Good morning, happy back to school for those returning today, and welcome to Five Great Reads, your summertime, morning-tea wrap of good exposition and enthralling writing, graded A+ by me, Alyx Gorman, Guardian Australia’s apples, backpacks and crafting editor.
If you fancy following the news as it unfolds, please head over to our live blog for that, and if you woke up on the wrong side of the bed today, why not try a gentle stretch tonight?
1. What is going on with Witness K?
If you’ve lost the thread on the Witness K case, no one can blame you. It’s been a “protracted, convoluted prosecution”, writes the Guardian Australia reporter Christopher Knaus. Fortunately, he’s here to bring you up to speed.
Why do I need to know? It’s “critically important to understand,” Knaus writes. “Particularly at a time when so many Australian whistleblowers are under threat, and secrecy is becoming increasingly pervasive across all aspects of government.”
Notable quote? “The attorney general’s continued pursuit of secrecy in this case is a damning indictment of the Morrison government’s priorities,” says the Human Rights Law Centre senior lawyer Kieran Pender. “Rather than enacting long-overdue reform to whistleblowing laws, the government has gone to the high court to keep parts of a court judgment that said no to a secret trial itself secret.”
How long will it take to read? Two and a half minutes.
2. The seven species of workplace jerk
From credit-stealing colleagues to micromanaging bosses, we’ve all dealt with a stress-spiking coworker at some point, but a psychologist, Tessa West, argues we probably didn’t deal with it well.
Why not? “Did you ever take a course to learn what to do when someone’s being a low-level asshole?” West asks this piece’s author, Alex Moshakis. And don’t think prestigious workplaces are immune from pettiness either, West says. “I’ve seen Nobel laureates act the same way in meetings that I saw on the shop floor.”
So what do you do if someone’s being a low-level asshole? It depends on what flavour that comes in. West outlines seven kinds of unpleasant office behaviour and offers tips on how to handle it.
How long will it take me to read? Five minutes.
3. Stonehenge under the microscope
We’ll never know all of Stonehenge’s secrets but DNA testing of nearby burial sites and the use of forensic geology are revealing new stories from the mysterious structure.
What do we know? For starters, “Stonehenge was not a single event,” writes Tim Adams, “but a series of interventions in the site, beginning in 3000BC with the first earthworks and spanning 1,500 years – or 90 truncated human generations.”
Notable quote: “I imagine people may come in thinking that this is a show about England,” says Neil Wilkin, curator of a new exhibition about Stonehenge at the British Museum. “And then be surprised to find that, actually, to understand Stonehenge, you have to keep widening your focus.”
Widen your focus to where? Well, if you take “an exquisite jadeitite axe head” for example, Adams writes, you’ll find it was “quarried in northern Italy and left as an offering beside the Sweet Track, a wooden pathway built through reed beds on the Somerset Levels in 3807BC”. That “tells a startling story, proving the movement of neolithic people over vast distances”.
How long will it take me to read? Five minutes, but if you spend long enough staring at the the Towie ball, a 5,000-year-old miniature stone carving found in Scotland, you may just travel back in time.
4. Can cryptocurrency turn green?
Depending on how you’d like to frame the argument, bitcoin mining uses more energy than Norway, or 0.1% of the Earth’s total energy consumption. One of those figures might sound worse than the other, and either way, there’s disagreement over how to bring the number down.
Who’s saying what? On one side, you’ve got the experts (and governments) who’ve decided bitcoin mining just shouldn’t exist at all; on the other, you’ve got the crypto-faithfuls, who tend to get defensive when they hear that.
How long will it take me to read? About four minutes, provided you don’t need a primer on what the blockchain is first.
5. The year of the tiger
At lunar new Year celebrations in Bankstown, Mostafa Rachwani and Carly Earl find tentative optimism, Covid-caution and a chance to reconnect.
Notable quote: “We’ve both been apart from each other and bonded more than ever,” says a local, Nine Doan. “So lunar new year this year is a chance to say ‘hi’, have a fresh start and wash away everything from the previous year.”
Remind me, when’s the lunar new year again? It’s tomorrow, 1 February, and we’ll be entering the year of the tiger.
