Good morning, and welcome to the last edition of this newsletter for the year (and fear not, we’ll be back next week, in what sources say will be 2024).
2023 was, among many, many other things, the year that brought Labor back down to Earth. Who knows what’s coming next – some good TV at least. We hope you’ve enjoyed our picks of interesting stuff from around the Guardian every Saturday. If you have, consider forwarding this email to a friend! Friends love emails.
And here’s what I thought looked good this week. Put on one of the tracks you may have missed this year, maybe rustle yourself up a Bill Granger summer brunch (RIP) and treat yourself to some weekend reading.
1. Nude public baths – was Australia ever ready?
The traditional Japanese bathhouse Ofuroya was the country’s first when it opened in Collingwood in 1998. “I remember all my friends at the time telling me that it couldn’t work here,” 78-year-old founder Hiromi Masuoka says – “that Australians would not cope well with the nudity aspect.”
But as James Norman writes, Ofuroya became a beloved inner-Melbourne sanctuary, one that lasted 25 years.
What is Japanese bathing? The tradition is generally traced back to Buddhist purification rituals in the sixth century, “believed to cleanse the body and spirit through heat and steam”. Today, onsens (natural outdoor bathing pools) and sentos (public baths) can be found in most Japanese towns and cities, where Norman notes they also act as community meeting places.
How long will it take to read: two or so minutes
2. Yes to romance, no to tech
Out: empiricism, algorithms and smartphones. In: “astrology, art and a life lived fiercely offline”. Ross Barkan thinks the zeitgeist is changing. Turbulent times, he posits (are they ever not?), make for rebellion.
In a piece both notably pro-Substack and (weirdly) anti-Fauci, he suggests we’re heading for something like a rerun of 19th-century romanticism, where poets and painters railed against a dehumanised, industrialised future with, well, poems and paintings. Today, he says, art is once again the key. “Backlash is bubbling against tech’s dominance of everyday life, particularly the godlike algorithms that rule all of digital existence.”
Not sure where I stand on this take, honestly. Excitingly idealist, or just a false binary? Tell us what you think, at australia.newsletters@theguardian.com.
How long will it take to read: four minutes
3. Mythbusting: anti-Zionism is not antisemitism
Kurds don’t have their own state, nor do Basques, Catalans, Scots, Kashmiris, Tibetans, Abkhazians, Ossetians, Tamils … yet, Peter Beinart argues, “barely anyone suggests that opposing a Kurdish or Catalan state makes you an anti-Kurdish or anti-Catalan bigot”.
It’s been four years since Beinart grappled with the dangerous tangling of anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Amid the still-unfolding devastation in Israel and Palestine after 7 October, his bleakly timeless piece became one of this year’s most-read stories from the Guardian’s long reads archive.
“All over the world, it is an alarming time to be Jewish,” the editor-at-large of progressive US magazine Jewish Currents wrote in 2019. “But conflating anti-Zionism with Jew-hatred is a tragic mistake.”
It’s a conflation that keeps on coming up. Per Beinart, it rests on three pillars: that “opposing Zionism is antisemitic because it denies to Jews what every other people enjoys: a state of its own”; that to “take away that statehood once achieved” is bigoted; and that, lastly, “as a practical matter, the two animosities (anti-Zionism and antisemitism) simply go together”.
His analysis carefully examines each.
How long will it take to read: seven minutes
Further reading: As always, you can find many perspectives on and full coverage of the current Israel-Palestine conflict here.
4. Packaged up: the ‘weird but true’ history of cereal
Eating sugary snacks first thing in the morning: yay or nay? Another thing 2023 was, apparently, was the 160th anniversary of cereal. Matthew Cantor goes deep on its American beginnings – “a culinary history deeply intertwined with the history of US advertising”.
A good hook: “Like all good stories, the history of cereal begins with an anti-masturbation campaigner,” he writes. OK, go on.
How long will it take to read: three minutes
5. How to win the Google Street View comp
Name that spot! That exact one! Competitors at the GeoGuessr World Cup are given a Google Street View image that could be anywhere on Earth, and asked to identify the location. They can zoom in and pan around – but can’t zoom out – for added context. So, as Ralph Jones discovers, they look for clues: in “brick houses, distinctive trousers and unusual telegraph poles”.
Who’s the best? GeoGuessr’s most public champion goes by the striking name of Trevor Rainbolt, a 25-year-old who tells Jones he has spent more than 10,000 hours playing. (“That he didn’t think he was good enough to enter the World Cup tells you all you need to know about the other players,” Jones adds.)
How long will it take to read: five-and-a-half minutes
Well, that’s all for now. Have a lovely weekend, and a wonderful New Year. (And to the kindly reader who requested more New Zealand content: consider it added to our resolutions list.)
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