Long reads shortened
Soldiers on their way to attack the president’s house. Benin Directorate of Liaison and Documentation
The barefoot general who fought off a coup from his bedroom
When Major General Abou Issa woke at 3am one night last year to the sound of a crash outside his three-storey house in Cotonou, Benin, he “didn’t register it as a coup”, says Michael Phillips in The Wall Street Journal. But moments later, the commander of the president’s Republican Guard called to warn him that a top general had been kidnapped by plotters, and that he might be next. His wife stepped on to the balcony and a bullet slammed into the wall behind her. Issa told his colleague: “The assailants are already at my house.” Unable to breach the steel door to the upper floors, the rebels set up a machine gun outside and started firing. Issa, barefoot in a pair of Adidas drawstring shorts, located his AK-47 and fired back, successfully holding them off until the arrival of an elite Quick Reaction Force (QRF) team. Unfortunately, that team was stuffed with plotters, and they bundled Issa into a car headed for the Nigerian border, and execution.
Meanwhile in the city, Colonel Dieudonné Tévoédjrè, head of the Republican Guard, had realised he was the “last man standing”. He took 100 loyalists to guard the president’s palace in Chinese-made armoured vehicles. After a street battle, the rebels fled to the national TV station – Tévoédjrè only learned that the QRF operative he had sent to save his friend Issa was a plotter when he saw him reading out their demands live on air. But the insurgents were quickly dislodged from the station with a well-aimed bazooka, and after a short stand at the airport and back at the QRF base, they scattered and the coup was over. On the Nigerian border, Issa’s kidnappers nervously started calling him “big brother”. He forgave them.
🐓🪖 The soldiers who laid siege to Issa’s house were terrified of him. His “dark powers”, they suspected, had allowed him to survive the fierce assault – common beliefs in the country that gave birth to voodoo. “If I had magic powers,” Issa told them, “I wouldn’t be here right now.” Just to be sure, the soldiers cracked two raw chicken eggs on his head and smeared the contents over his body, a traditional method for neutralising the supernatural.
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Property
THE COUNTRY HOUSE Aldborough Grange is an early 20th-century six-bedroom house on the edge of Aldborough in North Yorkshire, says Country Life. High ceilings, intricate woodwork and tall sash windows attest to the property’s period origins, while a recent update has created a comfortable family home. On the ground floor, a panelled reception hall leads to a drawing room with a feature fireplace, a dining room, a kitchen with an Aga, and a garden room. All six bedrooms have en-suite bathrooms. A detached cottage on the grounds has an open-plan sitting room and bedroom, a kitchen and a bathroom. Outside, three acres of mature gardens include formal lawns and a grass tennis court. £2.25m. Click on the image to see the listing.
Heroes and villains
Hero
Shani Wallis, who found fame as Nancy in the 1968 film Oliver!, for wowing the Britain’s Got Talent judges at the age of 93. A video of the actress performing a pitch-perfect rendition of her character’s most memorable song, As Long as He Needs Me, has racked up more than 900,000 views on YouTube. The judges put her through to the next round of the competition, the winner of which will star at the Royal Variety Performance in November.
Hero
Shabana Mahmood, for dealing with a heckler in admirable fashion. The home secretary was at a live recording of Matt Forde’s Political Party podcast when a man in the audience loudly accused her of “out-Reforming Reform”. Mahmood said she was sick of white liberals trying to “delegitimise” the “perfectly valid” views millions of people hold on immigration, and that those who try to “put me in a box” can “just f*** right off”.
Hero
Aaron Beggs, who abandoned his quest for a personal best in the Boston marathon to help a struggling fellow runner cross the finish line. The Northern Irishman had about 200m to go when he spotted Ajay Haridasse collapsing. He helped the American up, and together with another good samaritan, Brazilian Robson De Oliveira, carried him to the finish.
Villains
Two South Korean fighter pilots who had a mid-air collision because they were taking selfies and filming from their cockpits. An air force spokesman apologised this week for the 2021 incident, which resulted in no injuries but caused about 880 million won (£440,000) in damage.
Villains
Old people, at least according to The Guardian, which ran a long feature last weekend in which young people complained that their families were being “torn apart” by older relatives “going far-right”. In the interests of balance, says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph, there should be a follow-up piece on younger relatives “going far-left”. They could interview pensioners distressed to hear their children and grandchildren expressing “unhinged” views, such as “women have penises” or “Zack Polanski would make a good prime minister”.
Comment
Instagram/@Extra.Emily
Remember: most people you meet online are freaks
Something curious happened on Reddit last week, says Jeremiah Johnson on Substack. When users noticed that a live-streamer called ExtraEmily seemed to be using fake-account tools to inflate her audience numbers, their posts about it kept getting deleted by a moderator. This moderator, it turned out, was an obsessive ExtraEmily fan. How obsessive? In a single month, he or she posted more than 7,400 messages in ExtraEmily’s stream chat – roughly two per minute for 57 hours – and spent countless more hours commenting on the ExtraEmily Discord chat and clipping her videos for other platforms. All of this – “essentially working a frenetically paced full-time job” – just to be her top fan.
It’s an important reminder of an often overlooked truth: most people you encounter online are freaks. On Wikipedia, the top 0.01% of editors – 5,000 people – are responsible for a third of all the site’s edits. On the betting site Polymarket, 0.23% of wallets generate 63% of trading volume. As many as 98% of Reddit users never post. This is the 90-9-1 rule: 90% lurk, 9% dabble, 1% create almost everything. (It even applies in jihadi forums, where 87% never post and 1% account for the overwhelming majority of content.) Of course, the fact that the internet is essentially staffed by obsessive weirdos can sometimes be extremely helpful. If you want to know which baking soda works best in carrot cake, there’s someone out there who has “put together a spreadsheet testing 20 different brands”. But in other respects it’s damaging. Fandoms are becoming ever more obsessive and deranged. Political discussions are dominated by lunatics and extremists. The freaks, put simply, are driving the rest of us out – and massively skewing our impression of what’s normal.
The Knowledge Crossword
Quirk of history
A 1936 photo of the Timleck family, one of four winners of the Great Stork Derby. Toronto Star Archives/Getty
Before his sudden death in 1926, the Canadian financier and eccentric Charles Vance Millar made a curious bequest, says Jordan Friedman in Smithsonian Magazine. The childless, unmarried millionaire left 500,000 Canadian dollars (around nine million today) to whichever Toronto mother gave birth to the most children over the next decade, kicking off what became known as the Great Stork Derby. The competition became a media sensation, with elaborate narratives about the personal lives of participants and complaints about Catholic immigrants having an unfair advantage. After a series of court rulings, only living, registered children born “in lawful wedlock” were included in the count, and the money was split between four women, each of whom had produced nine offspring in the 10 years after Millar’s death.
Weather
Quoted
“Fifteen years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now, the real world is an escape from the internet.”
Economist Noah Smith
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