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.
If you would like to get some romantic performance poetry into your soul, read on.
And if you are of the opinion that too much news is barely enough, sign up to our weekday Morning Mail and Afternoon Update emails for just a taste of what the Guardian team has been hunting and gathering.
1. Spending the night in a Tokyo micro-apartment
Think your apartment is a shoebox? Think again. The Japanese, as always, are a step ahead of the game, offering up nine-square-metre apartments to Tokyo residents battling to keep up with the capital’s sky-high rents.
Our Tokyo correspondent, Justin McCurry, packed an overnight bag to test one out.
Surprise takeaway?
“The night was more restful than I usually get in my own apartment.”
Fun fact: The toilet and kitchen sink are so close you could wash dishes while doing your morning constitutional. Which would be pretty weird, but more productive than looking at your phone.
How long will it take to read: Three minutes.
Further viewing: Come on, feel the claustrophobia for yourself with Justin’s video diary of the experience.
2. What a dietitian eats in a day
As I have recently learned across a six-week training program, watching what you eat is hard work. For dieticians, it is a full-time job, and Priya Tew practises what she preaches.
Pro tip? Drink four to six pints (of water, not beer) a day (which is equivalent to two to three litres). “Staying hydrated helps your digestive health, making sure that everything gets pushed around the system and forms a stool.”
How long will it take to read: Three minutes.
Further reading: The How to have a healthy gut series has a myriad of nuggets about poo, going gluten-free and more.
3. Is this the world’s favourite poem?
Hands up if you have never heard of John Cooper Clarke?
This philistine is guilty as charged – surrealist beat poetry is not really my bag. But Clarke’s 1982 work I Wanna Be Yours has always been a big deal in the UK, working its way onto the English syllabus and becoming a favourite alternative wedding vows option.
Now, it has gone global courtesy of an Arctic Monkeys interpretation that has clocked up a billion streams on Spotify.
“An American billion is different to a British billion – and I don’t know what either of them is,” says the 74-year-old Clarke. “But it’s a fuck of a lot of listens.”
Key couplet: “I wanna be your vacuum cleaner, breathing in your dust / I wanna be your Ford Cortina, I will never rust.”
How long will it take to read: Four minutes.
4. Gareth Evans interrogates the Aukus deal
The Aukus deal may have been superseded in the news cycle by the voice to parliament and IPCC report this week, but Gareth Evans still has questions. The former Australian foreign affairs minister writes that the public has a right to know why we are making such a drastic shift in our defence strategy and spending.
Notable quote: “When it comes to decisions to go to war, we have too often in the past, most notably in Vietnam and the Iraq war of 2003, joined the US in fighting wars that were justified neither by international law nor morality, but because the Americans wanted us to, or we thought they wanted us to, or because we wanted them to want us to.”
How long will it take to read: Three minutes.
Further reading: Adam Morton running the rule over the Labor government’s response – or lack thereof – to the latest IPCC report’s call for no new coal and gas.
5. ‘Going missing was a conscious choice’
About 170,000 people go missing in the UK every year. Some will have been taken and harmed. Some are never found.
But most of them return.
And, as Francisco Garcia discovers, the missing are not a homogenous group.
Case study: On the first anniversary of her mother’s death, Ju Blencowe packed a bag with a few photographs and her mother’s cardigan, then boarded a train to London. Across days moving around the city at random, she did not consider herself to be missing; “she was too dejected to give the blur of experiences a name”.
How long will it take to read: Four minutes.
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