched cranes at work transforming Dublin. Now she worries the city has become too reliant on a handful of large tech companies who drove that transformation.
(The Dial, approx 20 minutes reading time)
The area I had visited with my dad soon became known as Silicon Docks. Droves of tech workers vied for Dublin’s limited housing stock in these rapidly gentrifying areas, pushing locals out of traditionally working-class areas like the North Wall, where a small terrace of 10 Victorian houses has been dwarfed by the development of a 25-story skyscraper. Today, the residents, some of whom have lived there for generations, feel their needs have been ignored. As one resident, Tony McDonnell, puts it, “We were told, ‘We can’t allow a group of houses to prevent the economic recovery of this city.’” The plight of the people of North Wall feels like a microcosm of the problem posed by these tech companies for the people of Ireland: While their contribution to our GDP has been huge and successive governments have scrambled to make Ireland attractive to them, their benefits to individual citizens can be intangible at best, and at worst, detrimental.
4. The foodie crisis
Is there a lack of foodies in the world? Alicia Kennedy thinks so. In fact, she thinks nobody is taking food as seriously as they should be anymore.
(The Yale Review, approx 14 minutes reading time)
The foodie is in crisis. For forty years, the word itself has been hanging out in the culture, signifying a person who doesn’t just eat but knows what farm the arugula came from and which chef in town has the hottest pedigree. Where once the foodie had Anthony Bourdain roving the world in a leather jacket, telling them how to travel, what to eat, and how to be in restaurants, his death in 2018 left a hole that seemingly nothing in today’s food culture can fill. How does food emerge from its post-Bourdain malaise? Not even Stanley Tucci searching for Italy could resuscitate the culture into a consensus about who the foodie is now and what they care about.
5. Why is Robert F Kennedy so convinced he’s right?
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F Kennedy Jr speaks alongside President Donald J Trump. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
How did someone who was once ignored by the public-health establishment become the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services? And why do people believe his theories?
Kennedy himself has done much to fuel the rising distrust. He views some of the world’s most celebrated scientific and political leaders as charlatans. He calls some of the experts who work under him at HHS “biostitutes,” because he considers their integrity for sale to the industries they regulate. He rejects much of the scientific consensus regarding vaccines, arguing that they have likely seeded the growing epidemic of chronic illnesses. During a Senate Finance Committee hearing just days before our flight from Chicago, Kennedy had called one U.S. senator a liar and another ridiculous. A bipartisan majority of the panel, including two Republican doctors, voiced concerns that vaccine policies he supported threatened the lives of American children. Kennedy argues that journalists like me are complicit, along with the public-health establishment, in hiding the truth from the American people. The nation was tearing itself apart, and Kennedy had positioned himself at the seams.
“The whole medical establishment has huge stakes and equities that I’m now threatening,” he told me. “And I’m shocked President Trump lets me do it.”
6. The Indian village where scamming became the new farming
In India, the name of the town of Jamtara has become synonymous with money scams. But how did a group of young men from this rural town become masters of financial fraud?
(The Guardian, approx 30 minutes reading time)
Mandal’s method began, of course, with a phone call. The voice on the line would be tinged with urgency; it was the bank calling, they would say and issue a dire warning: there was a problem with the target’s bank account. To those unaccustomed to modern banking and increasingly complex know-your-customer (KYC) regulations, this was all too believable. “Your ATM card is about to become inactive,” they would then declare, dialling up the sense of urgency.
Under the guise of verifying the victim’s identity, they asked a stream of questions, such as the person’s date of birth and address. By the end, they had harvested every detail they needed: card numbers, pins, three-digit CVV number. Simultaneously, an accomplice would be navigating the victim’s bank account online, armed with the freshly gleaned information. To finalise the illicit transfer of funds to their account, they required one last piece of the puzzle: a one-time password (OTP) sent by the bank to the victim’s phone via SMS. “To complete the KYC process, you must read out the six-digit code sent to your mobile number,” they instructed with authoritative calm. Overwhelmed by anxiety by this point, the victim recited the six digits as if they were items on a grocery list. With this, the fraudulent bank transfer was executed to perfection.
…And a classic from the archives…
The subject of Serial Adnan Syed. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
Serial, a 2014 podcast series from The New York Times, has amassed over 300 million streams.
The crime series explores whether Adnan Syed actually murdered his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee, a popular high-school senior, in Baltimore in 1999.
(Serial season one, approx nine hours and 35 minutes listening time)
For the last year, I’ve spent every working day trying to figure out where a high school kid was for an hour after school one day in 1999– or if you want to get technical about it, and apparently I do, where a high school kid was for 21 minutes after school one day in 1999. This search sometimes feels undignified on my part. I’ve had to ask about teenagers’ sex lives, where, how often, with whom, about notes they passed in class, about their drug habits, their relationships with their parents.
And I’m not a detective or a private investigator. I’ve not even a crime reporter. But, yes, every day this year, I’ve tried to figure out the alibi of a 17-year-old boy. Before I get into why I’ve been doing this, I just want to point out something I’d never really thought about before I started working on this story. And that is, it’s really hard to account for your time, in a detailed way, I mean.
How’d you get to work last Wednesday, for instance? Drive? Walk? Bike? Was it raining? Are you sure? Did you go to any stores that day? If so, what did you buy? Who did you talk to? The entire day, name every person you talked to. It’s hard.
Now imagine you have to account for a day that happened six weeks back. Because that’s the situation in the story I’m working on in which a bunch of teenagers had to recall a day six weeks earlier. And it was 1999, so they had to do it without the benefit of texts or Facebook or Instagram. Just for a lark, I asked some teenagers to try it.
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.
