Happy New Year! Welcome to our first edition of Five Great Reads for this new one – hope 2024 has been good to you so far.
Did you make any resolutions? Why … or why not? And how are they going? Trying to get off your phone (except when you’re reading this email, obviously), or be more creative? I’d love to know – write to us at: australia.newsletters@theguardian.com
1. How do you feel about giving up?
Adam Phillips says: “We give things up when we believe we can change; we give up when we believe we can’t.” The psychotherapist opens this piece with garden-variety sacrifices – booze, smoking, chocolate – then quickly jackknifes into much bigger stuff. Any sacrifice, he suggests, can be read as a “form of prediction” – a way of trying to control what happens. “Giving up, in other words, is an attempt to make a different future.”
His (very) deep essay dives into desire and despair, and what we get wrong about wanting.
As well as all that … Phillips explains the difference between “narrow” and “wide” attention – and why we need both.
How long will it take to read: A bit less than nine minutes
2. A Palestinian poet on loss of art ‘we can’t begin to comprehend’
Dozens of writers, journalists and artists have died in Gaza since the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October sparked a fresh tide of violence (the total death toll passed 22,000 this week). As Israeli strikes continued into 2024, Alexia Underwood interviewed the Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish over the phone. His “spare, elegant” work has been translated into more than 20 languages, and in the foreword to his latest book, the Chilean poet Raúl Zurita describes their shared form as both “the colossal record of violence and … the colossal record of compassion”.
“I don’t know what we should remember and what we should forget,” Darwish tells Underwood. His conversation with her about writing, bearing witness and holding onto humanity in the face of atrocity is painful and beautiful.
A line to stay with you: “I want eternity at the breakfast table / with the bread and oil. / I want you– / earth, / my defeated banner.”
How long will it take to read: About six minutes
Further reading: You can find our full coverage of – and a range of perspectives on – the Israel-Gaza war here.
3. Undoing the fear: data, hope and the climate
Oxford University senior researcher and data scientist Hannah Ritchie is 30. At some point in her studies, she realised her perceptions of the climate crisis didn’t necessarily correlate to the latest scientific predictions – and that in correcting her misconceptions, she was discovering new causes for, if not optimism, then at least hope.
“We have a habit of underestimating how quickly things can change,” she says.
Her new book, Not the End of the World, uses data to illuminate the message that information – and engagement – can help us resist defeatism about the climate crisis. This extract gives you a taste.
How long will it take to read: Less than seven minutes
Further reading: The Q&A with Ritchie, who explains to Killian Fox why doomsday predictions are “a dream for climate deniers”.
4. Newborns taken by baby brokers
Records for Dolores Preat’s adoption named her birth mother as Rosario Colop Chim, a woman from an area ravaged by Guatemala’s civil war. But when Preat went looking, she discovered Colop Chim was not her mother at all, but her kidnapper. As Rachel Nolan finds out, Colop Chim “had acted as a jaladora, or baby broker: someone who is hired by a lawyer to supply babies for the purpose of placing them in private adoptions”.
Why is Preat’s case significant? As Nolan writes, Guatemala is “often cited as the worst-case scenario for what can go wrong when adoptions are commercialised and children are sent from poorer countries to wealthier ones”.
Outright kidnappings such as Preat’s may have been rare, but conditions of extreme inequality make for plenty of ways to pressure or coerce women into giving up their children. And current debates around international surrogacy raise similar questions about what exactly constitutes meaningful consent.
How long will it take to read: About 10 minutes
5. The future is now: watching movies set in 2024
Every story set in the future is someday going to get tested against the real thing. The word 2024 “has a particularly futuristic ring to it that’s long captured cinematic imaginations,” writes Charles Bramesco. He looks at five films set in the year ahead to see what lessons one might take from them. Some are obvious, others … less so.
For example: “If you think that once the waters rise and we must retreat to archipelago-style floating houses, the developers won’t gouge buyers, I’ve got some soon-to-be-submerged beachfront property to sell you.”
How long will it take to read: Two-and-a-quarter minutes
In the mood for more 2024 predictions? It could be a big one for nature rights, and a miraculous one for the Australian economy. Plus there’s a more general view from some of our writers and a take from the experts on … everything else.
That’s all from me for now – have a lovely weekend.
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