Top of the Tuesday morning to you! Welcome back to Five Great Reads, your summertime wrap of stories (usually) handpicked by Alyx Gorman, Guardian Australia’s lifestyle editor. Surprise! I am not she. I’m Rafqa Touma, a reporter temporarily taking the baton so Alyx has more time to let her dog pee in the morning.
If it is breaking news you are after, head over to our live blog here. If not, stick around. Today we talk codes cracked, books banned and orgies enjoyed with cups of tea.
But first, we enter the streets of Kabul, where children are working just to survive.
1. Children making a living on freezing Kabul streets
Shaista is a 10-year-old girl. She is selling plastic bags in freezing temperatures to shoppers in a busy street market in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul. If she does not work, she says she will go hungry.
The UN predicts 97% of Afghans could be living below the poverty line by June. Aid workers say the number of child labourers and beggars in Kabul has tripled, with many fighting to survive.
Notable quote: “By the side of a dirty Kabul road, Khadjia sits on a plastic bag in the snow, a few brushes and shoe polish in front of her. She is four, says her mother, who sits metres away, and asked to remain anonymous. People rush past as the sun sets and temperatures fall. ‘We don’t have an alternative,’ Khadjia’s mother says. ‘If we don’t make any money for food, we’ll go to bed hungry.’”
How long will it take you to read? About 2 minutes.
2. Dickens deciphered
Charles Dickens was a rather messy scribe. He called his own scrawling shorthand “the devil’s handwriting”. It baffled experts for over a century, and academics are still mystified by 10 shorthand manuscripts that have survived. So they launched a deciphering competition for puzzle fans and amateur sleuths.
In splodgy blue ink, on a paper bearing the letterhead of the London home where Dickens wrote Bleak House, was a mystery note kept safe in a New York library for more than a century. Almost 165 years later and the letter has been downloaded 1,000 times in just three days, to be pulled apart in a scramble to decipher it for a £300 prize.
Who cracked the code? A 20-year-old student from Ohio named Ken.
What secrets of Dickens’ life were revealed? Ones of love and financial peril.
Notable quote: “Forget Wordle. This is the Dickens Code. And for a long time, it had seemed uncrackable.”
3. Goodbye, Ramsey Street
The Australian suburbia depicted in the beloved soap Neighbours won the hearts of the world and launched the careers of international stars such as Kylie Minogue and Margot Robbie.
Melbourne author Anna Spargo-Ryan reminisces on her days working on her favourite show. She says stepping inside the Neighbours studio “is a wormhole to a simpler time, where no one has a real job, drama is just drama, and the people next door have become good friends”.
Notable quote: “I had literally written on a piece of paper “DREAM JOB” in capital letters and then underneath, “Work on Neighbours”. I’d been watching it since I was in primary school, when Daphne woke from a coma to croak, “I love you too, Clarkey,” before carking it … By some cosmic intervention, I got my dream job, spending my days filming behind-the-scenes videos for the show and arguing with fans on Twitter. It was heaven. For two years I drove through that security entrance and into another world.”
Further reading: Guardian Australia’s media correspondent Amanda Meade on the UK’s Channel 5 axing the soap.
4. Teenagers rebel with … books?
In the back of a new and used bookstore in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, a group of 13- to 16-year-old teenagers huddle together on foldout chairs. They are Kutztown’s Banned Book Club, who meet every fortnight to read the books being banned from school libraries across America by conservatives.
What are the teens reading? Animal Farm by George Orwell, The Colour Purple by Alice Walker, The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas.
Notable quote: “The sheep, who represent the unwitting masses in George Orwell’s critique of Joseph Stalin’s totalitarian rule, are ‘ignorant buffoons’, Daughtry [14] says.”
Further reading: Pennsylvania’s Central York school board banned a long list of books. The list is made up almost entirely of titles by, or about, people of colour. It took student protests to overturn the ban.
5. A sex club renaissance is happening in London
After two pandemic years of avoiding physical contact, London sex clubs are undergoing a resurgence. Leading the resurgence is a generational shift. CEOs in suits and expensive lingeries are being replaced with sex-positive art students and young DJs driving demand for inclusivity and queerness.
Crossbreed parties, hosted across the UK, in particular offer the full scope of fun; from techno music to hedonistic adventures and cups of tea in wellness sanctuaries.
Notable quote: “It has more of a ‘night out with your mates’ vibe than other events. When I’m on the dancefloor and everyone around me is so happy and queer, it feels like I’m in exactly the right place,” they say. “Getting the tube in full latex is dreadful, though.”
How long will to take to read? About 2 minutes.
