Our weekly recap highlighting the best feature stories from around the internet.
Photo: Image: 123RF
We need to talk about how white the NZ Olympic team is - by Dylan Cleaver, NZ Herald
“Ironic then that the NZOC are sending a team to the Olympics that bears little resemblance to modern New Zealand. If it wasn't for the inclusion of rugby sevens on the programme, the discrepancy would be even more stark.”
Summer Friends – by Micah Peters, The Ringer
“It’s a tale as old as exceptionalism: A majority-white police force, appallingly out of their depth in a majority-black community, either too skittish or too prejudiced to see black men, women, or children as anything other than imminent threats in varying sizes. From there, the system simply works against people it was never truly meant to protect.”
How technology disrupted the truth – by Katharine Viner, The Guardian
“We are caught in a series of confusing battles between opposing forces: between truth and falsehood, fact and rumour, kindness and cruelty; between the few and the many, the connected and the alienated; between the open platform of the web as its architects envisioned it and the gated enclosures of Facebook and other social networks; between an informed public and a misguided mob.”
Daddies, “Dates,” and the Girlfriend Experience: Welcome to the New Prostitution Economy – by Nancy Jo Sales, Vanity Fair
“Miranda is 22 and has the wavy bobbed hair and clipped mid-Atlantic accent of a 1930s movie star; she grew up in a Texas suburb. “I’ve learned how to look like this, talk like this,” she says. “I work hard at being this,” meaning someone who can charge $700 an hour for sex.”
A crisis heads south: the new homeless of Hamilton - by Aimie Cronin, The Spinoff
“I felt like being violent towards people sometimes,” he says. “I was in the state of mind where people would look at me and I would think ‘What are you looking at, we are just like you. Don’t look at my kids like they are scum, they are just like you.’”
My Mother, the Shrinking Woman - by Rose Thomas, Vice
“The scales in my mother's bathroom revealed a weight six kilograms heavier than those in my doctor's office—and those six kilos made all the difference. No matter how dire my doctor's assessments of my health got, Mum's scales were always the ones telling the truth.”