Happy Saturday to all and welcome back to Five Great Reads 2.0, in which we dig a little deeper into the Guardian’s wealth of coverage from Australia and abroad.
My colleague Imogen Dewey kicked us off last week and has passed the baton my way for this second instalment. In the first full week of summer it’s little surprise that music, sport and health are top of mind.
While I’ve got your attention, subscribe to our weekday Morning Mail newsletter for the lowdown on what happened while you slept, and Afternoon Update to get you up to speed on the commute.
For now, here’s some fine writing to get the weekend juices flowing.
1. Is Facebook losing its US$100bn metaverse gamble?
Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is increasingly spending his time trying to perfect his vision of the virtual reality future. Out in the real world, the future of the social media behemoth is suddenly looking shaky: the parent company Meta has laid off 13% of the workforce and investors have made for the exits, wiping US$80bn off its valuation in the process.
Virtual reality competitors such as VRChat and Rec Room are thriving. At Meta HQ, employees are wondering whether Zuckerberg’s vanity project will kill the company.
By the numbers: Reality Labs, Meta’s metaverse division, has lost US$3.7bn in the past three months. Worse is expected to come.
How long will it take to read? Five minutes.
2. A ‘deeply uncomfortable’ World Cup experience
Guardian Australia’s deputy sport editor, Emma Kemp, has just returned from Qatar, where she had a front-row seat to the Socceroos taking it to the world’s best. “The pre-tournament stream of news and commentary about what was happening off the pitch slowed as journalists shifted their focus to the football,” she writes. And although she enjoyed herself, the “grotesque pang of privilege” was never far from the surface.
Notable quote: “You can try to bridge the gap all you like, by chatting and joking and humanising the person who has just served you something from a fridge you could have opened yourself. Truthfully, though, that process only helps you – the workers themselves will still be there, standing sentry at their station like servants inside a mansion of disproportionate wealth.”
How long will it take to read? Five minutes.
Further reading: Aaron Timms tears strips off the “unmissable abomination” that is the US Fox Sports’ World Cup coverage. For fans of Geoff Lemon steaming in off the long run-up in his seminal 2015 takedown of Nine’s cricket commentary team.
3. The price of ‘sugar free’
Even if you’re not seeking out artificial sweeteners, the chances are you’re consuming them. Researchers in Hong Kong have detected them not just in sugarless chewing gum, but also in salad dressings, bread and instant noodles.
As the world scrambles to cut down on sugar, Bee Wilson’s long read asks: are sweeteners as harmless as we thought?
Key takeaway: Every expert Wilson spoke to said the best answer for our health would be for people to get used to a less sweet diet. “But sweeteners are no easy thing to give up,” she writes.
How long will it take to read? Ten minutes.
4. ‘My boyfriend, a writer, broke up with me because I’m a writer’
To go into too much detail about Isabel Kaplan’s account of a messy relationship breakup would spoil the surprise. Suffice to say, it was the talk of the newsroom, generating highly polarised views.
Why the Nora Ephron photo above? Take it away, Isabel. “When I found myself sad and lonely in the Upper West Side apartment of my now-ex-boyfriend’s dreams, I turned to Nora Ephron. I hunted through her body of work searching for clues, trying to understand who and what my ex-boyfriend loved and feared.”
How long will it take to read? Three minutes.
5. Wrapped in stats
A clinical dissection of who you are as a person or a cynical marketing exercise? #SpotifyWrapped dominates Twitter and Instagram for 24 hours each year as tastemakers and punters share their most-played music of the past 11 months, even if in my case that does lead off with Kanye West thanks to a post-doco, pre-antisemitism discography binge. But I digress …
Where exactly your music taste comes from is a matter too complex even for the Spotify algorithm. Katie Hawthorne speaks to two authors with alternative takes: one romantic, the other more scientific. “Although streaming services might surreptitiously curate our listening experiences,” Hawthorne writes, “Spotify can’t account for the songs that get stuck in our heads.”
Fun fact: Those genres you’re assigned to, like Escape Room or Float House? They’re coined by software engineers who spot listeners congregating around sounds and title the groups accordingly.
How long will it take to read? Four minutes.
Any retrospectively embarrassing artists in your #SpotifyWrapped? Or any other thoughts? Tell us here: australia.newsletters@theguardian.com
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