Good morning. Every week, this newsletter rounds up some of the best writing and most interesting stories from around the Guardian, for you to peruse with a bit more leisure over a Saturday (or Sunday) coffee. Enjoy.
1. ‘I can sense Sinatra enter my body and exit my lungs’
Mina Tavakoli filed this dispatch from her cruise with Marilyn Monroe, Walter White and Ozzy Osbourne … as well as 4,000 other passengers not part of the Sunburst celebrity impersonator convention.
‘A curveball too good to pass up’: Among lots of interesting details (“tribute artist” is not the same as “lookalike” or “impersonator”, FYI), my favourite is Ozzy. After the former corrections officer skipped a haircut and was swarmed by Black Sabbath fans in Mexico, his wife encouraged him to lean in. He lost several sons to addiction, he tells Tavakoli, and plays the heavy metal icon as “drug-free preacher man”.
“You know what happens when I talk to kids as Ozzy? They finally listen,” he says.
Impersonator logic: The trip leaves our correspondent meditative. “Accept that there are few complete originals. Make do with your earthly gifts. Understand that to be close enough to greatness is, very often, more than enough.”
How long will it take to read: 10 minutes
2. Violins in a tent and a flute made from plastic tube
Most of the instruments in Gaza’s bomb-shattered conservatory have been destroyed, but teachers are restarting classes in a makeshift replacement on the beach.
Coordinator Ahmed Abu Amsha, pictured above, lost one of his most talented guitar students when a cafe was bombed. He says music has become “an important tool for psychological relief”.
Osama Jahjouh, a flute teacher at the conservatory since 2012, lost his instruments when his home was destroyed – and resolved to make his own. “It was difficult, as flute making requires precise measurements for tone holes and placement, but I managed to produce a playable instrument.”
Mohammad Khader, 17, has started learning the oud. “Whenever I feel stressed or upset, I turn to music because it calms my nerves and gives me a sense of peace.”
Yara Abu Amsha, 15, chose the violin. “I felt it is closest to my personality and most expressive of my feelings … Music means a lot to me. Before the war, I didn’t think about it in this way but during the war I discovered that it has become a real refuge for us. Even if only for a short while, music gives us a chance to escape reality.”
How long will it take to read: about three minutes
3. ‘There is a way of writing about motherhood that can be very sentimental and reductive and kind of boring’
Greta Rainbow has interviewed “one of today’s greatest essayists”, the New Yorker staff writer Rachel Aviv.
***
“Encountering her New Yorker cartoon headshot is like a signpost: you are about to read a piece of writing that could change how you choose to live.”
Aviv’s beat is the “deliciously nebulous” intersection of “psychology, medical ethics and criminal justice”. Her recent-ish investigation into the author Alice Munro’s partner’s molestation of Munro’s youngest daughter made waves globally. And, wary of oversimplistic ways of writing about mothers and daughters, she is exploring the complexities of the relationship in a new book.
“Perhaps more than any other, [that bond], seems to defy a fixed point of view,” she tells Rainbow.
How long will it take to read: about five minutes
4. Surviving stalker neighbours
Amanda Hutton and Richard Burton fell in love with a dilapidated Welsh farmhouse, or really, the countryside around it – all meadows and woodland, anemones and quiet streams, “like a secret you weren’t supposed to find”.
But when a young couple, Francis and Cassie, bought the land next door, the dream home turned into a nightmare. Behaviour that started as “odd yet basically harmless” escalated to threats, vandalism and ultimately “a full-blown campaign of terror”.
“He hadn’t been trying to scare us. He’d been trying to kill us,” Burton recalls of one particularly frightening moment.
How long will it take to read: 12 minutes
If you want to know more: Look, 12 claustrophobic minutes was enough for me – I feel tense even remembering this piece. But it’s an extract from a new book, which is no doubt just as gripping. It’s all a bit Straw Dogs (another drama too stressful for me to ever consume in full).
5. ‘The Ronaldocene is over; the Mbappécene begins’
The captain of Les Bleus is footballer, flautist and thespian, and, according to Aaron Timms, “the most thrilling and compelling figure” at this year’s World Cup. In gorgeous prose, Timms lays out the case for Kylian Mbappé as king.
Mesmerising on the field: “Referee view, the technological innovation that has exposed spectators to a thousand different varieties of male forearm hair, has allowed us to understand the degree to which the speed and violence of Mbappé’s game also come with a kind of pickpocketing nonchalance, how every demonstration of strength is simultaneously an expression of the most feathery mercy.”
And statesmanlike off it: particularly in his “volcanic denunciation” of a Paraguayan senator’s racist attack. “Rarely if ever has football seen a player who’s this aware of his own press, or this prepared to embrace his own capacity for polarisation,” Timms writes. “If Michael Jordan lived by the rule that ‘Republicans buy sneakers too’, Mbappé appears quite happy with a world in which acolytes of the far right go shoeless.”
Plus, despite “the deeply felt sense of principle, the unabashed intellectualism”, he doesn’t take himself too seriously – always nice.
How long will it take to read: four minutes
Further reading: The comments section – people have, unsurprisingly, a lot of feelings about this rave review.
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