The Serial Killer Has Second Thoughts: The Confessions of Thomas Quick
Sture Bergwall, known in Sweden as Thomas Quick, has confessed to more than 30 murders, eight of which resulted in convictions. Heath comes face-to-face with Bergwall as he prepares to make another startling confession:
“Here, five doors from the free world, it is hard not to feel a little apprehension. There is an odd moment after I first arrive when the translator has gone to the bathroom and the two people from the hospital who will sit by the door as we talk are not yet in place, and so it is just myself and Bergwall, meeting for the first time, exchanging stilted pleasantries. He takes a seat on one side of a low coffee table—a position chosen, I later discover, because he doesn’t like to see the staff who are monitoring him. I move toward the sofa on the other side of the coffee table. But then he overrules me. He gently taps on the chair right next to him. Okay.”
Walter Willett’s Food Fight
Harvard professor Walter Willett is one of the most influential nutritionists in the world whose studies tracking hundred of thousands of health professionals have resulted in data shaping what we eat and how it affects our health:
“He’s tasting an almond-and-grape gazpacho when someone brings over a woman named Cindy Goody and, by way of introduction, says, ‘Walter, she’s trying to do good work at McDonald’s.’
“He phrases his greeting in the form of a question, ‘Why can’t you make a good veggie burger?’
“Goody, the senior director of nutrition for the 14,000 US outlets, appears taken aback. ‘We tried it,’ she says tentatively.
“‘Aw, that was a setup!’ Willett complains, waving his hand. He tasted one many years ago in an airport McDonald’s, and it was so awful he couldn’t finish it. ‘I’m convinced you guys made it bad to turn off people from veggie burgers.'”
The Lady Jaguars
A look at a basketball program for teenage girls that offers guidance and refuge from their rocky family lives in a town plagued by unemployment, substance abuse, and teenage pregnancy. The program is part of the Carroll Academy, a school run by the Carroll County Juvenile Court in West Tennessee. John Branch reports the story in two parts:
“Hannah arrived when she was 12, after she admitted stealing prescription pills from her mother and bringing them to school under orders from girls who had threatened to beat her up. It was Monica, wanting to teach Hannah a lesson, who called the school.
“It was only this spring that Hannah acknowledged that it was a lie — a lie conceived by her father, Hannah said, so that he could take the pills and avoid the wrath of his wife. Hannah wants to graduate from Carroll Academy. She likes the attention and a predictable schedule. She likes playing on the basketball team. She has flitting dreams of becoming a doctor or a veterinarian.
“Hannah’s parents do not like that she goes to Carroll Academy. Getting her to the van stop in the nearest town is inconvenient, and picking her up after basketball games (when school vans do not run) can cost an hour of time and $20 in gas money, if the car is running at all. But if Hannah does not attend, her parents could end up in jail. The juvenile court views truancy as a parent problem, not a child one.”
Reading List: One in Seven Billion
Picks from Emily Perper, a freelance editor and reporter who blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. This week’s picks include stories from the The Tampa Bay Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Andrew Yellis, and Vela Magazine.
A Hollywood Ending
The writer reflects on the 1992 murder of his brother, incorporating the stories of his friends and family members:
“Dad said he often thinks about how things might’ve been if only my brother was less naïve, better prepared for confrontation. Armed.
“‘I still think that,’ he said quietly on the phone. ‘And I think: Damn.’
“The line was silent for five long seconds.
“‘Damn.'”
The Disposable Man: A Western History of Sherpas on Everest
In the past decade, climbing Mount Everest has become a multimillion-dollar tourist attraction. Nepals’s Sherpas have been hired to do most of the dangerous work on the mountain—fixing ropes, stocking camps shuttling gear for climbers—but are paid much less than Western guides. When Sherpas die working on the mountain, they often leave behind families who receive little in terms of life insurance payments:
“Soon after, Arnot was confronted by members of Chhewang’s family who wanted to immediately launch an expensive body-recovery expedition. The urgency was over Chhewang’s spirit, which was at risk of getting lost and wandering the earth if it wasn’t set free within seven days by cremation. ‘I begged them not to go,’ said Arnot, worried that others might die trying to recover the body. They went anyway and never made it beyond Base Camp due to snow conditions. Arnot paid $19,700 herself in helicopter fees and says her sponsor Eddie Bauer wired $7,000 to cover the puja. Arnot has now committed to paying Chhewang’s family what she can—which has amounted to roughly $4,000 a year—for as long as she’s guiding, though it hasn’t entirely eased her conscience.
