Five Great Reads: shoebox living, getting your gut right and rhyming Cortina with vacuum cleaner

Hygiene optional: the distance from the toilet to the kitchenette in a Tokyo micro-apartment. Photograph: Justin McCurry

Sometimes you have one of those weeks where the strip of brain behind your eyeballs aches and you don’t know why.

It has been one of those on my end but here we are, the weekend – and here, in New South Wales, election day. I love the smell of democracy sausage in the morning, so things are definitely looking up.