Happy Saturday! Welcome to this week’s five great reads. I already miss the Oscars, but maybe the best actress award should have gone to the Duchess of Sussex. Marina Hyde will tell you why further down the page.
Plus: a couple experiment by switching parenting loads, and an archive from the Guardian resurfaces. It’s incredibly moving.
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1. The week-long mental load marriage swap
Earlier this week Guardian Australia reported on the latest gender pay gap data. Australian women are earning nearly $30,000 less than men a year. But what about the unpaid labour and mental load generally shouldered by women in heterosexual relationships?
For Stuart: he walks the dog and does the cleaning and finances.
For Chloë: she organises all the meals and responds to family WhatsApps.
Until they swapped.
Did their household fall apart when they changed places? No, but “the mental load, it seems, is not something that can be handed over easily, like a baton in a relay,” Chloë writes. Walking the dog did feel like a holiday though.
How long will it take to read: six minutes.
2. ‘The time my father wrote to the Guardian’
It was the 90s, and the UK seemed to see homosexuality as something shameful. Sam was 16, gay and bullied for it. His father told the world how proud he was of him. It’s a moment that changed Sam’s life.
13 July 1998: Sam’s dad sent an anonymous letter to the Guardian in response to an article it published “about parents who expressed their sadness, regret, disappointment or shame about having gay kids”.
Sam’s dad wrote: “The reaction of the parents in your article in no way reflects that of my wife and I when our son came out to us earlier this year. Our reaction was one of pride and respect.”
How long will it take to read: two and a half minutes.
3. Danny Dyer: from national joke to national treasure
Danny Dyer is now an “unlikely sex symbol for middle-class women”. It’s a “mark of the mainstream appeal”, Chris Godfrey writes, thanks to his recent roaring success in Jilly Cooper’s Rivals – a show that even the millennial podcast I listen to recommended. But what was life like before for Dyer? And where has he been in between?
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“I ended up with a lot of fame, no money, going to nightclubs and waving off of balconies and pretending to be a DJ. Quite a dark time in my life.” – Danny Dyer.
Marching Powder: “I mix in both circles and believe you me, everyone’s fucking at it,” he says of his new film’s euphemism for cocaine. “It is classless actually, that drug.”
How long will it take to read: six minutes.
4. Civil rights pioneers on Trump
Trying to making sense of what is happening in the US, journalist Lottie Joiner has turned to the pioneers of the civil rights movement who faced violence and racism on the frontlines for justice and equality. Over the decades since, they have witnessed surges forward and backwards for their communities. Now Trump is reversing the progress they toiled for.
Dangers of extremism in America: When Carlotta Walls LaNier “saw the violence that occurred at the US Capitol on January 6”, Joiner writes, “it reminded her of her experience in Little Rock more than six decades ago”.
Carlotta Walls LaNier: “I think that if anyone who never lived through what we lived through and need to understand what it was like, they can look at January 6.”
How long will it take to read: four minutes.
5. Watching Meghan’s show
Marina Hyde’s take on the Duchess of Sussex’s latest venture – a lifestyle TV show made to “give hope” – almost made me watch it. And not in a good way. In a “I’m missing out on a historically bad TV moment” way.
But could it be a landmark TV series after all? If we look past the peonies and “Good vibes, good hives” quotes, Hyde believes the show could signal the death of an era … with a better one around the corner?
How long will it take to read: three minutes.
Further reading: With Love, Meghan may be the last of the royal’s US$100m deal with Netflix, Stuart Heritage writes, which so far has produced global justice and polo documentaries … that no one really watched.
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