Sydney, where I’m writing this from, is having a late, baking burst of summer: in the evenings, bats and rats flit across my back yard (by sky and fence, respectively), lazy shadows jagging towards the last of the light. In the bright, cicada-filled mornings, people plan how they might make the most of – or avoid – the sun, drink their coffee, and stand squinting at the lights, idly thumbing over their phones and trying to make sense of the week.
And what a week: (another) bad one for banks! Some very expensive boats for Australia! An Oscar for Paul Keating! A ratpocalypse for Paris! An OnlyFans doppelganger for … Adrian Chiles?
If this dizzying agenda has you worried you’re out of touch with current affairs, consider signing up for the daily Morning Mail or Afternoon Update. If, on the other hand, you’re happy letting the distant echoes of global events filter through to you as they will … stay here, read these stories instead.
1. The great serotonin debate
An interesting instalment from our How to have a healthy brain series looks at the hotly contested role of the chemical – sometimes labelled the “happy hormone” – in depression. As Hannah Devlin writes, “the idea of a chemical imbalance is embedded in public consciousness and has shaped the way we view mental illness”. But, spoiler, the bigger picture is more complicated.
How long will it take to read: a bit under five minutes.
Further reading: try another one from the series, Don’t forget to floss: the science behind dementia and the four things you should do to prevent it – this by our UK science editor, the pleasingly named Ian Sample.
2. A job after death
Read Jonathan Watts’s account of a memorial mass for murdered US activist and nun Dorothy Stang in the Brazilian forest city of Anapu – “one of the most murderous municipalities on Earth … [where] much of the violence is related to disputes over land”.
Watts’s mate, British journalist Dom Phillips, was murdered last year alongside Brazilian Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira, joining hundreds “in the pantheon of martyrs of the rainforest”. Their faces frequently adorn protest shirts and banners, their deaths now another flashpoint for environmental and political debate.
For Watts, seeing his old friend’s image at the service is “at once horrifying, uplifting and surreal”: a friend who “was very much of the view that journalists should never become the story”, who was keenly aware of the many killings never investigated or covered by media – but who, for better or worse, has brought renewed global attention to a constantly roiling conflict.
A shocking stat: according to Global Witness, Watts notes, at least 1,733 people have been murdered since 2012 trying to protect land and resources – “an average of one killing every two days”.
How long will it take to read: a bit less than three minutes.
3. Something to ponder on the whole Gary Lineker thing
For my sins, I did not until last week know who Gary Lineker was. Obviously, I do now. (TLDR: beloved football presenter tweets reasonable thing about inhumane UK – Oz-inspired! – policy, huge backlash ensues as he is taken off-air then put back on again. Sign up to those news briefings if you’d like to know more about these things as they unfold).
Jonathan Liew’s piece took a pithy look at what the whole scuffle (re)exposes about “the chimera of impartiality” surrounding institutions like the BBC – why we buy in, locally or globally; why we might, one day, eventually stop doing that.
In a line: “This has always been a playground of establishment power, and yet if the surreal last few days teach us anything it is that the terms of engagement may be shifting.”
How long will it take to read: two minutes.
4. Some books are beyond a sensitivity read
“As a wheelchair user, I could not help noticing that the original Bond books had, shall we say, an interesting relationship to embodied difference,” writes Jan Grue. “Fleming’s attitude to disability was encoded not only in words and phrases, but in characterisation and plot – that is, in the stories’ most fundamental qualities.”
Grue makes a fantastic close read of what’s really at play when we’re talking about dated attitudes in storytelling. And then returns to a point that’s been made again and again: you can re-edit old stories, but only to a certain point. At a certain point, you can just read (and assign on courses, and make movies of) other books.
Why his perspective is extra interesting: Grue played a political assistant to the fictional PM in a Norwegian TV series – and as drafts of the show progressed, realised his character was “joining the ranks of Dr Strangelove and the usual wheelchair-using baddies”. Not shockingly, no one else really seemed to see this as an issue.
How long will it take to read: seven-and-three-quarter minutes.
5. Are still lifes (lives??) boring?
Hannah Jane Parkinson takes the occasion of a blockbuster at the Tate Modern to point out that maybe there are more interesting things to paint than apples (something Cézanne did more than 270 times, apparently) – or still life generally. She gives a pass to flowers, kitchen-scapes and Martin Parr’s baked beans. And to the artists giving still life a more contemporary valency: coffee cups, headphones, face masks. But makes an entertaining argument that there are better things to put to canvas.
Still, I just don’t agree with her on the fruit. Fruit is pleasing. So much so that people buy fake versions of it. A source of rich emotional material, and in fact one of the best subjects to evoke “the feeling of summer warmth on your skin”. To her claim that: “A banana has not fallen in love with other fruits; experienced joy or loss,” I would simply say she has clearly never been to a show where a mime makes several bananas act out a dramatic break-up scene and murder at the club – something I experienced earlier this year, weirdly compelling.
How long will it take to read: three-and-a-half minutes.
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