Our weekly recap highlighting the best feature stories from around the internet.
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Being a NZ Customs Officer With a Drug Habit is Seriously Stressful – by David Benge, Vice
“Meanwhile I was turning up to work coming down from the night before. I had begun to hate my job. I was getting high to cut off from my professional existence. By day I was breaking into people's houses and seizing drug shipments. At night I was taking the drugs that had slipped through the cracks.”
Is This the End of the Era of the Important, Inappropriate Literary Man? – by Jia Tolentino, Jezebel
“Our awareness of the prevalence and magnitude of sexual assault has outpaced the systems that expose and adjudicate it. It’s incredibly difficult to match these two things up. But for activism to carry the authority of journalism—or for journalism with an activist conclusion to work—there are basic practices that can’t be set aside. Noble goals can be quickly rendered immaterial: Rolling Stone should’ve been enough to teach us that good intentions—that “believing women”—can end up hurting them dramatically in the end.”
ELLE on Earth – by Jacques Hyzagi, Observer
“We all know most of our colleagues at work are incompetent frauds but it is the smallest unexpected change in our routines that reveal how easy it would be for our collective inefficiency to bring about destruction—how close we are from complete collapse. A box cutter brought down the World Trade Center and our air defense system with it.”
‘Māori special privilege’ is code for ‘We like it better when you’re just the joker on the guitar’ – by Luke Tipoki, The Spinoff
“If New Zealand is to ever shake the special privilege debate it needs to make up its mind: does it want us as Māori to lift ourselves up and compete alongside Pākehā – to be equals – or is it still more comfortable with us being the joker, the guitar player, the flying winger or the gang member.”
Ugg: the look that refused to die – by Marisa Meltzer, The Guardian
“Uggs are certainly ugly, or at least inelegant. They look like something Frankenstein’s monster would wear if he were an elf. The shapeless, unstructured boots, pulled on in a hurry, can make anyone look like a slob, which has made them the target of special scorn. For as long as Uggs have been popular, it hasn’t been hard to find someone furiously denouncing them.”
The voice that launched a thousand careers – by Jim Pinckney, Article Magazine
“The range of artists Peel introduced and championed who subsequently went on to do extraordinarily great things is astonishing, and only countered by the thousands of bands he played for whom having his attention and patronage may have been their greatest ever achievement, sometimes deservedly so.”