“‘It’s the guilt of hiring somebody to work for me who really had no choice,’ Arnot told me last October in Nepal, where I’d joined her on her second annual trek to visit Chhewang’s widow. ‘My passion created an industry that fosters people dying. It supports humans as disposable, as usable, and that is the hardest thing to come to terms with.'”
Ants Go Marching
The writer, after discovering a large mound of fire ants in his backyard, heads out to learn how the “ants from hell” invaded the American South:
“The range of Solenopsis invicta covers a vast wetland in southern Brazil and Paraguay known as the Pantanal. Sometime in the early 1930s the ants stowed away in coffee sacks, soil, or hollow logs piled in the bottom of a cargo ship. The voyagers were probably just a handful of queens, each about the width of a thumbnail. They ate what they could find down in the hold—cockroaches, beetles, sugary cargo, and, when the pickings got slim, themselves, digesting their own wing muscles and fat reserves. Their ship may well have steamed past Rio de Janeiro, the mouth of the Amazon, and the lush peaks of the Antilles, all while their first batch of eggs gestated in their abdomens. In Mobile, Ala., the ship docked, the sacks or soil or logs were unloaded, and the queens disembarked. Beneath the port’s loading cranes and circling seagulls, perhaps in a patch of newly cut grass, the ants established their first colony: a mound of soil honeycombed with chambers and tunnels that ran as much as four feet deep. They like to build mounds in disturbed habitats such as the edge of a road, the side of a building, pastures, lawns, or near a busy port. They eat pretty much anything—seeds, nectar, worms, weevils, butterflies, and even baby sea turtles, snakes, and alligators—catching the young as they hatch.”
Should Reddit Be Blamed for the Spreading of a Smear?
“Modern journalism is a kind of video game…to be silent is to lose points.” How social media editors for mainstream media sites, feeding off the Reddit community, incorrectly identified a missing 22-year-old Brown University student as one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects. The family of Sunil Tripathi, who was later found dead, has now been forced to pick up the pieces:
“At 2:43 a.m., a Twitter user named Greg Hughes (@ghughesca), who was previously tweeting things like, ‘In 2013, all you need [is] a connection to the Boston police scanner and a Twitter feed to know what’s up. We don’t even need TV anymore,’ shifted the now-fervid speculation to established fact: ‘BPD scanner has identified the names,’ Hughes tweeted. ‘Suspect 1: Mike Mulugeta Suspect 2: Sunil Tripathi.’ (Hughes has since all but disappeared from the Internet, and where he got this information is unclear.) Seven minutes later, Kevin Galliford, a journalist for a TV station in Hartford, relayed the same information to his own followers; Galliford’s tweet was retweeted more than 1,000 times in a matter of minutes. The next multiplier came from Andrew Kaczynski, another journalist at BuzzFeed, who sent out the police-scanner misinformation to his 90,000 followers and quickly followed up with: ‘Wow Reddit was right about the missing Brown student per the police scanner. Suspect identified as Sunil Tripathi.’
Short Read: Rape Joke, A Poem By Patricia Lockwood
“The rape joke is that you were 19 years old.
“The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend.
“The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee.
“Imagine the rape joke looking in the mirror, perfectly reflecting back itself, and grooming itself to look more like a rape joke. ‘Ahhhh,’ it thinks. ‘Yes. A goatee.‘”
Reading List: 5 Great Stories on the Lives of Poets
Julia Wick is a native Angeleno who writes about literature, Los Angeles, and cities. She is currently finishing an Urban Planning degree at USC. Read her picks from Tablet Magazine, The New Yorker, and more.
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