My recommended read for this week comes from The Daily Beast, in which Heidi Vogt describes the harrowingly mundane process of reporting on bomb blasts in Afghanistan during her time as an AP foreign correspondent. It gives real insight into this particular aspect of war reporting in the 21st century, where every second counts when it comes to reporting news. It’s well worth a read.

The picture at the top of this post shows the detonation of an improvised explosive device by the US army’s bomb disposal team at Bagram Airfield. It was taken by Sgt Rob Frazier, posted on Flickr, and has been modified and used under Creative Commons licence.

Iain Brassington is a lecturer in bioethics in Manchester, and he occasionally blogs for the Journal of Medical Ethics. Back in February, he wrote a brilliant post taking on the Christian Medical Fellowship’s arguments about gay conversion “therapy”. It’s nice to see someone rehearse a whole argument explaining why gay conversion “therapy” is nonsensical: the arguments are largely obvious, but sometimes I think people are too ready to shoot others down without at least trying to explain their logical fallacies.

This weekend’s read is a fairly short article from the New York Times by Ron Nixon. It describes one of those jobs that I was conceptually aware must exist, but to which I had never really given any thought: the job of deciphering addresses on postal items which machines cannot read. The workers have to process items at quite incredible speed – an average of three seconds per item. This article is worth spending a little more than three seconds reading!

My recommended read for this weekend is an article from The Atlantic about in-flight medical emergencies. I have read quite widely around this subject over the years as it’s something I find interesting. Yet despite the fact that I didn’t feel that I learned an awful lot that was new from Celine Gounder’s article, I found it very absorbing – and not a little shocking in parts. It’s well worth a read.

I usually try to select weekend reads that are free to access, but this week I’m breaking that rule. My choice this week was written by the sickeningly talented Will Storr, edited by the Pulitzer honour Deborah Plum, and published by the startup I helped to fund, Matter. It tells the story of Alexander Litvinenko’s death, from the events in his life which lead up to it, to the extensive investigation and decontamination programme which followed it. This is one of the most absorbing bits of longform journalism I’ve read in absolutely ages, and I have no hesitation in recommending it.

It isn’t free, but it is cheap – and worth several times the price. I highly recommend it, and I’m very proud to see my name at the bottom of it!

I really liked The Inbetweeners, so I was very interested to read this blog post by Iain Morris describing the creative process behind the show. It gives a fascinating insight, and is well worth reading this weekend.

Microsoft has been having a tough time of late, with sales of both the Surface and Windows 8 reportedly below expectations. Many millions of words have been written over the years about Microsoft’s woes, but Kurt Eichenwald’s article for Vanity Fair last summer gave a particularly thoughtful, well written and absorbing account of where it all went wrong for the firm. And for that reason, it makes a great weekend read.

On Wednesday, Iain Banks revealed that he has terminal cancer, and likely only months left to live. I’ve long been a fan of Banks’s mainstream novels, and believe him to be one of the UK’s greatest literary talents. My thoughts are with him, his wife, and his family.

As this sad news reached me, I recalled an old interview I’d read online with Banks about how he writes. I’m always fascinated to read about authors’ methods, and this is ground Banks – like any prolific author – has trodden in promotional interviews many times over. For some reason, this short 2008 interview by Nick Ryan, originally for The South China Morning Post of all places, stuck in my mind. And so that’s my recommended read this weekend.

This week, I’ve chosen something that could perhaps more properly be called a weekend gawp than a weekend read. Before reading Sophie’s Travellettes post, I was already aware of City Hall station on New York’s subway, having read about it somewhere else at some dim and distant point in the past. But I’d never seen pictures, and, by golly, does Sophie have some pictures to share! Her post is well worth a look.

Before I read this article by the BBC’s Ed Lowther, I hadn’t realised that it was even possible for MPs to vote both ‘Aye’ and ‘No’ during the same division. Lowther’s careful discussion of the arguments for and against makes for a genuinely interesting read, and highlights the lack of any other mechanism for actively abstaining from Parliamentary votes. It’s a relatively short article for a Weekend Read, but it’s well worth reading.