Our weekly recap highlighting the best feature stories from around the internet.
Business journalism Max Chafkin writes about his attempt to reinvent himself as an instagram celebrity Photo: 123rf
Confessions of an Instagram Influencer - Max Chafkin, Bloomberg Businessweek
“Both are cartoonishly handsome, and both (I noticed this later when I checked out their Instagram work) have amazing abdominal muscles. “Constantly,” Floruss said, when I asked him how often he takes pictures of himself. “You sell part of your soul. Because no matter what beautiful moment you enjoy in your life, you’re going to want to take a photo and share it. Distinguishing between when is it my life and when am I creating content is a really big burden.”
Casey Affleck’s Dark Secret - Amy Zimmerman, The Daily Beast
“As glowing writeups of Manchester by the Sea continue to roll in, Casey Affleck’s allegations merit more than an asterisk. Coverage of these types of cases often seems to operate according to an invisible scale. At first, unsavory allegations are cast aside in the service of palatable profiles. We subscribe to easy narratives; reporters don’t want to irritate stars with unpleasant questions, and fans don’t want to complicate their adoration with dark details. At a certain point, there is no longer an easy way out. The balance of public opinion shifts toward guilt, or, at the very least, suspicion.”
Ivanka Trump’s terrible book helps explain the Trump-family ethos - Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker
“Ivanka Trump’s 2009 self-help book, “The Trump Card,” opens with an unlikely sentence: “In business, as in life, nothing is ever handed to you.” Ivanka quickly adds caveats. “Yes, I’ve had the great good fortune to be born into a life of wealth and privilege, with a name to match,” she writes. “Yes, I’ve had every opportunity, every advantage. And yes, I’ve chosen to build my career on a foundation built by my father and grandfather.” Still, she insists, she and her brothers didn’t attain their positions in their father’s company “by any kind of birthright or foregone conclusion.”
Man alone: A mysterious death in the graveyard - Steve Braunias, NZ Herald
“His body was found by a gravedigger. Likely one of the last things he had ever seen, lying on damp earth near a sewer line in a grove of trees - pretty in the daytime, sunlit, with fantails hopping on low branches of flowering manuka, but lonely and terrifying at night - was an urupa, the graveyard at Orakei. It has a chapel and a low white wall and a bell tower. This was all that was left of the Auckland he had come home to, the city narrowing to a graveyard, a bell, a tap for visitors to wash their hands.”
Girlpool Forever - Patrick D. McDermott, The Fader
“It’s no secret that rock & roll is not the dominant American music genre it used to be, even compared to the 2000s heyday of bands like Bright Eyes and Rilo Kiley. But the need for the kind of truthful, underground music that Harmony and Cleo make never really goes away, and you can see that style’s fingerprints on some of 2016’s most talked-about moments, which also felt hinged on earnestness.”