Our weekly recap highlighting the best feature stories from around the internet.
Jia Tolentino reports on Bill Cosby's trial this week for The New Yorker. Photo: AFP
Bill Cosby’s Trial Begins with the World Barging In, by Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker
“It is difficult, even in the case of Bill Cosby and his nearly sixty accusers, to be a woman with a story of sexual assault. In her opening statement, Assistant District Attorney Kristen Feden laid out Constand’s narrative, which resembles Johnson’s. Feden addressed both real and apparent inconsistencies: Constand mixed up dates; she maintained contact with Cosby after the incident. (Cosby does not dispute that the sexual encounters with Johnson and Constand occurred.) No one can predict how a person will act after experiencing sexual trauma, Feden said.”
The Addicts Next Door, by Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker
“We were driving away from Hedgesville when the third overdose call of the day came, for a twenty-nine-year-old male. Inside a nicely kept house in a modern subdivision, the man was lying unconscious on the bathroom floor, taking intermittent gasps. He was pale, though not yet the blue-tinged gray that people turn when they’ve been breathing poorly for a while. Opioid overdoses usually kill people by inhibiting respiration: breathing slows and starts to sound labored, then stops altogether. Barrett began preparing a Narcan dose. Generally, the goal was to get people breathing well again, not necessarily to wake them completely.”
All Worked Up and Nowhere to Go, by Amber A'Lee Frost, The Baffler
“The Trump administration has rekindled the internal hysteria that Fisher warned against. And though it was heartening, the first wave of solidarity marches and general actions is now fading into memory; we’re left with a familiar hostility, a recurring bad faith that so recently has smeared greater minds and gentler hearts than my own. The economic ambitions of the so-called “Sanders Effect” appear to have waned, and the focus has predictably turned to the glittering, bilious spectacle of Trumpism.”
JC Superstar:John Campbell on leaving TV3, radio life and his new TV show, by Julie Hill, Paperboy
“When people talk about Radio NZ having no money, you don’t know that until you get there – there’s no travel budget, there’s no correspondents budget. But I would say as a taxpayer that the money is spent well and cautiously. No one’s taking the piss. All I want to do is do the best journalism I can do. It sounds like a load of shit but I’m fit for purpose for being a journalist.”
He was an ardent WikiLeaks supporter. Then he got to know Julian Assange, by Alexander Bisley, Vox
“Julian has always claimed the relationship of WikiLeaks to its sources as being an invisible one, including to me. Look at his recent comments on the character of the sources. “It’s not Russia, I can say categorically!” he says. How can he say that if he doesn’t know? In other words, he is freely aware of the sources in both cases. And freely employing his skills as a selector and editor of materials; he’s shaping the material and shaping its public perception.”
Rachel Nichols Is One of the Sports World's Few Female Voices—but That's Not Why She's a Game-Changer, by Molly Knight, Marie Claire
“I do a lot of research before every interview I do. I sat down and read the police reports, I read the great reporting boxing journalists had done that hadn't gotten a lot of public traction. The context of it was really relevant to me; the interview happened right around the Ray Rice video [of him assaulting his then-fiancée in an elevator] coming out [in September of 2014]. So, to me—even though some of the incidents I asked Mayweather about what had happened quite a bit in the past—it was relevant.”
There’s a Buried Forest on My Land, by Rachel Buchanan, Vice
I did not have the words to explain what I felt. Perhaps I was happy. Or maybe I was meek and grateful. Certainly there were other sensations too: anger, sorrow, rage, total disbelief. There is certainly no term in the English language to express my situation. I was less than nothing. I was an invited guest on my own land. The tenant was the host. The land that was 'ours' was, manifestly, 'his'. The land was an orphan, adopted by his family, abandoned by ours.”
