Earlier this week, my 2D post was all about BuzzFeed, so it feels right that this week’s recommended read should come from there as well. And so, I’ve chosen Charlie Warzel’s analysis of the paywall, and how the online world is coming to terms with content no longer being free. It’s a great summary… and it’s not even in list form.

This weekend, Lotto relaunches in the UK. But how big would the jackpot have to be to make playing worthwhile? That’s the question James Harvey attempts to answer about the US Powerball game, in this entertaining Medium post.

I’ve chosen this weekend read not because I agree with everything it says, nor because I consider it’s author particularly well qualified to write on the subject. But Ryan Holiday’s “25 rules for living from a (semi-)successful 26-year-old” from Thought Catalog is one of those trashy list-based “articles” that, to my mind at least, falls just on the right side of provoking a bit of fairly superficial self-analysis in the reader.

I offer it as a sort of antidote to the frequently long and heavy articles I suggest as weekend reads… we all need a rest from time to time!

As someone who isn’t a fan of spiders at the best of times, this Weekend Read slightly freaked me out – yet intrigued me at the same time. Jeffrey Delviscio writes in the New York Times about being bitten by a black widow spider.

My recommended read for this week is a Jimmy Stamp piece from the Smithsonian‘s website, giving a fascinating insight into the history, expansion and architecture of McDonald’s, casting it in a Modernist light. It’s only fairly short, but contains some interesting nuggets of history and I found it rather thought-provoking, examining a familiar concept from a somewhat unfamiliar viewpoint. It is well worth reading.

This can’t really be called an original suggestion for a Weekend Read: earlier in the year, this fantastic New York Times article was being recommended across the internet. But nevertheless, Maxine Swann’s bathetic and somehow familiar tale of a socially naive university professor seduced into – intentionally or otherwise – smuggling two kilos of cocaine into Bolivia is well worth a read.

My recommended read for this week is a long but very engaging extract from David Quammen’s book Spillover. It was published in PopSci. It reads like some sort of adventure novel, but discusses the reality of tracking where the next pandemic virus might come from, and the work scientists do to prevent it. It’s well-worth reading!

The electron micrograph of a varicella zoster virus at the top of this post is from NIAID’s Flickr feed, and is used under its Creative Commons Licence.

I’ve chosen a relatively short recommended read for this weekend: I know people like a variety of lengths in these selections, and I’m aware that the last few weeks have been pretty heavy going!

Richard Smith, former editor of the BMJ, published a brilliant post on the BMJ blog back in June about the BMA’s difficult relationship with homosexuality. Or really, in some ways, I guess it’s more about the BMA’s relationship with the concept of masculinity. It’s hard to beleive that, well within living memory, the BMA made statements like this:

Effeminate men wearing make-up and using scent are objectionable to everybody.

And, as if the rest wasn’t enough, the casual sexism on display in the BMA’s previous advice is totally jaw-dropping:

Other men adopt homosexual practices as a substitute for extramarital heterosexual intercourse because there is no fear of causing emotional complications as in the life of a woman.

I think it is sometimes easy to forget the relative speed with which British society has become socially enlightened, and Smith’s blog post serves as a curious reminder of common attitudes of the not-too-distant past. It’s food for thought.

My recommended read this weekend is “The Undertaker’s Racket” written by Jessica Mitford and published in The Atlantic.tic. It’s a very well-written article describing the funeral business in the United States. It’s fascinating, shocking, and intriguing all at once, without ever being ghoulish.

It wasn’t until after I’d finished the article that I realised the date on top of it – this was originally published in 1963. It was written to promote the release of Mitford’s book, The American Way of Death, an exposé of the industry’s practices which caused a huge stir when it was published.

At over fifty years old, I think this may be least timely article I’ve chosen in this series to date, but it’s most definitely worth a read this weekend.

This week’s recommended read is a deeply troubling report by The Guardian‘s Will Storr published a couple of years ago. It discusses – in some graphic detail – the appalling rapes suffered by many thousands of men during wars in Africa and elsewhere.

The article quotes Chris Dolan, British directory of Makerere University’s Refugee Law Project:

The organisations working on sexual and gender-based violence don’t talk about it. It’s systematically silenced. If you’re very, very lucky they’ll give it a tangential mention at the end of a report. You might get five seconds of: ‘Oh and men can also be the victims of sexual violence.’ But there’s no data, no discussion.

Storr also talks to a victim of male rape, who at the time of his attack was studying electronic engineering at a university in the Congo:

Eleven rebels waited in a queue and raped Jean Paul in turn. When he was too exhausted to hold himself up, the next attacker would wrap his arm under Jean Paul’s hips and lift him by the stomach. He bled freely: “Many, many, many bleeding,” he says, “I could feel it like water.” Each of the male prisoners was raped 11 times that night and every night that followed.

This article is undeniably disturbing and reading it feels a little uncomfortable – but perhaps it is altogether more disturbing that we hear so little about topic, and that there is seemingly so little support for victims. It is certainly thought-provoking.