Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.
An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.
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.
Matthew Walther’s obituary of the late pontiff looks at the legacy he leaves.
(The Atlantic, approx 11 mins reading time)
Perhaps Francis’s real legacy is discord. Catholics could not agree about the value of his words and acts or even their meaning, and these disagreements gave rise to further misunderstandings and recriminations. Francis himself was responsible for at least some of these misunderstandings; when given a chance to clarify his intentions, he tended to prefer inscrutability. It is even possible that he found division valuable. His declaration before an audience of pilgrims in 2013 now appears prophetic: “I want a mess.”
Antonia Hitchens reports that a culture of obedience and sycophancy now reigns in Washington under the new Trump administration.
(The New Yorker, approx 28 mins reading time)
The gestures of servility come from all over. At a Cabinet meeting not long ago, Trump’s secretaries took turns: “Your vision is a turning point and inflection point in American history” (Brooke Rollins, Agriculture); “You were overwhelmingly elected by the biggest majority—Americans want you to be President” (Pam Bondi, Attorney General); “What you’re doing now is a great service to our country, but ultimately to the world” (Marco Rubio, State). Jeff Bezos, whose business empire can easily be affected by the favor or disdain of the White House, announced that the newspaper he owns, the Washington Post, would no longer welcome opinion columns outside certain boundaries. He redoubled his bow by licensing Trump’s reality-TV show, “The Apprentice,” in order to make reruns of it available to stream on Amazon. (Amazon also paid forty million dollars for the rights to two forthcoming documentary projects on Trump’s wife, Melania.) Senator Ted Cruz, who had once called Trump a “snivelling coward,” “utterly immoral,” “nuts,” and “a pathological liar,” now rushes to compliment the President, along with his main campaign funder and close adviser, Elon Musk; Cruz recently tweeted a photograph of himself with a red Tesla parked on the grounds of the White House. “This may be the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” he wrote.
A group of conservative female influencers are putting out content telling young women to be fertile, thin and traditional as part of an organised effort to create a right-wing, anti-feminist movement mirroring that popularised by Andrew Tate.
(The Guardian, approx 17 mins reading time)
Instead of trying to have it all, women, she said, need to change their priorities because “if you aren’t going to the gym, if you aren’t taking care of yourself, if you don’t like children, if you only care about your career, and you hate the patriarchy” then a desirable man is “not going to go for you”. The type of woman these commentators valorize is thin, straight, fertile, traditionally feminine, conventionally attractive to men and white – though they try to avoid overt racism, instead opting for sentiments like, “as a minority woman, I’m here to say that you’ll be happier and more fulfilled if you aren’t consumed by thinking about your race.” Anyone who falls outside of this narrow mold is subject to relentless mocking and disparagement. Though they have different tactics and tones, like their cohorts in the manosphere, they play with the idea that calling women fat or ugly is fun and transgressive – framing it as part of a virtuous quest to rid society of woke, feminist ideals.
Owsley Stanley created it back in the 1960s. Now it’s being used in clinical trials.
(Rolling Stone, approx 24 mins reading time)
Whether in cannabis dispensaries, concert parking lots, caves à vin, or dark-web narcotics markets, a drug’s pedigree is a link, drawing together users through history and binding them through a common experience, or headspace. But with Owsley acid, purity connotes something more than the molecular immaculacy of the compound. It’s a philosophy, an ethos. And it’s one that endures today, as the drug — or a version of it — is deployed in licensed medical trials as a psychopharmacological intervention. Tracing this LSD’s trip from the counterculture to the clinic tells the story of psychedelic drugs themselves: how criminalized compounds have found a second life as part of a cultural and psychopharmacological renaissance, wielded against intractable maladies from addiction to end-of-life anxiety. It is the story of how attitudes and cultures shift — and of just how far people will go to preserve access to the absolute best LSD. Ever.
A man who served in the US air force claims that his health problems can be traced back to toxic waste contamination at the George Air Force Base in California. But was there a cover-up, or is it all conspiracy? Maddy Crowell investigates.
(Harper’s Magazine, approx 25 mins reading time)
He watched in awe as more than a thousand veterans flooded to the page to share their experiences. For the first time in decades, Frank didn’t feel alone. It was impossible for me not to see Frank’s Facebook group as part of a larger trend toward conspiratorial thinking—including on the part of some who now occupy the highest positions of power in the federal government. And yet the ubiquity of the terms “conspiracy” and “misinformation” obscures the fact that not all conspiratorial thinking is mistaken. Which is why separating the facts of Frank’s story from various fictions he’d picked up online presented such a challenge. Was I myself falling for a conspiracy theory? Or had I just landed on a major cover-up?
Life expectancy in Britain has stopped increasing for the first time in over a century. In some communities, it’s falling. In this fascinating article, Rhys Blakely explores why.
(The Times, approx 10 mins reading time)
“Life expectancy at birth for 2021-24” would tell you how long somebody born between those dates would live, on average, if the death rates for people of every age between 2021 and 2024 were to continue unchanged. In reality, new treatments, diseases, lifestyles and policies will influence how long people live in the future, but life expectancy serves as an indicator on the dashboard of a society. Professor Sir Michael Marmot of University College London said: “There’s such a close relation between social and economic conditions and life expectancy, it is a good measure of how well we’re doing in meeting people’s needs. “The reason that we knew that the Soviet Union and the communist countries of central and eastern Europe were doing really badly socially [during the Cold War] is because life expectancy wasn’t improving.” The same now appears to be true of Britain.
On Easter Sunday in 2008, a fishing boat called the Alaska Ranger sank in the freezing cold Bering Sea. There were 47 people on board. This is the mission that took place to try and rescue them.
(GQ, approx 75 mins reading time)
Ryan Shuck was near the number three raft, on the starboard side close to the wheelhouse. He had his Gumby on, but he still wasn’t worried. He’d heard the boat wasn’t on fire like his roommate had told him. The chatter on deck was that the rudder had fallen off and water was coming in at the stern. That made more sense, would explain the guys with the wet pants he saw running through the galley. Come to think of it, Ryan had wandered into the rudder room that morning and seen water on the floor, maybe an inch. He assumed the engineers knew about it, and if they weren’t concerned…well, hell, Ryan wasn’t an engineer. What did he know? He just hoped the e-crew would hurry up and plug the leak and pump her dry so he could go back to bed.
He was close enough to the wheelhouse to hear what was going on. He watched as Dave Silveira, the mate, picked up the radio, keyed the microphone. “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday,” Dave said. “This is the Alaska Ranger.…” Those were fearsome words. Waking everybody up, ordering the crew into the Gumbys and out onto the bow? Yeah, that could all be Captain Pete ercising an abundance of caution. But Mayday? Mayday meant things had gone to shit. Ryan figured then would be a decent time to start worrying.
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.
have your say