Happy Saturday! This week’s news provided some insight into what the next four years under Donald Trump could look like, and our first great read might help check the pulse on how we’re all feeling. And then let’s move on to some other stories you may have missed amid the turmoil.
1. So this is Trump’s ‘golden age’?
Marina Hyde has looked at the new era of Trump and signposted it as chaotic and dysfunctional, with the president surrounded by a “coalition of creeps”. Hyde writes that Trump has started as he means to go on – confusingly and capriciously. “The day marked a personal tipping point for Trump, who has now pulled out of more international agreements than Playmates.” To all the leaders pledging to work with him, she says, good luck with that.
How long will it take to read: Three minutes.
Further reading: The president’s 2017 “American carnage” theme seems almost innocent now, writes David Smith, the Guardian’s Washington DC bureau chief, as Trump embraces the role of a demagogue on a divine mission to reshape America in 2025.
2. Like mother, like daughter
Jane Yang’s relationship with her mother changed after she asked one brave question – whether Po Po (her maternal grandmother) had been in love with a woman. Yang’s mother was so outraged by the question she refused to talk about it.
But then, “the question proved to be a chisel, prising open the vault containing all the unmentionable topics that had arisen between my mother and me over the years”, Yang recalls. Now Yang’s relationship with her own daughter has changed too.
A memory Yang’s mother was willing to share: “At 19, she fell head over heels for a tall, handsome architect, but they lost touch when he fled the Vietnam war.”
How long will it take to read: Three minutes.
3. Edmund White: ‘I’d had sex with 3,000 men. A peer asked: “Why so few?”’
When a colleague linked our interview with Edmund White under a note “quotable quotes galore”, my eyes greedily scanned for newsletter treasure. The headline alone was a gem, and reading on about the American author’s fifth memoir, which is all about sex, I imagined each of White’s quotes as hilarious tweets he could have posted in Twitter’s heyday, pre-X. This interview is a delight.
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“I’d rather die than cuddle with somebody. It’s cloying. Someone who strokes your hair when you want to be left alone.” – Edmund White
Alex Needham asks if Guardian readers are better off reading, or having lots of sex? “Well, it depends on their age,” White replies. “If they’re as old as I am, then books are a bit better. But if they’re young, they should have lots of sex.”
How long will it take to read: Four and a half minutes.
4. Signature moves: handwriting’s rapid decline
What does it mean to live without handwriting? Maybe we lose the “pleasure of using our hands … in a process that for thousands of years has allowed humans to make our thoughts visible to one another”. Knowing we are far more likely to use our hands to type or swipe than pick up a pen, Christine Rosen highlights the dangers of losing cognitive skills, sensory experience and a connection to history.
‘Do the write thing’: Bob Dylan fans were outraged when they discovered a US$600 limited edition of his book The Philosophy of Modern Song was not, in fact, “individually signed by Dylan”. He apologised and admitted “using a machine was an error in judgment”.
Further reading: If this story makes you want to pick up a pen, Cait Kelly’s goal of writing a journal for 66 days is where you should go next.
How long will it take to read: Seven and a half minutes.
5. Brooke Shields: ‘Was I going to get angry, shave my head or punch a photographer?’
“Most people don’t get to watch a film of their lives, Brooke Shields acknowledges, leaning in with her tea,” Eva Wiseman writes. She sat across from the American actor, a sexualised child star at just 11, who somehow turned out very normal.
Shields is no stranger to watching her body or personal life as tabloid fodder, but viewing a documentary about the awfulness of how the media treated her, she “found herself horribly moved”. The 59-year-old actor has now written her own story “about fame, women and the complexity of ageing”.
Watching a film about yourself? “We all should, in order to come to terms with our own inevitably complicated pasts and see them laid out, well-lit,” Shields says.
How long will it take to read: Six and a half minutes.
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