Good morning and welcome back to Five Great Reads, your carefully curated assortment of stories to provoke some thought over morning tea. I’m Rafqa Touma, filling in for Guardian Australia’s legendary lifestyle editor Alyx Gorman. If you miss her, you can binge her on Saved for Later, our online culture podcast. And if you are after breaking news, you can follow our live blog here.
If not, chimps are playing doctor with crushed insects, so let us get into it.
1. ‘I was an addicted doctor, the worst kind of patient’
“Addiction is a terrifying breakdown of reason,” writes Carl Erik Fisher.
He is a psychiatrist and assistant professor whose drinking and drug pushed him into rehab and made him question how much we really understand about addiction’s pull between free choice and total compulsion.
Notable quote: “I’m 29 years old, writing notes in a sloppy felt-tip pen (no ballpoints are allowed), trying to understand how I went from being a newly minted doctor in a psychiatry residency programme at Columbia University in New York to a psychiatric patient at Bellevue, the city’s notorious public hospital.”
How long will it take to read? About 10 minutes.
2. The refugees stranded on the Belarusian-Polish border
In August last year, a villager from Ostrowka in Poland shared two photos to Facebook. Pictured were groups of families from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraqi Kurdistan, lugging bags on backs through cornfields.
They were among the first asylum seekers to enter the country from Belarus, after the Lukashenko regime offered a route into Europe. What would ensue in the following months is a Belarusian-Polish border crisis.
In November last year, the humanitarian emergency reached its peak. While many asylum seekers were illegally forced back to Belarus by Polish border guards, hundreds of others escaped into the forests. Now, Guardian Australia documents their journeys in pictures.
Notable quote: “Every night in the forests, there is a race between border guards and aid workers to reach the asylum seekers hidden among the trees … Many of those found in the woods can barely walk after travelling long distances on foot. Some have not eaten in days.”
3. A journalism academy at a business school
NewsCorp Australia and Google Australia have teamed up to start the Digital News Academy through the University of Melbourne’s business school, where 250 journalists will receive nine months of training in “unashamedly” commercial journalism.
Why teach journalism from a business school? The academy would teach students to do journalism that is “fit for a commercial purpose right from the moment of creation,” said Campbell Reid the inaugural head of the Digital News Academy.
The concern? “That News Corp is seeking to work with the business school so as to avoid the kind of questioning culture of liberal arts and humanities faculties, It’s a reflection really of the antagonism that News Corp has had for university journalism programs over many years,” said Andrew Dodd, director of the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne.
4. Chimps treating each other’s wounds
Chimpanzees have been observed catching insects and applying them to open wounds, in a procedure similar to humans disinfecting a cut and covering it with a Band-Aid.
Scientists in the west African nation of Gabon noticed that the apes are not only treating their own wounds with insects, but are also treating their peers. The research adds to the ongoing debate around the ability of chimpanzees to observe that others need help, and to offer it selflessly.
Notable quote: “It takes lot of trust to put an insect in an open wound,” said Simone Pika, a biologist at the University of Osnabruck in Germany. “They seem to understand that if you do this to me with this insect, then my wound gets better. It’s amazing.”
So can animals show empathy? There are still doubts about the ability of animal species to exhibit prosocial behaviours, like selfless caring of others. But scientists say it’s a hypothesis that is worth further study.
5. A culinary tour of Greece’s first gastronomic city
The history of Thessaloniki – the heart of Macedonia, an important trading post, and Greece’s first city of gastronomy – is a layered web of empires. Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman empires, all creating a vibrant melting pot of culture through the ages that defines the city’s cuisine today.
Notable quote that makes me swoon for wine and food: “Walk through the central Modiano and Kapani markets to find juicy Naoussa peaches, Halkidiki olives and bright-red Florina peppers – this rich, regional produce takes its place in Greek, Jewish, Balkan and Turkish-influenced recipes. The result? A uniquely Thessalonian culinary repertoire, best enjoyed with a generous glass of local wine.”
