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. Eve Hewson on fame
This interview from The Times with Eve Hewson explores how the actress has little interest in fame, partly from growing up with Bono as a father, and seeing the reality behind the glamour. She also touches on her role in Steven Spielberg’s new movie Disclosure Day, her on-screen sisters from the dark comedy Bad Sisters and her on-the-go lifestyle.
(The Times, approx 9 mins reading time)
“Memphis Eve Sunnyday Iris Hewson was born in Dublin in 1991, the second of four children. Her mother, Ali, is an activist and her father a musician — Bono, the 22-time Grammy-winning lead singer of U2. This meant Hewson — plus her older sister, Jordan, and younger brothers, Elijah and John — had the sort of childhood where sometimes you’re sitting in double maths and sometimes you’re backstage at Madison Square Garden while Dad belts out With or Without You. ‘You go away and have a sort of unbelievable fantasy life,’ she says. ‘And then you come back and take the train to school in the rain and see your friends and do your homework.’ This itinerant double life was good prep, it turns out. Now, ‘I make all these friendships with these people for six months and then go back to my regular life. I think it set me up for being able to manage it.’”
2. Saving orangutans from palm oil production
A transmigration programme in Indonesia encouraged people to move from busy cities to rural villages. But in one of the most popular places for palm oil production in the world, orangutans whose homes have been destroyed are now being forced into these same villages. What can be done to help them?
(The Guardian, approx 24 mins reading time)
“Orangutans forced out of their home territory quickly get into trouble. Early one morning last summer, a baby orangutan was spotted clinging to the tall slender trunk of a jabon tree, half a mile or so from Edi’s farm. An hour later, the mother was found, hidden in tall grasses nearby. She had a wound 5cm deep on her back. The weapon, likely a spear of some sort, had penetrated her kidney. It took a week for her to die. The baby was taken to a centre for rehabilitation and eventually released into the forest, alone.”
3. Caring for an abusive parent
Caring for an ageing parent can be challenging if you have a good relationship with them, but what about when you don’t? New York Times writer has interviewed dozens of caregivers doing it to highlight their experiences.
(The New York Times, approx 28 mins reading time)
“Sometimes, for a moment, Carole could see Andre as others saw him, as a sweet old thing. A French Canadian man with pale blue eyes and a bad knee, who said ‘merci beaucoup’ with the remnants of an accent. An older person with dementia who was losing the thread. But usually, she saw him as he was when she was a little girl, when he used to kick her — hard, ‘like you would kick a dog that you were abusing.’”
4. Labyrinth’s 40th anniversary
Some of the cast and crew from Jim Henson’s 1986 fantasy Labyrinth, which starred David Bowie, have spoken to The Guardian on the 40th anniversary of the iconic film.
(The Guardian, approx 10 mins reading time)
“David was a crazy workaholic, just like my dad. They were both people who were used to being creative every waking moment of their life. So for David, doing Labyrinth was like being on vacation. He was a really wonderful spark of a person.”
5. How NYC celebrated the Knicks NBA win
New York erupted in jubilant scenes last Saturday when the Knicks broke a 53-year drought to defeat the San Antonio Spurs to win the NBA final. Vanity Fair has looked into the lead up to the big win, what it meant for the city and the celebrations in its aftermath.
(Vanity Fair, approx 10 mins reading time)
“Across the city, New Yorkers were hanging off of fire escapes and scaffolding and scaling traffic poles and street lights. The bed of a pickup truck in Dimes Square was full of fashion personalities cheering along. The West Fourth Street basketball courts, dotted with pickup games and a few mohawked punks, offered some rowdy counterprogramming to the West Village Girls who had showed out in full force and then some.”
6. Is personal taste gone?
Writing for The Guardian, Rachel Aroesti says that the increasing use of technology in everyday life means that people don’t actually make personal choices about what clothes, music and TV they like any more – the algorithm does it for them. Interesting food for thought.
(The Guardian, approx 18 mins reading time)
“And yet, perplexingly, one of the ways the internet destroyed personal taste was by prioritising it above anything else. By making taste – at least the most passive yet performative version of it – our defining quality, streaming and social media platforms boiled humanity down to data-producing nodes of consumption. Nathalie Olah’s book Bad Taste examines the politics of taste in the 2010s. In it, she writes about how middlebrow millennial “good” taste – muted colours, expensive candles, pot plants, coffee-shop coffees – became an online performance of capability and authority amid post-2008 financial precarity. We had little economic capital, but we had the supposed cultural capital of curating our lives, tastefully, on social media. It was a neoliberal con – and proof that being reduced purely to our tastes is just as dehumanising as having none.”
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
7. The truth about incest
Children born from incest were once estimated to be one in a million, but DNA testing is increasingly showing just how common it is globally. This article from The Atlantic explores the story of Steve, who was abandoned as a baby, and discovered he was born as a result of incest after taking an at home DNA test aged 40.
(The Atlantic, approx 12 mins reading time)
“The stigma around openly discussing incest, which often involves child sexual abuse, has long made the subject difficult to study. In the 1980s, feminist scholars argued, based on the testimonies of victims, that incest was far more common than recognized, and in recent years, DNA has offered a new kind of biological proof. Widespread genetic testing is uncovering case after secret case of children born to close biological relatives—providing an unprecedented accounting of incest in modern society.”