Good morning. Today’s collection of interesting things I saw around the Guardian this week is themed on things I want to know. What happens when you die? What would compel you to live with 19 dogs? Why won’t Liz Truss go away? And so forth.
Hope you enjoy these, and, despite the bleak march of the news, have a lovely weekend. Send us an email with a question you would like answered – maybe Kris will include it in his missive next Saturday: australia.newsletters@theguardian.com
1. What happens when you die?
There’s a new science of life and death, Alex Blasdel reports, suggesting that the line between them “may be less distinct than previously thought”. As he charts the history of this field of study – where it’s emerging that, one day, even total brain death may be reversible – Blasdel meets a neurology professor, Jimo Borjigin. She tells him her startling findings are “only the tip of a vast iceberg”.
“There’s something happening in there, in the brain, that makes no sense,” she says.
The stats: apparently one in 10 people claim to have had some sort of near-death experience – “roughly 800 million souls worldwide who may have dipped a toe in the afterlife”, as Blasdel puts it. So what can they tell us? Do we … have souls?
How long will this take to read? 10 minutes
Fun fact: more than 1.7 million (probably 2 million, by now!) people have already read this story. Maybe some of them have had near-death experiences too. If this is you, you know what to do (email us about it).
2. What’s up with Liz Truss?
David Runciman is great to read on any political subject. This week: Liz Truss, Britain’s erstwhile PM, who keeps sort of just … hanging around. She appears, he writes in this piece, “to believe that lasting little more than a month in a job she had aspired to all her adult life is evidence not of her profound incompetence but of her virtue”.
Why is she like Jeremy Corbyn, you ask? Or, even if you didn’t … Runciman suggests it’s her “mix of utter conviction and utter obliviousness to how she might come across to anyone who doesn’t see the world the way she does”.
Come for the “spectacular aura of failure”, stay for the enjoyably catty descriptions of the crowd at the launch of a new conservative organisation: “I have never been among such unhealthy-looking people,” Runciman writes. “It wasn’t just the pallid complexions (this was also, unsurprisingly, an extremely white audience). Quite a few were overweight, their three-piece suits and tightly buttoned shirts straining to contain them. The room also had a distinct and increasingly unfamiliar odour: stale cigarette smoke. As no smoking was allowed here, they must have brought it in with them, from wherever they would normally gather to exercise their freedom to resist the dead hand of the nanny state. These people, it was clear, were out of shape on principle.”
How long will it take to read: about eight-and-a-half minutes
3. What is the point of rules of engagement?
Recent events in Gaza have raised yet more questions, Peter Beaumont writes, “about the IDF’s opaque and highly permissive rules of engagement, whether those rules are enforced, and how willing it is to investigate breaches”.
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“Put simply, rules of engagement define how and in what circumstances it is permissible to use force, including lethal violence, during operations, and at what potential risk to civilians.”
As his analysis points out, “the reality is that human rights organisations, inside Israel and beyond, have long raised questions about the IDF’s rules, amid allegations that the ones that do exist are being ignored by soldiers and commanders on the ground”.
How long will it take to read: about two minutes
Further reading: this week, we published a fascinating piece on a previously undisclosed AI-powered database that Israel used to identify tens of thousands of Hamas targets. Closer to home, Mostafa Rachwani had this beautiful story about the Sydney volunteers helping feed families who have fled Palestine.
4. What makes a writer good?
I love reading Hanif Abdurraqib. I’m not the only one – this week the poet, essayist, cultural critic, curator and 2021 MacArthur fellow was awarded the US$175,000 Windham Campbell prize (nonfiction). Something he says in his interview with Katherine Rowland illuminates the thing – or at least one thing – that makes his writing so alive. “What I’m always reaching for is: I want to know your interior world,” he tells her. “Expressing interest, expressing genuine curiosity in other people is what sustains me.”
Abdurraqib on love: “There’s the imagined person, and then there’s the actual person. And I think sometimes even in love, even in our desire to love someone in a very big way, we are perhaps rushing to love the imagined person.”
How long will it take to read: about five minutes
Further reading: another author interview, this one with Helen Garner (whose recommendation for Javier Marías’s A Heart So White I heartily second).
5. How many dogs is too many dogs?
Abdurraqib is a “dog parent”, a phrase I’ve always loathed, but I guess have to make my peace with now. It’s not that I don’t love dogs, it just astounds me that a person might love them enough to live (as in, inside a human house) with, say, five wolfhounds.
Mandy does. And somehow she makes the tripe sourcing, bouts of canine pneumonia and “constant singing chorus” sound almost worth it.
See for yourself: the photos in this one are really something.
How long will it take to read: six minutes
Don’t read: the tale of faithful Gelert, the first story I ever wept bitter tears over (and, come to think of it, maybe the reason for the fortress of ice around the dog section of my heart).
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