Good morning, it’s Saturday and I’m back after a small hiatus with the stories that grabbed me from around the Guardian this week. Settle in and read them now, or bookmark them for later – and tell us what got you thinking: fivegreatreads@theguardian.com.
This first story is distressing and confronting. The rest of today’s newsletter moves on to lighter terrain.
1. Palestinians on Israeli prison ‘hell’
Musician Ashraf al-Muhtaseb was taken into Israeli custody on 8 October 2023. In the six months before his release on 7 April, during which time he was not charged, the 53-year-old says he passed through three prisons, enduring a marathon of torture, abuse and humiliation.
When he was finally reunited with his wife, she fainted – and his son asked: “Who are you, and where is my dad?”
Muhtaseb is one of eight detainees interviewed by the Guardian. Their experiences back up a report by the Jerusalem-based human rights group B’Tselem suggesting, in light of the scale and nature of abuse in custody, Israel’s jails should now be labelled “torture camps”.
The Israeli Prison Service said “as far as we know, no such events have occurred under IPS responsibility” and the Israeli military said it “rejects outright allegations concerning systematic abuse of detainees”.
How long will it take to read: three or four minutes.
For further reading you can find further Guardian interviews with released Palestinian prisoners here, and our full coverage of the crisis in Gaza here.
2. Hamlet Theft Auto
Nick Buckley’s story this week about a new documentary really tickled me. Grand Theft Hamlet is about two out-of-work actors, Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen. When the UK’s theatres closed during Covid lockdowns, they decided to stage Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Grand Theft Auto V. If this sounds very meta, it is – just like, as Buckley points out, the Shakespearean tragedy itself, which “famously features its own play-within-a-play narrative”.
And not only does the staging work in the vicious world of the game; it brings out something unexpected. “GTA is a world where violence is absolutely de rigueur,” Crane tells Buckley. “But sometimes you scratch the surface and you find someone who wants to help you out, protect you and engage with you.”
All the world’s a stage: “You want this safe, clean environment which you can experiment in, take risks and you don’t have a fear of being judged,” Crane says of throwing his production into this more lawless place. “But there is something really theatrically powerful about being in a space where you don’t have that, where you’re on the edge of chaos all the time.”
How long will it take to read: about two minutes
3. ‘I’ve lived with this nose for half my life now’
When the film-maker Desiree Akhavan was 14, she was voted “ugliest girl” at her New York private high school. “I’d always had a suspicion, but now I had empirical proof,” she writes, in an extract from her new book. “I’d started to get the sense I might be ugly around 11, when adults began offering up unsolicited hair, diet, exercise and cosmetic surgery advice. It was about that time that I learned what ‘hot’ was, and how it seemed to be the price of admission if you were a girl.”
At 19, she had a nose job – this piece is a brilliant exploration of her conflicted journey to get there, and her ambiguous relationship to it since.
“No, I don’t regret it, and no, I wouldn’t do it again,” she writes. “I don’t think my nose job actually had that much to do with my nose.”
Further reading: this review of Akhavan’s memoir praises her for an “addictive and endearing” honesty, “allowing us to see inside a closed world and understand that it is glamorous and exciting and horrible and deeply disappointing all at the same time”.
How long will it take to read: about 10 minutes
4. On board the Creed cruise
This one goes out to Five Great Reads co-writer Kris Swales, who was truly zealous about it being included. It is really good.
Remember Creed? (With Arms Wide Open? Higher? Man in a singlet singing tortured Christian-lite rock dirges? Mocked as “the worst band of the 1990s”? Sold more than 28m albums in the US?) They’re back. And Luke Winkie went on the reunion cruise (!) to find out how they became so beloved in the first place.
A path to passion: “I hated Creed. I thought they were terrible,” a 28-year-old cruise passenger tells Winkie. “But then I started listening to them ironically. And I was like: ‘Oh, shit, I like them now.’”
How long will it take to read: 10 minutes
5. Sex before coffee
Apparently people in Iceland don’t really date – they tend to start with sex and go from there. As Zoe Williams finds, this has a bit to do with the nation’s tiny population (about 400,000). “You’re not really out looking for someone,” Völundur, a 26-year-old graphic designer tells her, “because you already know them.”
But there are other interesting factors: a lack of body shame, Iceland’s slightly different relationship to patriarchy and city spending habits (related: everything is very expensive there).
“You can’t compare Iceland to a culture of 10 million. Sweden is like a warm-blooded mammal, like a cow, with a bloodstream, and four stomachs. Iceland is more like an insect, where the food and the excrement and the oxygen all use the same hole.” – Jón Trausti Sigurðarson, 42, an Icelandic publisher who spent 10 years living in Sweden
How long will it take to read: five minutes
While we’re on the topic: If you were wondering, yes, people are using AI for dirty talk.
I leave you with this fascinating painting by Piero della Francesca, whose “depiction of life [as] an insoluble enigma” (in the words of the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones) made him beloved by many major modern artists – and now the subject of a new tribute from David Hockney.
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