Top of the weekend to you all. The highlight of my week (and funniest thing I’ve seen all year) was watching Klingons rock out, boyband style. Do yourself a favour if you have a spare hour. This week’s reads are better suited to a spare three to 15 minutes.
1. Sad girls, optimism, and Sally Rooney
Irish author Sally Rooney’s fans love her so-called “sad-girl lit”. Some of her feminist critics reckon her work is too positive. Rooney argues her books – Normal People, Conversations with Friends, and her latest, Intermezzo – are “quite optimistic about the human condition”.
Her first two novels made Rooney the voice of millennial angst. “I didn’t actually want to be ‘the young novelist’,” says Rooney, now 33. “I just wanted to be good.” Lisa Allardice met the author in Dublin and found she was not the spiky recluse her fiction or reputation might suggest.
Lockdown hit: When the BBC adaptation of Normal People blew up in 2020, the media scrutiny became too much. Says Rooney: “I don’t want to be the centre of attention like that ever again.”
How long will it take to read: Six minutes.
Further reading: Australian author Charlotte Wood on her Booker prize nomination: “The global attention is like nothing I’ve seen.”
2. Labor’s empty rhetoric on the environment
Sarah Hanson-Young’s assessment this week of the Albanese government’s performance was plain-speaking politics at its best. “Can’t they just be better?” the Greens senator asked. “Can’t the prime minister just be better and not so crap?”
Exhibit A: environmental policy. Labor handed Tanya Plibersek the “cuddling koalas” portfolio and declared nature was back on the priority list. Now the government’s lofty-ish plans are under attack from miners, media giants and big business and the PM seems more inclined to do deals with the Coalition than the Greens. As Adam Morton writes: “This paints a pretty grim picture for nature, wherever things land.”
By the numbers: More than 2,200 threatened species in Australia are listed as being at risk of extinction. Nineteen ecosystems are showing signs of collapse or near collapse.
How long will it take to read: Three minutes.
3. The tyranny of impossible beauty standards
A shop assistant lightly bullies you into buying products you can’t afford. A man stops talking to his wife after she cuts her long blond hair. Victoria’s Secret push-up bras. Misguided attempts at contouring.
These are just some of the reflections four Guardian writers share on society’s obsession with youth and good looks, inspired by the film The Substance, in which Demi Moore’s character experiments with an age-reversing injection after being sacked for being over the hill.
“You don’t age out of beauty standards,” Arwa Mahdawi concludes, “but you can move further away from them.”
***
“I met a married lady in her 60s who tightened her vagina as an anniversary gift to her husband.” – V (formerly Eve Ensler)
How long will it take to read: Five minutes.
Further reading: Demi Moore on body image, reinvention and her most shocking role yet.
4. The cement company that paid millions to Islamic State
“You ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight?” asked Jack Nicholson’s Joker in 1989. French cement company Lafarge most certainly has. Its Syrian subsidiary, Lafarge SA, kept its operations going as civil war erupted by paying the terrorist group Islamic State millions in protection money.
Samanth Subramanian’s long read delves into the (actually quite fascinating) business of cement, Lafarge’s mob-like deal with IS and the court action it now faces – a lawsuit by US-based Yazidis, helmed by Amal Clooney, and a criminal case in France alleging crimes against humanity.
A lucrative business: Without cement there would be no concrete – the second-most consumed material in the world, behind water.
How long will it take to read: Fifteen minutes.
5. The cult of storage
I won’t bore you with the full rationale for how my record collection is organised, only that it involves a mix of by genre and by era, some in storage bins and some just on shelves, all 11 sections handily labelled. It is immensely satisfying.
Anita Chaudhuri tried putting her possessions into drawers and containers but remains unconvinced. So she asked the experts: is being ridiculously well organised really the fast track to a happier, healthier life?
Sage advice: “Everyone’s standards are different,” says Errolie Sermaine, a counsellor and psychotherapist. “What matters is that if your home doesn’t look the way you want it to, then you are going to find it difficult to relax.”
How long will it take to read: Five minutes.
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