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 the week’s best reads for you to savour.
1. Botox King
Mark Seal on the flamboyant lifestyle of Hollywood dermatologist Arnold Klein (Vanity Fair).
Klein, in a deep, gravelly voice, began talking nonstop: “I’ve given my life for other people and have gotten screwed for it Do you know I discovered the first human gene? … Do you know I treated the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia? … My great-great-uncle is Albert Einstein. Lawrence Klein, my cousin, won the Nobel Prize.”
2. The most popular fight club in the world
Mark Jacobson on the website that has built an audience of thousands by showing videos of people being beaten and even killed (New York magazine).
Several of the shirtless man’s confederates converged on the scene. In the ensuing mayhem, Endara was beaten with fists and kicked to the floor. What made this video different from the usual mélange of sucker punches and overlit swish pans was the voice on the soundtrack, the one that shouted, “WorldStar, baby!”
3. One man’s journey to Dickens World
Sam Anderson takes a trip to a theme park based on the 19th-century novelist (New York Times).
Its centerpiece was the Great Expectations boat ride, which started in a rat-infested creek, flew over the Thames, snaked through a graveyard and splashed into a sewer. Its staff had all been trained in Victorian accents and body language. Visitors could sit at a wooden desk and get berated by an angry Victorian schoolteacher.
4. The STD experiments
Matthew Walter describes how the US deliberately infected thousands of Guatemalans with venereal diseases (Nature).
At first, Cutler tried using infected prostitutes to spread gonorrhoea to soldiers: he and his team used various bacterial strains to inoculate sex workers, who then had intercourse with many men. Records show that one prostitute had sex with 8 soldiers in a period of 71 minutes.
5. The organisms controlling your mind
Kathleen McAuliffe on how one scientist’s sci-fi hunch about his own brain is growing into a science of neural parasites (The Atlantic).
Starting in the early 1990s, he began to suspect that a single-celled parasite in the protozoan family was subtly manipulating his personality, causing him to behave in strange, often self-destructive ways. And if it was messing with his mind, he reasoned, it was probably doing the same to others.
6. Why do we take cruises?
Adam Curtis on the strange phenomenon that is the cruise industry, and the powerful attraction it exerts (BBC).
There is also a woman who in one sharp line points to the problem that would bedevil the democratisation of luxury. “I came because I expected millionaires” she says – “but all I found was a load of Huggets”. The Huggets were a fictional working class family from a famous radio sitcom.
… AND A CLASSIC READ FROM THE ARCHIVES…
In January 1998, Angelo B Henderson wrote for the Wall Street Journal about the rich, complex lives of a Detroit pharmacist and a petty hold-up artist, and the fatal encounter that brought them together.
Now he was a chump, on the floor. “It was the fear of not knowing what’s next,” Mr. Grehl recalls, staring off into the distance. “It’s absolute, complete helplessness — you’re not sure if they are going to eliminate the witnesses.”