What to read this weekend: recommendations from the bunker

Sally Whyte, journalist

“‘You’ve got mummy’s lungs’: After a life-saving transplant, a letter set Carolyn Boyd off on a mysterious treasure hunt” by Lucy Fahey on the ABC

“After some painstaking detective work — and more letters containing cryptic clues — Carolyn tracked down her donor’s family. Soon enough, on the phone from her flat from Perth, Carolyn could hear the voices of Terry and Frances Cannon crackling down the line.

“‘I think I shook throughout the whole conversation. It was just amazing. Asking questions and finding out,’ Carolyn says.

“Terry and Frances’ daughter, Natalie, was 22 when she died of a sudden brain aneurysm.”

Cass Knowlton, editor

“In Jim Cooley’s open-carry America, even a trip to Walmart can require an AR-15”, by Terrence McCoy in The Washington Post

“In a country of relaxing gun laws where it’s now legal to open-carry in 45 states and there are 14.5 million carry permits, every day seems to bring a new version of what open carry can mean. In Kentucky, it’s now legal to open-carry in city buildings. In downtown Cleveland, people carried military-style rifles during the Republican National Convention. In Howell, Mich., last month, a father went openly armed to his child’s middle-school orientation. In Mississippi, it’s now legal to open-carry without a permit at all. And in Georgia, which has passed a ‘guns everywhere’ bill and has issued nearly 1 million carry permits, Jim Cooley is staking out his version of what’s acceptable as he keeps pleading with his wife.”

Josh Taylor, journalist

“The Death of ‘He Said, She Said’ Journalism”, by Peter Beinart in The Atlantic

“A certain etiquette has long governed the relationship between presidential candidates and the elite media. Candidates stretch the truth, but try not to be too blatant about it. Candidates appeal to bigotry, but subtly. In turn, journalists respond with a delicacy of their own. They quote partisans rather than saying things in their own words. They use euphemisms like “polarizing” and “incendiary,” instead of “racist” and “demagogic.”

“Previous politicians have exploited this system. But Trump has done something unprecedented. He has so brazenly lied, so nakedly appealed to bigotry, and so frontally challenged the rule of law that he has made the elite media’s decorum absurd. He’s turned highbrow journalists into referees in a World Wrestling Entertainment match.”

Myriam Robin, media reporter

“The politics of pockets: the history of pockets isn’t just sexist, it’s political”, by Chelsea G. Summers in Racked

“This analysis of Western dress goes down pretty easy — maybe a little too easy. It’s not to say that pocket sexism isn’t true. It is to say that pockets are more than sexist: they’re political. One way to look at the transfiguration of women’s tied-on, capacious pockets of the mid-eighteenth century into the early nineteenth century’s tiny, hand-held reticule is to consider that this transformation occurred as the French Revolution, a time that violently challenged established notions of property, privacy, and propriety. Women’s pockets were private spaces they carried into the public with increasing freedom, and during a revolutionary time, this freedom was very, very frightening. The less women could carry, the less freedom they had. Take away pockets happily hidden under garments, and you limit women’s ability to navigate public spaces, to carry seditious (or merely amorous) writing, or to travel unaccompanied.”

Sophie Benjamin, engagement editor

“You’ve got mail”, by Daisy Dumas (photos and video by James Brickwood) in The Sydney Morning Herald

“Banking left and steeply carving towards the ground, we circle over a handful of tin roofs to signal our arrival before landing a kilometre or so away from the buildings and coming to a swift halt on the deep red, stony earth. It has taken just over an hour to fly what takes nearly seven to drive on pockmarked, corrugated roads.

“Our next stop is 10 minutes away by air, or an hour-and-a-half by unpaved road. At Theda Station, Megan and Brandy Jones meet our plane at the property’s neatly-clipped airstrip, where the temperature is in the high 30s. The daughters of a roaming cattle musterer, the teenagers have no phone or internet and have always been home-schooled. Today, the pilot brings their exams, the oversized envelope 2000 kilometres from its starting place in Longreach, Queensland.”

Sally Whyte, journalist

“The Professor, the Cop, and the President”, by Jamelle Boule in Slate

“It was July 16, 2009, and the prominent Harvard scholar of black history had returned from a trip to China to find that the door of his Cambridge, Massachusetts, home was jammed. He opened the door with the help of his cab driver and had been inside for several minutes when police Sgt. James Crowley arrived to investigate.