The attacks, a conversion, and the biography of a face

The best reads of the week

The Sunday

Published in

The Sunday

4 min readNov 22, 2015

Every week The Sunday features a carefully curated selection of the most thought-provoking, interesting writing from around the web. Today’s pick of the week is the remarkable story of Patrick Hardison, a Mississippi fireman who lost his face in a blaze 14 years ago. He now has a new face, one that just three months ago belonged to a young Brooklyn bike mechanic.

How One Man's Face Became Another Man's Face

For the moment, the face belongs to no one. It floats in a bowl of icy, hemodynamic…

Steve Fishman | New York Magazine

Conversion via Twitter

On December 1, 2009, to commemorate World AIDS Day, Twitter announced a promotion: if users employed the hashtag #red…

Adrian Chen | The New Yorker

Magical Thinking about Isis

Before the Lebanese civil war, Beirut was known as the Paris of the Middle East. Today, Paris looks more and more like…

Adam Shatz | London Review of Books

Can you think yourself into a different person?

We used to believe our brains couldn't be changed. Now we believe they can - if we want it enough. But is that true…

Will Storr | Mosaic

Cynthia Payne, madam

Judge David West-Russell noted, however, that Mrs Payne had appeared in court on four previous occasions, on similar…

Obituary | The Telegraph

Confessions of an ISIS Spy

For all the attention paid to ISIS, relatively little is known about its inner workings. But a man claiming to be a…

Michael Weiss | The Daily Beast

Memoirs of a Revolutionary's Daughter

On January 25, 1983, at about nine o'clock in the evening, my father and twenty-one of his friends were led onto a…

Neda Semnani | The Baffler

Forensic Pseudoscience

This past April, the FBI made an admission that was nothing short of catastrophic for…

Nathan J. Robinson | Boston Review

The Doomsday Invention

Last year, a curious nonfiction book became a Times best-seller: a dense meditation on artificial intelligence by the…

Raffi Khatchadourian | The New Yorker

Five last rounds in Louisville with Muhammad Ali

May, 1988 One In the month since I met Ali at his mother's and he gave me his phone numbers, I haven't called, not…

Davis Miller | SB Nation

Saudi Arabia, an ISIS That Has Made It

Black Daesh, white Daesh. The former slits throats, kills, stones, cuts off hands, destroys humanity's common heritage…

Kamel Daoud | The New York Times

Holiday at the Dictator's Guesthouse

On the morning of August 1, 2014, Jeffrey Fowle woke before seven in his room at a guesthouse in Pyongyang, North Korea…

Joshua Hunt | The Atavist Magazine

The dream of designing humans has a long and peculiar history

For centuries, human hereditary improvement was a problem in social, not biological, engineering: how to persuade or…

Nathaniel Comfort | Aeon

The murderers next door

In the poor and remote province of Maramureş in the northern Carpathians, cut off by bad mountain roads from the rest…

Adam Nicolson | The Guardian

You Won't Live to See the Final Star Wars Movie

Kathleen Kennedy has heard a lot of movie pitches. For decades she worked with Steven Spielberg, producing E.T. the…

Adam Rogers | Wired

Landlocked Islanders

Can Marshall Islanders whose lives are tied to the sea maintain their culture in Oklahoma?

Krista Langlois | Hakai Magazine

A Price Of Games Journalism

For the past two years, Kotaku has been blacklisted by Bethesda, the publisher of the Fallout and Elder Scrolls series…

Stephen Totilo | Kotaku

The Doomsday Scam

The hunt for the ultimate weapon began in January 2014, when Abu Omar, a smuggler who fills shopping lists for the…

C.J. Chivers | The New York Times Magazine

Two deaths, 26 years apart

For the first few seconds after the collision, the game continues as if nothing has gone wrong. The crowd cheers in…

Eli Saslow | ESPN

Australia's Secret History as a White Utopia

Today, the majority of Australians take pride in being part of a multicultural, multiethnic society. But much like the…

Matt Novak | Paleofuture

Run, Forest, Run

Helping trees flee climate change

Asher Mullard | The Walrus

Bill Simmons Interviews President Obama

Bill Clinton served for eight years, but we were always more intrigued by Bill Clinton the Person-a magnetic charmer…

Bill Simmons | GQ

The Double Life of John le Carré

Every writer is a kind of spy…

James Parker | The Atlantic

Belgium is a failed state

That the Paris terrorist attacks had strong links to a suburb of Brussels didn't shock many of us who live in the…

Tim King | Politico

If you enjoyed this week’s selection please give us a recommend and follow! Medium folks featured here are Adrian Chen, Neda Semnani, Joshua Hunt, Thanassis Cambanis, Krista Langlois and C.J. Chivers