Ten things you should read.
Five free recommendations; five for paid subscribers; and a bonus list of this newsletter's recent most-read!
Here’s your regular instalment of good things to read + the five most-read editions of this newsletter from the past six months.
1. Sam Bankman-Fried gambled on a trial and his parents lost
Elizabeth Lopatto for The Verge (November 2023)
This is a really striking summary on the conclusion of the crypto dauphin’s demise:
There was a hypothetical [Bankman-Fried] posited, where you could flip a coin: heads annihilated the world, and tails made it twice as good. Bankman-Fried said he would take that bet.
For Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, I think that is no longer a hypothetical. Bankman-Fried’s loving parents suffered through a trial where his closest friends testified against him, with their every move watched intently by a gallery of reporters.
There is a reason most people won’t flip that coin: they aren’t selfish enough to gamble with other people’s lives.
2. The Pirate Who Penned the First English-Language Guacamole Recipe
Luke Fater for Atlas Obscura (July 2019)
Like a 17th-century Anthony Bourdain, the pirate William Dampier ate his way around the world:
… several contributions from [Dampier’s book] A New Voyage reshaped our modern English food vocabulary.
In the Bay of Panama, Damier wrote of a fruit “as big as a large lemon … [with] skin [like] black bark, and pretty smooth.” Lacking distinct flavour, he wrote, the ripened fruit was “mixed with sugar and lime juice and beaten together [on] a plate.” This was likely the English language’s very first recipe for guacamole. Later, in the Philippines, Dampier noted of young mangoes that locals “cut them in two pieces and pickled them with salt and vinegar, in which they put some cloves of garlic.” This was the English language’s first recipe for mango chutney. His use of the terms “chopsticks,” “barbecue,” “cashew,” “kumquat,” “tortilla,” and “soy sauce” were also the first of their kind.
3. The Happiest Man in the World
Pagan Kennedy for Nautilus (October 2023)
The story of a man with psychotic delusions who believes, as the headline puts it, that he’s the happiest man in the world, and those like him who don’t want doctors to treat their psychosis:
Though he was engaged in an apocalyptic psi war, Harry was also a remarkably pleasant fellow who seemed to pose no threat to anyone. He did refuse his prescribed antipsychotic medications, but when Ritunnano and her colleagues asked him whether he would submit to a battery of pencil-and-paper tests, he cheerfully agreed. And so the doctors administered some whimsically named tools that are used to measure self-worth, including the Purpose in Life Test, the Life Regard Index and the Existential Meaning Scale. Harry aced them all.
4. ‘Good Burger’ Tried to Warn Us
Amy McCarthy for Eater (November 2023)
Keenan & Kel’s late-90s comedy movie was more prophetic than you might think:
Good Burger is pretty up-front about its anti-corporate message. On its surface, the movie follows what happens after Good Burger’s future is threatened by the opening of Mondo Burger, a chain slinging massive burgers pumped full of an addictive chemical. It’s worth noting that this storyline was written a full decade before Subway (and other fast-food chains) removed a chemical commonly used in yoga mats from its bread, and American food manufacturers were required to phase out the use of trans fats, which have been linked to chronic conditions like dementia and heart disease.
5. Phone-hacking trial: Why was Rebekah Brooks found not guilty?
James Doleman for The Drum (June 2014)
James Doleman, a pioneering court report and Byline Times contributor, died at the end of last month. I shared his recent piece about being stuck in hospital when I wrote about him on X/Twitter but I wanted to share this report from the phone-hacking trial to remind people of how good he was:
Rebekah Brooks has been cleared by a jury after an eight-month trial and leaves court without a stain on her character. However when you read the press headlines, especially the tabloid press ones, claiming that she has been declared "innocent" or has been "cleared", remember that no one ever knows what that jury really thought. All we can be sure of is that after listening to both sides of the argument, those 11 randomly selected people felt they could not be sure enough to convict and despite all the money spent on this marathon trial and all the legal talent deployed, that is the only fact that matters.
INTERLUDE:
Here are the five most-read editions of this newsletter in the past six months:
5. Ohwellism (11.2k)
The pages of the British press are full of glib answers and opportunistic digs in response to abject horror.
4. Just whispers about Wilby (11.5k)
A former editor of the New Statesman and Independent on Sunday was revealed as a paedophile. It hasn't really made the headlines or roused the columnists to rage.
3. In the shadow of 'The Nude Statesman'
The New Statesman played a pivotal role in allowing Russell Brand to remake himself as a 'revolutionary'. (11.6k)
2. "And then came the backlash!" Caitlin Moran in Can Dish It Out... shocker! (12.1k)
She wrote a bad book — which is selling like hotcakes anyway — but she needs an excuse for why not everyone loves it.
1. Fear And Loathing in Lancashire (Part 2): Any metaphor to escape reality (14.3k)
Part two of my trip to Rebellion festival which inevitably becomes an essay about decline and a review of a Neil Diamond impersonator.
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